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Article:
Parents '” The No Child Left Behind Law Won't Do Much For Your Child by: Joel Turtel Past experience with federal education programs predicts that the No Child Left Behind act (NCLB) will also fail parents whose children are doing poorly in school. The federal government has spent over $120 billion on Title 1 programs for low-income students since 1965. Yet the literacy rates for these children today are appalling and the achievement gap between low-income children and their peers has not closed. If the U.S. Department of Education wants to give real choice to parents, they should not be tinkering with a failed government-controlled school system that, by its very nature, strangles free choice and competition. Americans have been blessed with a system that gives them almost unlimited choices in their daily lives for almost four hundred years '” it's called the free market. If parents could pay for their kids' education in a totally unregulated, fiercely competitive education free market, free from government controls, parents would have all the school choice in the world. This education free market would also give their kids a superb, low-cost education. Yet too often, government officials with their bureaucratic mentality, distrust the free market, the same free market that brings them their cars, clothes, computers, electricity, and fresh food. The No Child Left Behind Act adds yet another layer of federal regulations to the already strangling layers of local and state government regulations on education. If the federal government truly wants to give parents more school choice, they should be working to remove local and state controls over education, not adding to those controls with the No Child Left Behind law and other regulations. That is like trying to cure a person dying of arsenic poisoning by giving him more arsenic. Naturally, government education officials can't understand the fact that government control of education is not the solution, it is the problem. Over the past fifty years, federal, state, and city governments have spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to 'fix'¯ the public schools. They have failed, time and again. For example, in July, '2005
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