A trio of Democrats seeking office huddled Wednesday to talk among themselves about education, providing an evening’s respite from the health care wars but not from rhetoric beaten to a pulp by the raw might of partisan twaddle. The federal No Child Left Behind law is damnable (kind of), public schools are positively starved for cash, student-teacher ratios must be kept low and hang those accursed unfunded mandates.

Schools fall short on list of federal benchmarks

BRIDGEWATER — Three Democratic candidates for the House of Delegates agreed at a forum Wednesday on the need to make education a funding priority while reforming, but not scrapping, No Child Left Behind.

Few favored phrases in the political parlance can match frequency with the dread “unfunded mandate,” a cry that rises whenever government imposes with one hand while leaving closed the one clutching the money. Responses from school officials to the words “No Child Left Behind,” for example, are patellar: Utter the phrase, and the knee jerks with the bleat: “Unfunded mandate.” So now Republicans have picked up the linguistic hinge on which Democratic money reaches commonly swing.

All but five schools in Waynesboro, Staunton and Augusta County met the Adequate Yearly Progress targets required by the federal No Child Left Behind law on student testing in 2007-08, and the Staunton and Augusta County schools met the AYP targets as a whole.