NAACP support for NCLB in CT

Here's another bit of interesting bit of news I found via the Jenny D. blog: NAACP Goes To Court To Support NCLB

I just saw this. Connecticut is fighting NCLB in court, and the NAACP has just filed a motion to join with the Bush Administration in support of the law.

The article comes to use from the Hartford Courant article: NAACP Opposes State Lawsuit

The decision to back the Bush administration's controversial school reform law "was very unorthodox for the NAACP," said Scot X. Esdaile, president of the state chapter, but he said Connecticut's opposition to the federal law amounts to an excuse to avoid helping minority schoolchildren.

State officials, he said, "are looking for loopholes, looking for ways to get out of what they need to do."

This fits together in a pattern with the recent NYT article(NYT Select subscription required, sorry) that delved into the unexpected support for NCLB by the venerable civil rights greybeard William Taylor. The article explains Taylor's support for NCLB:

WHILE working in Lyndon B. Johnson's administration as staff director of the Commission on Civil Rights, Mr. Taylor recalled, he saw firsthand the utility of backing up laudable values with tough enforcement. Only a decade after the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education did Southern schools start to comply, he said, because only then did Washington threaten to withhold federal dollars from districts that defied the integration order.

In the desegregation program in metropolitan St. Louis, Mr. Taylor has seen 12,000 black students who attend suburban schools record higher marks and better graduation rates than their peers left behind in the city.

''These suburban schools are accountable to their communities,'' Mr. Taylor told the audience at Teachers College. ''They have high standards and the students respond to those standards. And if a teacher or a principal is falling short, you know they will be gone. That's not the case in most central-city schools.''

The legal reality since a 1974 Supreme Court ruling is that such regional integration plans cannot be imposed, but only entered into voluntarily. So, for Mr. Taylor, still crusading for something at age 74, No Child Left Behind offers not a panacea but an obtainable possibility.

''I can't think of any other issues on which I agree with Bush,'' Mr. Taylor said. ''Iraq has been a disaster. There was no basis for privatizing Social Security. There's a growing inequality due to tax cuts for the wealthy and cuts in social programs. Nevertheless, I can work with the administration on this issue. You can't wait for a perfectly ordered universe.''

I'm not convinced that NCLB's penalties will really spur equitable change. I think it is equally likely to harm low income students since the penalties will negatively impact their schools without ushering in anything better. Still, it is interesting to note that accountability and enforcement does offer hope for students in inferior schools.