A reader named Anita Hoge has posted comments here and elsewhere claiming that the Senate committee proposal on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Act (aka NCLB) contains federal requirements for “medicalizing” children and other such assertions. When I disagreed, because I know that the bill reduces the federal authority rather than enlarging it, the writer asked me if I had read the entire bill, as Anita Hoge did. I had not; I had read summaries. It is typical of legislation these days that few people, even members of Congress, read huge bills. Sorry to say so, but it is true as legislative language is tedious and bills tend to be very long (NCLB was more than 1,000 when it passed in 2001). So I turned to someone who had read every single line of the bill, Mercedes Schneider, and asked her to review Ms. Hoge’s contentions.

Here is her response. Schneider checked and could not find evidence for Hoge’s claims.

There are good things in the bill (it shifts responsibility for the use of assessments to the states, it prohibits the Secretary of Education from interfering in which standards and assessments states adopt), and it allows states to try new ways of assessing students), and there are bad things in the bill (it continues to mandate annual assessments, which is my view is wrong, inasmuch as these assessments provide little useful information [other than test scores and rankings] and no high-performing nation tests every child every year). Whatever federal policymakers say they need to know can be learned from the NAEP assessments.

One of the few rules of this blog is: no conspiracy theories. So, I will no longer post comments that make claims about this bill or other bills that are not factual.