The No Child Left Behind law has been challenged in court by a group consisting of nine school districts and ten National Education Association groups. They allege that the law requires the Federal Government to fund any mandates from No Child Left Behind.

It’s not just school districts that are fighting the unfunded mandates of No Child Left Behind. The Republican controlled Utah legislature passed a No Child Left Behind opposition bill by an overwhelming margin. The Governor of Utah has promised to sign the bill, despite threats from U. S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings that the passage of the bill could cost Utah federal education funds. One Utah state legislator is said to have expressed his opinion thus: "I don't like to be threatened," said Representative Steven R. Mascaro, a real estate developer from a Salt Lake City suburb. "I wish they'd take the stinking money and go back to Washington.”

What’s the problem? No Child Left Behind is supposed to be, as Tessa Lowe so succinctly put it, focused on the education gap between white and minority students. Most people want to see that gap closed. No Child Left Behind is largely the result of Business Roundtables held in states around the country. Businesses wanted very well educated high school graduates, and they would do anything but pay for the education in order to get them, including identifying numbers of students as failures. The roundtables cheerfully ignored the fact that society cannot afford many education “failures.” Too many of them later show up as prisoners at $30,000 or more per year.

How we go about doing it is a question which raises the hackles on a lot of caring parents. They don’t want their round children stuffed into square education holes. Some are so resistant to the one-size-fits-all education concept that over 600 students are home schooled in St. Mary’s County, and in my experience most of them are not home schooled because of religious reasons. Our parochial schools are well regarded by parents with religious concerns. Many parents, teachers, and even some administrators agree that the dollars spent on testing required by No Child Left Behind could better be spent on more teachers or educational materials. But school systems don’t get to chose.

The businessmen who demanded a No Child Left Behind approach to education missed an important concept - education is an art as well as a science. Unlike a refrigerator, an education is the result of highly complex actions and interactions between people (students and teachers), and it is a highly individual process. An automated production line can manufacture a refrigerator. I have yet to see a production line manufacture an education, although the increased size of our schools indicates that the school system is trying to have a production line do the job. The increasing number and severity of discipline problems indicate that the production line approach to education used by the school system is failing.

Then there is the cost of No Child Left Behind. In Fiscal Year 2006 alone, 19 locally funded sessions of pre-kindergarten and kindergarten students required by No Child Left Behind will be added.. No wonder the St. Mary’s County Board of Commissioners raises the funding and St. Mary’s County is still way down the list in per pupil expenditures. The total number of pupils to be educated every year will be expanding by 1,000+ students as pre kindergarten children are added to those required to be educated by the schools. And who gets to pay for it?

Now even developers are thinking about meeting our school construction funding needs with a proposed increase in the impact fee - pardon me but just as I said in 2001 and 2002 we needed to do.

Unless this lawsuit is successful, the next increase will be in property taxes to meet the increased requirement for operating expenses for our schools.

I just wish that the Board of Education was seeing financial reports from the School System in enough detail that I could believe the school system is not misusing funds. But I can’t believe it.