From Jim Horn:

It appears that more towns, districts and states are opting out of NCLB:

Voters in Kit Carson have agreed to pay more in taxes to make up for federal aid they’ll lose when the district pulls out of the No Child Left Behind program – a move believed to be at least the first of its kind in Colorado.

By just seven votes on Nov. 1, residents in the southeastern Colorado town agreed to pay a total of $25,000 more in property taxes each year for five years. The tax increase was billed as the first step toward opting out of President Bush’s landmark education law, and the school board is set to vote today to actually do that.

First, folks have to remember that NCLB’s enforcement teeth comes from the ability to revoke funding for states and districts that are in non-compliance with the law, so raising taxes to compensate for the percentage of federal funding lost is a pretty effective work around for the wealthy districts that can afford it. It also requires a state education department, I’d imagine, that is sympathetic to the cause.

And it’s important to remember that Federal funding makes up a pretty small percentage of education money. Most of it still comes from local property taxes and state funding — and that percentage is even higher for wealthy districts because the bulk of federal funding (I believe) comes in Title I money which is allocated by percentage of students under the poverty line.

So what does this mean practically? Probably not that much — especially for poorer district in the short term. But this could be another chink in the NCLB armor. After all, if the wealthier suburban districts — which tend to be Republican in their voting habits — start clamoring for ways around NCLB, that’s pretty telling. Of course, worst case scenario is that those folks — who are just the people we need onboard to reform federal education policy — raise taxes to pay their way out of NCLB which just makes it "someone else’s problem" and we lose the opportunity to bring them into a discussion / movement on progressive education.

Either way, the resistance to NCLB is growing by the day. And on a personal note, I’m drawing my energy from Many Children Left Behind, edited by Debbie Meier and George Wood, with essays by Ted Sizer, Alfie Kohn, Linda Darling-Hammond, Meier and Wood and others. It feeds my soul powerfully to remember that there are some incredible people out there arguing powerfully for change, and then it makes it easy to remember that the pendulum will swing back to more sane educational policy… that is, if enough folks mobilize to make it swing.