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By Scott Stephens U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings' big yellow school bus navigated its way through Cleveland's orange construction barrels and Indians game traffic Wednesday without so much as a bump or a scrape. Spellings can only hope the renewal of No Child Left Behind, the much-touted federal education reform act she helped create, sees as smooth a voyage through Congress. Spellings, a longtime confidante of President Bush and one of the chief architects of the 2001 bill, has been making the rounds to build public support for reauthorization of the law, often viewed as the cornerstone of the administration's domestic policy. She has been sharply critical of a draft proposal circulated by influential House Democrats and Republicans that would take many suburban schools off the hook if they raise achievement for most students but miss academic targets for a few groups of children. Others have criticized the law for being too focused on standardized testing, which they say penalized high-poverty districts such as Cleveland. "I'd like to see changes, too, but I don't support watering down accountability," Spellings said during an hourlong stop at the 540-pupil Watterson Lake School in the Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood. "This is not some pie-eyed, wild dream. This is something we can and must do." It is something that has been largely accomplished at Watterson Lake. Last year, about 85 percent of the school's sixth-graders read at grade level. There was virtually no difference between the performance of white and black children at the school. Spellings, Cleveland schools Chief Executive Eugene Sanders and Principal Caren Geissinger walked through the school and greeted children and teachers. They helped Jackie Glenn's sixth-graders with reading, worked with Mary Beth Leifner's seventh-graders on vocabulary, and helped David Roth's kindergartners fashion a response to the Big Bad Wolf after he blew the Three Little Pigs' house down. From there it was to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, where Spellings continued to beat the drum for No Child Left Behind and even belted out a rendition of the Stevie Wonder hit "Signed, Sealed Delivered" - a reference to her faith that the law will be renewed. She finished the day at an invitation-only "town hall" gathering at Collinwood High School, where she fielded questions from a mostly friendly audience of about 150 parents, students and teachers. Her next stop is Dayton, followed by Cincinnati and Indianapolis. "No Child Left Behind works," Spellings declared. "It's been a true game-changer in American education." But not everyone in the audience embraced those changes. "Testing, punishment, sanctions - it's very unjust," said Jan Resseger of the United Church of Christ, one of 140 groups seeking dramatic changes in the law. "And it doesn't provide the funding to help districts like Cleveland." |
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