19
Laws are very difficult to operationalize. If they weren’t, we could
legislate morality and we could legislate all kinds of things. But we have
not been successful. There, at the local level, you’ve got to attack the real
systemic issues and they may not all be the same. In fact, one size doesn’t
fit all. So, [Congress] got it down to not the federal unit, but to the state
unit, which is better, but not a whole lot, because states, one, don’t have
any money, small departments of education tend to be extremely
bureaucratic, tend to measure things rather than deal with building
capacity of people and tend to want to do short-term turnarounds rather
than long-term kind of things.
The standards and penalties set at the federal and state levels could conceivably affect a
school’s—or a school system’s—reputation. But neither the federal nor state laws had
the funding behind them to compel or persuade schools to really change course. For
example, in Montgomery public schools, federal dollars accounted for less than 7 percent
of the schools’ total budgets; state funding was more significant at 17 percent. In both
Fairfax and Montgomery counties, the most likely impact of No Child Left Behind was to
provide additional ammunition to school administrators that were already advocating for
programs to reduce the gap in test scores and other measures of educational outcomes
between white and minority students. The programs themselves, and their funding by the
counties (particularly since NCLB offered little in the way of additional funding),
preceded these state and federal mandates.
Court Decisions
Two court cases, both decided by the Federal 4
th
Circuit Court, had a direct
impact on school policies toward racial and ethnic minorities in the Washington D.C.
area. In both these cases, not coincidentally, the plaintiffs and defendants were drawn
from the DC area.
In Eisenberg v Montgomery County Public Schools et al.,
15
a white non-Hispanic
first grade student was denied admission to Rosemary Hills Elementary, a magnet school
in Montgomery County, Maryland. The denial was based upon the negative impact the
15
Eisenberg v. Montgomery County Public Schools, et al., 197 F.3d 123 (4th Cir. 1999), 19 F. Supp. 2d
449 (D. Md. 1999).
Convention