north eugene, i wanna see you stomp--and shake it.

That was always my favorite cheer of the North Eugene High School cheerleaders. Today I was reading a policy proposal about school redistricting and the No Child Left Behind Act, and it made me think of that cheer.

"North Eugene! I wanna see you stomp--and shake it!"

North Eugene wasn't the best school in the district. In fact, it was the worst school in the district, and one of the worst in the state. We didn't have a lot of money, nor did we have the best teachers (though you'll never hear from me that I had bad teachers in high school--some of the truest and most lasting beliefs I have came from passionate, motivated teachers--people who believed in what they were doing, and believed in me), and the way the school was run sometimes leaned toward woeful incompetence. The school tried new and bizarre programs to get grants and help the students, but those bizarre programs inevitably failed, and in the years following my graduation, almost all of the good teachers left.

South Eugene High School, predictably on the other side of town, was the best school in the district, one of the best in the state and, according to Newsweek magazine, one of the best in the country. Many of my friends attended South Eugene, and they had that special air about them that kids in good public high schools tend to get. It's not snotty, it's not condescending, it's not a private-school white-blazer-with-navy-piping kind of attitude, but just a general aura of comfort and confidence. Kids at South took interesting courses from interesting people, they learned whatever language they were interested, they played music or painted and earned valuable credit for it. They built their own education, but not in the forced and pathetic way that North Eugene attempted, but in the natural, organic way that free-love educators think all school should be like.

They were better students with better educations than mine. I was lucky to be friends with them, because it gave me perspective into the nature of public education. I preferred my friends at South Eugene to mine at North Eugene because they were smarter and more interesting. I preferred them to my friends at Marist, the local private school, because they weren't complete tools. They didn't have the social imperative because their fathers owned successful chains of hardware stores or a lumber mill. They were just smart and interesting and ambitious. And because of the opportunities afforded to them at a good public high school, most of them moved on to college all around the world, where they'll meet other smart, interesting people and turn into successful, smart, interesting people.

It helps, of course, that the South Eugene district was an old, affluent, liberal part of town. It's where professors and writers and artists lived, its where the University of Oregon was. It had all the oldest and most beautiful homes in Eugene--not the gaudy McMansions that fed into the private school, but elegant, fascinating homes full of elegant, fascinating people.

So it'd be difficult to defend that my friends were interesting and successful because their high school was good.

It'd be more reasonable to say that their high school was good because my friends' parents wanted them to be interesting and successful.

That's where this policy initiative comes in.

As things stand now, taxpayers within a given school district pay taxes which go to schools within that district. Money from that large, district-wide pool is then given to individual schools according to many factors, including, the No Child Left Behind Act.

The No Child Left Behind Act was signed in 2001. It's basically an attempt to enforce accountability in public school teachers and staff for their students test scores and overall academic performance. Standardized tests are administered to students, and if after two years the scores don't improve, that school gets a yellow card. If after three years the scores still haven't improved, the school's funding is placed in serious jeopardy, and that school must offer tutoring programs.

If five years go by with no marked improvement, so starts what I call The Schoolpocalypse. The federal government steps in with the mandate to reorganize the school in order to make it function well. Programs get cancelled, programs get created, people lose their jobs, people get locked in closets, its crazy.

Now, like most education legislation, the No Child Left Behind laws are enforced in at the district- and, if necessary, the individual school-level. The problem is that all the funding comes from people in those districts, and, in large cities, there are good districts and bad districts.

The good districts are in rich neighborhoods, the bad districts are in poor neighborhoods, at least most of the time. What this means under the No Child Left Behind Act is that districts who start out at a disadvantage, with little money and even less parental involvement, are effectively punished for not getting blood from a stone, and driven further into the ground when the good teachers lose money and the good students lose morale, and leave for magnet/charter/private/better public schools. Meanwhile, the rich schools continue to thrive, and instead of bringing bad schools up, the No Child Left Behind Act drives them further down.
In a phrase from this particular policy initiative, "the good get better and the poor get poorer." (Incidentally, I think that's a great ten-word line).

Now, recent studies have been released to say that in the grand scheme of things, the No Child Left Behind Act has yielded positive results: in a word, test scores are going up.

People claim, however, that it's been the mediocre schools that have improved, leaving the truly horrifying schools in the lurch. Their scores have stayed largely the same and, since it's 2007 and we've come upon the first five-year benchmark since the NCLBA was first established in 2002, those schools are staring into the maw as we speak.

Under this proposed change to the No Child Left Behind Act, standards would be applied to Congressional districts, not school districts. A Congressional district is much bigger than a school district, and often subsumes several small districts. Therefore, if implemented, this redistricting would take into account good districts and bad districts, and compile them into a mean score. After that, those same actions would be taken under the No Child Left Behind Act to improve the schools in that congressional district.

Effectively, the better districts, and therefore the better schools, would be held accountable for the worse ones. Better staff, teachers, and students would be sent to different schools, I'd imagine, under some kind of "exchange" or "ambassador" program, and in order for the good schools to maintain their advantage, they would have to ensure the success of the poor schools.

This proposal strikes at the very heart of liberal social thought.

As it stood before the NCLBA, there were good schools, and there were bad schools, and mediocre schools. Then we drafted legislation to (hopefully) turn the bad and mediocre schools into good schools. According to some, we're actually bringing up the mediocre schools while making the bad schools worse.

What this policy initiative proposes, therefore, is to make all the schools a little more mediocre. It's a policy of redistribution--we give the bad schools resources from the good schools and, even though the good schools will become marginally worse, the bad schools will become markedly better. At least, that's what we hope.

That's the basic policy of socialism. Sacrifice quality for quantity. And I'm of the opinion that in some matters, like secondary education, that's precisely what needs to happen.

Because in secondary education, quality is not just a scale of funds, but a matter of opportunity. Students at poor, inner-city schools aren't given the proper opportunities for higher education. Many of these students don't know what it takes to go to college, don't know about financial aid, don't know that if they wanted to, they really could go to college and be successful.

Now, there are lots of reasons that they don't have this opportunity and, frankly, the biggest one is that they don't go to class, much less talk to college counselors. But I'm confident that with better staff and better resources for outreach, these poor schools could better inform their students that it's possible to attain higher education and, most of the time, that special opportunities exist for minorities and the poor.

To accomplish this task, staff and resources must be drafted from better schools and redistributed to worse ones. The money just doesn't exist otherwise.

It makes sense that this redistribution could accomplish that goal of ensuring that every student in America, every one, is given the opportunity to pursue higher education.

However, I don't think this same socialist tendency should be applied to higher education.

I'm willing to concede that good public high schools should dip a little in order to make the bad schools get better and provide the same opportunities. However, if we take this stance on secondary education, we cannot also claim that higher education is a right. The opportunity to get higher education is a right, but admissions guidelines should not have socialist tendencies.

I agree that if government is to control education for its citizens, then all citizens should be given the same opportunities. However, there's a reason that the United States has the universities in the world, and it's because not everybody can get into Yale or Cooper Union or MIT. We have maintained a merit-based education system because we believe that, frankly, getting into a good school should be about kicking ass and nothing else.

I maintain that only the best students should get into the best schools in America. And to be truly merit-based, we must abolish affirmative action in universities and we should abolish unfair legacy admissions to universities.

I don't want our colleges to be mediocre, and I don't want policy that encourages them to be so. But to justify that position, I must also maintain that every public school student should be given the same opportunities to kick ass. The government should be responsible for educating you well enough to get into school and giving you the information you need to go to school, but nothing else.

A little socialism, a little redistribution, is necessary to ensure that all citizens have the same rights and opportunities when it comes to their lower education. But it would be an immense failing to allow the quality of higher education to suffer for those who don't meet the standard. If we sacrifice the quality of lower education for the sake of equal opportunity, we are justified in demanding the utmost quality from those in higher education.

That way, as the North Eugene cheerleaders would say, everybody wins.