Gregory Kane: No Child Left Behind was Kennedy’s bill, too

Black journalists, in particular — most of whom tend to be liberal — were notorious for excoriating Bush about NCLB, while mentioning the Massachusetts Democrat’s role in it not once.

To hear some black journalists and newspaper columnists tell it — although this perception was fairly common among blacks not in either of those categories — NCLB was some great anti-Negro plot inspired and executed by that great anti-Negro leader Bush. And if any of those pundits praised Kennedy in the past few days, you can bet they never mentioned his support of NCLB.

Perhaps the most egregious of the Bush-NCLB bashers was the black columnist who, at a convention of black newspaper columnists held in Washington, D.C., last November, told Hilary Shelton of the District’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter how horrible NCLB was.

“And it’s underfunded,” she added.

It was at that point I was tempted to bolt from the room, run screaming down the hall at the top of my lungs and bang my head repeatedly against the wall while shouting, “Why don’t liberals just stop it, stop it, stop it?”

Bad government programs shouldn’t be funded at all. Government should “underfund” them out of existence. That obviously never occurred to my colleague suffering from what I call “incurable liberalitis.”

Kennedy had the same disease. While no NCLB-basher, he wrote in a January 2008 newspaper column, “We can’t achieve progress for all students on the cheap. No child should have to attend crumbling schools or learn from an outdated textbook. … It’s disgraceful that President Bush has failed to include adequate funding for school reforms in his education budget. Struggling schools can only do so much on a tin-cup budget.”

Here is where the “liberal lion” revealed the essence of modern American liberalism: the belief that, while government shouldn’t carefully monitor how taxpayers’ dollars are spent, it is entitled to spend those taxpayer dollars as government pleases.

The “liberal lion’s” older brother, the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, D-N.Y., also felt the government had unlimited access to taxpayers’ wallets. Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, in their book “No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning,” attributed this quote to Robert Kennedy about Title I funds for education:“What I want to make sure of is not just that the money is not wasted, because you can find more money, but the fact that the lives of these children are not wasted.”

But if RFK had a redeeming grace — and this is where he differed from today’s liberals — it was in his insistence that if the federal government puts up money for education, then somebody had darned well better be educated. That sounds obvious almost to the point of being tautological, but today’s liberal dogma says, “Pour unlimited money into public schools whether pouring more money in works or not.”

When the liberal lion was piously chiding Bush for shortchanging education — and let’s not forget there is evidence that Bush did no such thing — Ted Kennedy’s memory must have failed him about Kansas City, Mo., a city that spent $2 billion on public education over a 15-year period with no discernible improvement in student achievement.

It was just this kind of government hosing of the taxpayers that NCLB was meant to prevent. Whatever the flaws of NCLB are, both Kennedy and Bush deserve credit for at least wanting to hold public schools accountable for educating students. And both men, not just one, should take the heat if NCLB is as horrible as its critics say it is.

But we all know it isn’t. For all the criticism, no state — not even Smurf-blue ones like Maryland and Massachusetts — has considered NCLB bad enough to tell the federal government to take its education money and cram it. And in New York and Baltimore, test scores for students in public schools have risen for the first time in years.

Everybody and everything is getting credit for that, except NCLB.