Blog

Your Education Road Map

Politics K-12®

Politics K-12 kept watch on education policy and politics in the nation’s capital and in the states. This blog is no longer being updated, but you can continue to explore these issues on edweek.org by visiting our related topic pages: Federal, States.

Federal

NCLB’s Biggest Basher Dropping Out

By Michele McNeil — January 10, 2008 1 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

The only sitting governor in the presidential race—and the campaign’s loudest NCLB naysayer—is calling it quits. Though New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson hasn’t made it official, every media outlet in town is reporting it. (Update: He just made it official, a little before 3:30 p.m. today).

This means Gov. Richardson, a Democrat, can stop thinking up more verbs he can use to describe what he wants to do with NCLB. “Scrap it”, “junk it”, “get rid of it”, “throw it out”, and the list goes on...While that may have resonated with the education community fed up with all of the testing and accountability, Richardson never said what he would replace NCLB with.

The leading Democrats left in the race have slightly more moderate approaches to No Child Left Behind (although former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, who supports better testing and broader measures of student learning gains, has said that it may be necessary to ditch it.) New York Sen. Hillary Clinton has called it a great promise that’s resulted in an unfunded mandate. And Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois wants to improve assessments and provide more resources to low-performing schools.

Related Tags:

A version of this news article first appeared in the Politics K-12 blog.