Happy Birthday to NCLB!

Wow, you're already 6 years old! I remember when you were just a gleam in President Bush's eye. And aren't you special?! Not many 6 year olds cost their "parents" 24 billion dollars per year.

Says Neal McCluskey of the libertarian Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom:

"Six years of No Child Left Behind, and what do we have to show for it? Stagnant reading achievement, slowed math improvements, declining academic performance versus competitor nations, and narrowed curricula, all for the bargain price of about $24 billion per year, or a 40 percent increase over fiscal year 2001."

Cato education expert Andrew Coulson adds:

"It's the NCLB's birthday, and you can cry if you want to. And if you have kids in school, or about to enter school, you might want to."

"[W]hat do you get for the law that's done nothing? Barely a month ago, two separate sets of international test results were released, allowing us to see how U.S. academic performance has changed since NCLB was enacted. ... The tests were PIRLS (Program on International Reading Literacy Survey) and PISA (Program on International Student Assessment)."

"Across grades and across subjects, student achievement has either stagnated or declined -- and that's despite the infusion of tens of billions of dollars of new spending in each of the past six years."

"Mainstream lawmakers outside D.C. acknowledge the unconstitutionality of NCLB, pointing out the Constitution does not authorize federal involvement in education. In 2005, a task force of the bi-partisan National Conference of State Legislatures declared: "The task force does not believe that NCLB is constitutional."

"But as we know, in the Alice In Wonderland world of DC, failure is rewarded with... more money and more power. Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers are proposing "reforms" for NCLB that would increase federal power and lavish even more money on this failed, doomed, unconstitutional and idiotic boondoggle."