While speaking in front of a teacher’s union, naturally.

CONCORD, N.H. - Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton on Friday criticized the Bush administration for outsourcing teaching to private tutoring companies, arguing that many firms have close ties to Republicans.

“This is Halliburton all over again,” the New York senator said.

The 2002 No Child Left Behind Act requires school districts to provide free tutoring in math and reading to poor children in schools that repeatedly fail to meet state testing standards. Clinton said that amounts to $500 million a year being paid to tutoring companies and other supplemental service providers that aren’t held accountable.

“Nobody’s looking over their shoulder. And we’re not really seeing results,” she members of the National Education Association’s New Hampshire chapter.

“Why would we outsource helping our kids to unaccountable private sector providers?” she said. “They don’t have to follow our civil rights laws, their employees don’t even have to be qualified, they aren’t required to coordinate with educators, there’s a grand total of zero evidence that they’re doing any good.”

I’m more than a little offended that Hillary Clinton, who favors the current union-dominated education system and speaks out vociferously against education vouchers, would dare raise the accountability issue on education.  If she wants to talk about tax dollars doing little good in education perhaps she should focus her attention on the billions upon billions of tax dollars we spend on the public school system in this country - more than any other nation on earth - even as our students perform below international averages on standardized tests.

As nations like Japan and India crank scientists and mathematicians and engineers out of their schools American students often spend their first year of college taking remedial courses in basic areas like math and composition before they can even begin college-level courses.

I’m not going to defend “No Child Left Behind.” While the intentions of the law were good, it is an appalling departure from the tenets of federalism and state autonomy this country was founded upon.  That being said, I’m certainly not willing to hear that legislation criticized upon the basis of accountability by a teacher union shill like Hillary Clinton.  If she were truly worried about accountability in our schools she would be demanding to know why our public school educators, despite being the best funded in the world, can’t even help our students finish above average in international testing.

But she’s not worried about accountability.  Instead she’s worried about lucrative contracts for the unions she shills for.