Senator Patty Murray took to the editorial pages of the Seattle Times today to rail against the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act. Evidently, she is quite upset over the 2001 education reform law and wants people to know almost 14 years later how disgusted she is by it.
Murray must think that it will play well to her base – she has an election coming up in less than two years – to attack a law first proposed by President George W. Bush. Her name-calling is familiar to those who have endured the Left’s hyperbole against all things connect to the former President:
“NCLB has proved to be a deeply broken law”
“It prescribed one-size-fits-all remedies”
”it punished schools”
“the law is so bad”
“unrealistic requirements”
Yet, nowhere in the piece does Murray reveal that she voted “YES” on No Child Left Behind. There is no mea culpa for her mistake, no regrets expressed for supporting this piece of legislation she now holds up for scorn.
Just crickets when it comes to her vote for the law.
Murray’s staff also appeared at a loss for other words when writing the editorial for her, as she called it “broken” no less than five times in the short editorial. Yet, her ultimate complaint appears to be more local: “The law is so bad that the U.S. Department of Education began issuing waivers,” but “Washington state had received a waiver but lost it last year.”
Left out of that statement was the fact that Washington State did not lose the waiver last year – rather, Murray’s fellow Democrats in the State Legislature gave it away. The liberals who are under state Supreme Court order to adequately fund out public schools buckled to pressure from the teachers union and took the waiver away from the state’s students.
As Shift reported, by not changing one word in our state’s education reform law, the Democrats punted away control of $40 million in education funding – all to keep one of their party’s biggest campaign donors, and a $1 million dollar donor to Jay Inslee, happy.
But, the “mom in tennis shoes” danced around that reality, just as she danced around the fact that she supported the law she now so deeply dislikes with a campaign coming up.
Perhaps there could be a silver lining in Murray’s push to reform laws she used to support, which the majority of her constituents would like to see changed. There should be plenty of opportunities to fix the “broken law” that is Obamacare in the coming months.
