More Parental Power in Revised NCLB Urged

Washington

The No Child Left Behind Act has expanded parents’ power over their children’s education and given them more information about student achievement than ever before. But Congress ought to take further steps to promote parental involvement when it reauthorizes the 5-year-old law, parent activists told a Senate panel last week.

The federal law should guarantee funding for parent resource centers, authorize schools to spend federal money to hire family-service coordinators, and give states the power to enforce the parental-involvement sections of the education law, the advocates told the Senate health, education, labor, and pensions committee on March 28.

“Schools are not taking these provisions seriously enough,” Wendy D. Puriefoy, the president of the Public Education Network, said of the law....