INSUFFICIENT ALTERNATIVES? Wednesday evening's Nightline featured the money crunch in education, with the travails of the good folk of Arlington, Massachusetts, who rejected a millage increase yet held a bake sale for their stressed schools. Also appearing was the Chicago superintendent, coping with the shell game mandated by the No Child Left Behind (but No Child Gets a Voucher) Act, in which a school "fails" if any of the pre-determined subsets of its population is not making progress. Students have the option of transferring to a non-failing school elsewhere in the system, which probably has the effect of moving the failures around. A concluding segment looked at the troubles at the University of Texas, taking the opportunity to list a few tuition increases without looking at the effects. The anchor -- not Ted Koppel -- left the viewers with an attempt to be witty: was it the politicians fault for promising school improvements and tax cuts, or the voters for believing it? No consideration of whether the State of Texas ought to be admitting as many students as it is, at the tuitions it charges. No effort to go to Milwaukee (an easy Amtrak ride from Chicago) to ask about the choice programs there. Jonathan Kozol got plenty of air time, but no reporter could be seconded from recall coverage in San Francisco to interview Eric Hanushek. The news clip that served as prime-time tease, and the Arlington coverage, focused on cuts in music and other basics. Must not have been enough time to look at invented math, invented spelling, environmentalist propaganda, and selective advocacy for justice crowding out the basics. (A reminder to parents: you can get your children reading and ciphering on their own. Simply provide the materials and the opportunities and turn 'em loose.)