PHILADELPHIA
They all voted for it, but that was then.
Democratic presidential candidates came out swinging Monday, not at each other but at the No Child Left Behind law.
They spoke at the annual convention of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union.
While the candidates received a warm response in the City of Brotherly Love, mere mention of President Bush’s signature education law elicited loud hisses and boos from the thousands of teachers on hand.
The law, passed with broad Democratic support in 2001, requires public school students to be tested annually in reading and math in third- through eighth-grade and once in high school. It is up for renewal this year in Congress.
An NEA criticism of the law is that it forces teachers to spend too much time on test preparation instead of other forms of instruction, and many teachers wore buttons or stickers reading, “A child is more than a test score.”
