“I’d scrap it!”

I could have sworn I heard (and saw) Hillary Clinton say those words on TV, counterintuitive though it may sound. Why, I asked, would the Democratic front runner go out on a limb and trash NCLB when she could get by with something bland like: “It should be reformed?”

So I got on Nexis and typed something like: “Hillary and Child and Left and Behind and scrap.”

Nothing.

How about: “Clinton and No and Child and scrap?”

Nope.

Try: “Big and bureaucratic and law and drill and kill and bye-bye arts and music -- and scrap?”

Actually, I didn’t do that last one. But I found that it wasn’t Clinton who had spoken of abolishing NCLB, but fellow Democratic candidate and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, hovering somewhere in the low single digits in popularity and having little to lose. The law, he said, is “a burden on schools, it’s an unfunded mandate, it hurts all kinds of kids and achievement.”

That’s not going to happen, of course. Once federal programs get created they have a way of hanging around far after their usefulness has expired, and NCLB will probably be no exception. There will be more “reform,” more “safe harbor” provisions, more arcane federal regulations and procedures that fill countless computer files and sap the time and energy of school boards, teachers, and administrators.

But what if? What if, by some miracle, Richardson got his way and NCLB was indeed abolished? What if the federal government simply declared victory and went home? You could argue that the bad things about NCLB would be gone but the good would remain. There would be much less fear of failure among school staff -- much less teaching to the test and “drill and kill” -- and more thoughtful approaches to educating the whole child. At the same time, states and school districts would have set up mechanisms for tracking the progress of all students, from all ethnic and economic groups, and would be unable to hide behind average scores, as they might have done in the past.

Some would argue that, absent the threats of NCLB, schools would return to past practices, and poor and minority kids would be left behind. Maybe. But I think there is enough of a public mandate to educate all children -- even without NCLB -- that dispensing with the law would have mainly good consequences.

What do you think? I’d be interested to hear your comments.

Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor