Posted on 11/22/2010 8:55:22 PM PST by Josh Painter
“So what’s wrong with ‘No Child Left Behind’?”
Do you mean other than the fact that Ted Kennedy was one of NCLB’s authors?
The No Child Left Behind Act radically increased federal authority whilet aking it away from the states. It gave the U.S. Congress and the Education Dept. more powers to dictate policy which controls public schools. Whenever more power is given to the federal government at the expense of the schools, the law of unintended consequences kicks in.
The Heritage Foundation points out:
“One significant problem is that NCLB testing policies have inadvertently weakened state-level testing and academic transparency. Under NCLB, states are required to test students annually and demonstrate continual progress toward a federal goal with all students reaching ‘proficiency’ on state-level tests by 2014. Some states have responded to this pressure by changing how their tests are scored to allow more students to pass and to show more progress under NCLB.”
“This problem, which researchers have called a ‘race to the bottom,’ threatens to erode academic transparency in America’s schools. As states respond to the pressure of NCLB testing by lowering state standards, parents, citizens, and policymakers are denied basic information about student performance in America’s schools. The loss of academic transparency will hinder parents from knowing whether or not their children are learning and will prevent policymakers from judging how well public schools are performing.”
- JP
“Whenever more power is given to the federal government at the expense of the schools, the law of unintended consequences kicks in.”
OK, OK. It works the same way in big private corporations when low level problems come to the attention of vice presidents who then react by start harassing middle and low level management.
Education has gotten so ridiculous that I was hoping that this would be an exception. I guess the only way out of this would be to obliterate the Dept of Education and Teachers Unions then return to State or local control of education.
No trace of the Dept of Education or its staff should remain. If the Washington Fire Dept insists on evacuating staff members before burning the building to the ground, our top educators should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize then sent to some equally useless but less relevant institution like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
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