ABSTRACT
Democratic support of No Child Left Behind is based on the beliefand as yet unproven-that educational standards, testing, and charter school provisions would help American workers and the American economy compete in the global marketplace. However, there are sharp differences between neoconservatives and those calling themselves “New Democrats” over the role of privatization in government reform. The New Democratic movement, as I will explain in the next section of this chapter, originated in the 1990s from the work of the Democratic Leadership Council. While neoconservatives support privatization of government services, including a reliance on for-profit private companies to provide public school services, New Democrats want to make government services more responsive to citizen desires through, for instance, parental choice of public schools and public charter schools. New Democrats do not publicly support those provisions in No Child Left Behind that are dear to the hearts of religiously oriented Republicans, such as school prayer, Boy Scouts, and teaching traditional American history. In fact, they are often critical of the blend of religious beliefs and educational policies that char-
acterize some Republicans. Speaking on the same panel as Governor Rendell, Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter of the Harvard Business School referred to “Senator Kerry, hopefully President Kerry” before calling for a national science and math education policy and expressing her worry that, “high school biology is being held captive to politics right now because of debates about things like the teaching of creationism. Can you imagine our scientists competing in the world if they’re taught not science, but local politics driven by the politics of religions?”2
