New York Daily News - Ideas & Opinions - Stanley Crouch: No child should be left behind by listless union

New York Daily News - Ideas & Opinions - Stanley Crouch: No child should be left behind by listless union: No child should be left
behind by listless union

American messes are often the result of laziness and unfair traditions combined with simplemindedness, crudeness and ideological blindness. So it is with the revolutionary No Child Left Behind Act, which suffers from underfunding and attacks by the largest teachers union, the National Education Association, with the intention of cutting its throat.

The underfunding means that important programs such as GEAR UP will not be able to continue providing high quality preparation for the poor students whom No Child Left Behind has targeted. Some see the present underfunding as a signal hypocrisy on the part of the Bush administration, which has fired down some hot rhetoric about raising the quality of public education for our poor children. With proper funding, No Child Left Behind could be the most important education reform in the last 100 years.

Jerry Reynolds of the Civil Rights Commission says, "If we are concerned with raising the black lower class into the arena of market forces where your skills and your intellectual resources trump everything else, then we have to be concerned with higher quality teaching and higher quality performance. What No Child Left Behind proposes is that we will either have a new set of winners and losers, or we will expand the winners to include those at the bottom."

If this is true, why is the NEA so intent on seeing it destroyed? Quite simply, teachers unions have sunk into the obsession that most unions have - keeping their members employed instead of fusing employment and quality performance. No Child Left Behind proposes that there should be an objective standard of performance.

Perhaps most despicable in this arena, though - or at least as despicable as the teachers unions - is the lack of involvement shown by the civil rights establishment, which has sold out to the Democrats and the unions. This is not a party issue; it is not a union issue. It is about the future of public education.

There must be radical change and a refusal to accept indifference. Poverty, color, sex and national region should have less and less to do with whether or not a child is prepared to get in the career ring and rumble. It is a difficult task, but we cannot avoid it. We might as well start stepping up with ever greater force right now.

Originally published on April 25, 2005