Posted on 03/31/2008 3:27:19 PM PDT by SoftballMominVA
t's the 800-pound gorilla of U.S. education. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the sweeping legislation enacted six years ago to improve public schools, seems to make a lot of people unhappy. But President Bush, undaunted by the barrage of criticism aimed at this beleaguered measure by states, teachers' unions and politicians on both sides of the aisle, is pushing Congress to reauthorize it this year . Many Capitol Hill observers believe that it won't survive without the political clout a new president and Congress would bring -- but after a starring role in five straight presidential elections, education is a bit player at best in the 2008 race. Could these widespread myths about No Child Left Behind have poisoned the well?
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Seems nobody really likes it at all....just a red-headed stepchild
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For this to work, of course, good standards have to be in place, and NCLB doesn't address the problem of mediocre or even downright silly standards. Compromises needed to pass NCLB left the law laid-back about standards yet fussy about what states and districts should do when those standards aren't met. The upshot: low expectations on one hand and too much micromanagement on the other...the majority either expect woefully little of their students and schools or have developed such nebulous standards that nobody -- not parents, not teachers, not test makers -- can make out what students are supposed to be learning.
I feel that in many areas, our state has set the standards too low to do much good, so that fewer schools would be failing. There are still failing schools, but students who meet the low standards and their parents get a false sense of security about how well they are actually achieving.
There is also the problem of students who move from one state or district to another and are expected to meet totally different standards.
I had a parent tell me last year that her child was going to fail a grade because the child couldn't meet the standards in our state, so the mother sent the child to live with a relative in another state (with different standards) for the last month or two of the school year so that the child could be promoted, then brought the child back home. The net result was that the child did not have the skills to be successful in the higher grade and was failing again.
My thoughts about NCLB are the same as they always have been.
In Georgia, where I live, the early grades are notorious about socially promoting kids left and right who obviously cannot do the work of the higher grade.
They make it all the way to high school, cannot read, do simple math or much of anything, but I am expected to work magic on them and get them to graduate high school.
Unfortunately, no amount of federal intervention is going to change the fact that some kids will simply never graduate high school, and if they all did, they should all be physicians. If you can make it out of high school, you can make it into and out of college.
I'm wondering if RTI will end some of that...or at least result in better remediation.
I think that instead of funding "graduation coaches" in middle and high schools, Gov. Perdue would have been better off suggesting reading specialists.
Kids need to read more. TV & video games work against that.
Kids need to play outside more. Not being able to beat the snot out of child molesters works against that. Ditto the video thing from above.
Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of “trades” jobs for current students to fall back on.
In California, you can go to the City College at age 18, with or without a HS diploma.
As the article says, teaching the standards required is not a bad thing when the standards are what the child needs to learn. Nothing anybody does will make the learning acheivement the same in every classroom, and its time we recognize this, but standard tests represent a way to verify results and this is needed in our education system today. Bush got his tests, Kennedy got certified (union) teachers.
A better solution would be to let schools and teachers negotiate for their jobs and salaries. Someday maybe the public will get behind this, until then we are going to have to do the best we can with what we have. BTW, I am applying to return to the classroom, to get up close and personal with NCLB and the rest of it. (Wish me luck)
Of course, AP teachers also teach to a test too, but the test includes such broader learning and is to intricate that it doesn't feel the same as to teaching to a 40 question multiple choice test.
I'd love to see her letter!
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