No Child Left Behind Act

“ With job training, employment, counseling, and career advancement education, we hope to make it easier for more fathers to have positive relationships with their sons and daughters. We have also taken important steps to empower and inform parents through the No Child Left Behind Act, ensuring that they will be vital partners in their children's education. Further, every child in America deserves to live in a safe, stable, and loving family; my Administration is committed to increasing public awareness about the importance of adoption and to encouraging Americans to consider adopting children. ”

“ The right of the state, as parens patriae, to deny to the child procedural rights available to his elders was elaborated by the assertion that a child, unlike an adult, has a right "not to liberty, but to custody." ”

“ The constitutional protection against arbitrary state interference with parental rights should not be extended to prevent the States from protecting children against the arbitrary exercise of parental authority that is not in fact motivated by an interest in the welfare of the child. ”

“ One interpretation of the substantive due process familial rights cases, up to and including Troxel, would be that the state's interest in protecting and promoting child welfare is so compelling that strict scrutiny is inappropriate because, if applied as it has been traditionally, it might limit too greatly the state's power to protect children. Thus, where the fundamental right of a parent against state interference is pitted against society's equally fundamental obligation to protect the innocent and vulnerable from harm, some flexibility is required to prevent deadlock. ”

“ Surely what is needed is such legislation as has been found necessary at home, which empowers the magistrate to remove a child from a dangerous house, and deprives parents of all parental rights who are found responsible for its being forced into wrong. Surely such action would be Imperially right; and can a thing right in itself and carried out with a wise earnestness, ever eventually do harm? ”

“ Thus, a State's permitting a child to obtain an abortion without the counsel of an adult "who has responsibility or concern for the child would constitute an irresponsible abdication of the State's duty to protect the welfare of minors." ”

“ It is clear from the evidence in this case that even though persons such as the applicants are suitable to adopt children jointly and provide them with family care, they cannot do so. The impugned provisions of the Child Care Act thus deprive children of the possibility of a loving and stable family life as required by section 28 (1) (b) of the Constitution. This is a matter of particular concern given the social reality of the vast number of parentless children in our country. ”

“ But the fact that the Constitution does not protect the parent-child relationship in all circumstances does not mean that the State cannot attempt to foster parental participation where the Constitution does not demand that it do so. A State may seek to protect and facilitate the parent-child bond on the assumption that parents will act in their child's best interests. ”

“ The Court of Appeal affirmed, holding that 'child' in Article 2315 means 'legitimate child,' the denial to illegitimate children of 'the right to recover' being 'based on morals and general welfare because it discourages bringing children into the world out of wedlock.' 192 So.2d 193, 195. ”

“ By ensuring the enactment and implementation of my Administration's strong child support enforcement proposals, we will send a clear signal to our citizens that they should not have children until they are prepared to care for them. Those who do bring children into the world must bear the responsibility of supporting them. We must rededicate ourselves to the task of putting these youngest and most vulnerable of our citizens first. ”

“ Nothing indicates better the seeming accidental and casual beginnings of large movements than the formation of this first society in America. Like Vincent of Paul’s recognition of the horrible crimes that were being perpetrated in Paris only when he came face to face with an ill-treated infant, so it was only when it was discovered that, with all the law, there was no legal way of protecting an American child, that the child-protection movement, with its many subsequent laws in behalf of children, sprang up. ”

“ For we have got so far as to recognise that the liberty of vagrant parents to drag their offspring round the country is a vicious liberty, and should not be tolerated, though we are not agreed on preventive measures. The Poor Law Acts of 1889 and 1899 empower Boards of Guardians, under certain specified circumstances, to assume and exercise parental rights over the children of pauper parents, and the Children Act, 1908, prohibits child vagrancy under penalty, and makes provision for placing in public or other suitable custody the children of persons who are unfit to discharge parental duty. ”

“ If the state legislature were to pass a law stating that any child under fourteen may not leave home without the consent of his parents, every opposition newspaper in the state would howl about the waste of time and money spent on ridiculous legislation passed to govern activities that are already under excellent control. They would poll the state and point out that for so many million children under age fourteen, precisely zero of them have left home to set up their own housekeeping. ”

“ The Constitution rejected the English common-law view of the position of the illegitimate child in so far as its fundamental rights are concerned. It guarantees to protect the child's natural rights in the same way as it guarantees to protect the natural rights of the mother of the child." For myself I am content to say that the provisions of the preamble, which I have quoted earlier in this judgment, would appear to lean heavily against any view other than that the right to life of the unborn child is a sacred trust to which all the organs of government must lend their support. ”

“ Authority over a child, in a modern State, is not essentially different from an official position. Since our criminal courts are empowered to decree any one’s unfitness to hold an official position, and to deprive any citizen of his civil rights, why should they not also be empowered to decide that certain persons are unfitted to exercise authority over children? ”

“ Exclusion from school, institutionalization, the lack of appropriate services to provide attention to the individual child's need -- indeed, the denial of equal rights by a society which proclaims liberty and justice for all of its people -- are echoes which the subcommittee has found throughout all of its hearings. ”

“ The modern State interferes with parental authority in accordance with the following principles. It is impossible for the State to supervise in detail the domestic life of millions of families, or to examine the soundness of the upbringing which millions of parents provide for their children. For these reasons, the State can intervene only in cases in which the conviction arises that by the conduct of the parents the mental or physical well-being of the child has been endangered, and thereby the interest of the State seriously threatened. ”

“ However, the state in general does not assume any duty towards abandoned or neglected children, and only in a hesitating way intervenes to punish or to take away the parental authority of those who have been guilty of such acts.65 Little by little, as the ideas upon the duties of the state become modified however (principally under the influence of organized labor, which aims at transforming the state into an organized community) , it interests itself more in the person of the child. ”

“ His first duty is, of course, one of humanity, to preserve life. Whenever helpless or abandoned children are found, the duty of the State is to take care of them, though this care may, in certain cases, offer an inducement to crime. The danger to the child, if neglected, is certain; that to the community, of inducing other mothers to abandon their offering, is remote and uncertain. On the other hand, the State is under no obligation to offer inducements to parents to neglect their illegitimate children ”

“ There is need, for otherwise the child suffers through the criminal neglect of the parents, and the community must interfere for the sake of the future social efficiency of the individual and of the nation. There is justification, for here as in the case of the parents of the morally defective, parental responsibility has either ceased to act or become too weak a motive force to be effective in securing the welfare of the child. As the individual parent neglects his duty, so and to the corresponding degree to which this neglect extends, must the duty be enforced by the State. ”

“ Protection of the right of each parent to participate in the upbringing of her or his own children is a further discrete interest that the State recognizes by the statute. The common law historically has given recognition to the right of parents, not merely to be notified of their children's actions, but to speak and act on their behalf. Absent a showing of neglect or abuse, a father "possessed the paramount right to the custody and control of his minor children, and to superintend their education and nurture." ”

“ But if this policy of "Poor Law treatment" of the child is repudiated—if the State is really to set itself to bring up the boys and girls whom it finds on its hands with a single eye to their development into efficient citizens—why should the State not use for them the organ which it has fashioned for this very purpose? What ground is there for treating the child as a pauper at all, when the Local Education Authority stands there, in every parish, already authorised by law to provide all that is requisite, and prepared to treat the child simply as a child? ”

“ On page 1 the definition of 'Child in need of care and protection' is so widened as to cover every possible type of preventive case, if read in conjunction with the amendments passed during last session and with the Cabinet authorities to spend public funds on such children.
"We do not think it necessary to increase the powers of Child Welfare Officers for these purposes. To give them more actual powers over children who have not committed an offence would be to risk justifiable public objection to interference with the liberty of the subject and the rights of parents." ”

“ Another aspect of the neglected children problem, which Federal action alone will solve, is in dealing with cases of neglect by desertion. At present each State is put to great trouble and expense through defaulting parents. Federal legislation would render it possible to have an order for payment made in one State collected and remitted by an officer in another State. By this means thousands of pounds a year could be saved to the various States, and many a child prevented from becoming a burden to the people at large. ”

“ It is too late now to doubt that legislation appropriately designed to reach such evils is within the state's police power, whether against the parents claim to control of the child or one that religious scruples dictate contrary action.
It is true children have rights, in common with older people, in the primary use of highways. But even in such use streets afford dangers for them not affecting adults. ”

“ I have directed the Federal Government to work with State and local governments to continue identifying and removing the barriers that prevent young people from moving from our child welfare system into adoptive families. ”

“ The Children's Protection Act was also another step in the right direction, and it has certainly ameliorated the state of affairs; but for various reasons, chiefly because the limit of age is rather too low, it does not seem to go to the root of the evil. ”

“ Perhaps the most dangerous tendency, at least to conservative ideas, is the increasing one to take the children away from the custody of the parents, or even of the mother, and place them in State institutions. Indeed, in some Western States it would appear that the general disapproval of the neighbors of the method employed by parents in bringing up, nurturing, educating, or controlling their children, is sufficient cause for the State authorities to step in and disrupt the family by removing the children, even when themselves unwilling, from the home to some State or county institution. ”

“ There is much evidence that some juvenile courts, including that of the District of Columbia, lack the personnel, facilities and techniques to perform adequately as representatives of the State in a parens patriae capacity, at least with respect to children charged with law violation. There is evidence, in fact, that there may be grounds for concern that the child receives the worst of both worlds: that he gets neither the protections accorded to adults nor the solicitous care and regenerative treatment postulated for children. ”

“ Meanwhile, in the last 2 years, we've cut through Federal redtape to give 26 States, more than half the country, the authority to conduct their own welfare reform experiments. And Republicans and Democrats now agree on tougher child support enforcement. They all agree that we have to have national action on tougher child support enforcement because 30 percent or more of the child support cases that are delinquent cross State boundaries. ”

“ At stake in this case is the welfare of a child. More immediately the question before us is what restriction, if any, does the Constitution of the United States impose on a state court when it is determining the custody of a child before it. ”

“ Limitations have emerged on the prerogatives of parents to act contrary to the best interests of the child with respect to matters such as compulsory schooling and child labor. As a general matter, however, it remains "cardinal with us that the custody, care and nurture of the child reside first in the parents, whose primary function and freedom include preparation for obligations the state can neither supply nor hinder." ”