EDITORIAL
No Child Left Behind: more challenges ahead

Advertiser education writer Jennifer Hiller's "On Campus" column yesterday may come as a relief to Hawai'i's public education establishment.

Indications are mounting, she wrote, that students exercising the new option to transfer from schools that are failing to those that are not may only amount to just a trickle. At first it was feared that a mass migration was possible.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act mandates yearly improvement in the nation's high-poverty schools. Under the law, parents of students in the state's 85 "failing" schools can request to be transferred to "better" ones.

But principals are telling Hiller privately that it appears parents aren't thrilled with making long commutes to new schools where their kids have no friends. More to the point, they say, most of the better schools are too crowded to accommodate transfers.

Whew, the educators are saying. A bullet dodged.

Not so fast. The law empowers kids in failing schools who can't find suitable transfers to receive tutoring. That's an option that avoids many of the drawbacks of transferring to another school.

Where would the DOE find tutors when it already has a teacher shortage? How would it pay them? If it failed to provide the mandated tutors — as for many years it failed to provide adequate services to special-ed students — would the state eventually face another devastating legal challenge equivalent to the Felix case?

The DOE has been right to take pains to comply with the elaborate process of creating a transfer system, even if few people apply. But that won't be the end of it.