The best and the brightest should be going to private schools, on scholarship if the family doesn't have the money.
An unbelievable about of funding is spent trying to educate the bottom 20% of our population. I think we would be better off throwing the big bucks at the top 10% of our kids and getting the slower learners into trade schools and what not where they can learn how to do the jobs that Americans won't do.
I'd just as soon abolish the Dept. of Education...
Yes.
My wife teaches high school for problem children and I was at a little get together between some from her school and some from the regular high school. Both her and the teachers of the GT kids (gifted, talented) complained about the way they had to teach under "Every child takes it in the behind".
When the marxist Thomas Dewey (who designed the public school system) said: 'A thinking child is a threat, and spoils the harmony of the collective society that is coming.'
The system is designed to destroy the chances of smart and very smart males, especially white males. The US will reap what it has sown over the next 100 years.
The problem isn't, "no child left behind", it's the public school system itself. It's a government monopoly that puts out a Yugo quality product for a Mercedes pricetag. If you really want your kids to become educated you teach them yourself or send them to quality private schools.
Hold a race and make sure the slowest runners
compete equally against the fastest...
Loads of fun for the slower folks...a real agony for
the swiftist...
Frustrating those above the norm is asking for trouble...
imo
Absolutely! But this problem is self-imposed by political correctness....
The self-esteem of, "remedial" kids..keeps them in classes with brighter children..the self-esteem of language-challenged students..keeps them in classes with well-spoken children..the self-esteem of thugs who could not care less about their future keeps them in classes with those who wish to support themselves when they graduate..the self-esteem of the physically handicapped keeps them in classes with non-handicapped-their "special needs" requires constant teacher or aid attention to physical, not mental needs
Remove these impediments..put them in classes for such things (like in the old days) and the dumbing down problem would be solved.
No Child Left Behind: The Football Version
1. All teams must make the state playoffs, and all will win
the championship. If a team does not win the championship, they will
be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be
held accountable.
2. All kids will be expected to have the same football skills
at the same time and in the same conditions. No exceptions will be
made for interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or
genetic abilities or disabilities. ALL KIDS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A
PROFICIENT LEVEL.
3. Talented players will be asked to work out on their own
without instruction. Coaches will use all their instructional time
with the athletes who aren't interested in football, have limited
athletic ability or whose parents don't like football.
4. All coaches will be proficient in all aspects of football,
or they will be released.
5. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only
be kept in the 4th, 8th and 11th games.
6. This will create a New Age of sports where every school is
expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach
the same minimal goals
Teaching to the lowest common denominator has been going on LONG before NCLB. The problem is not No Child Left Behind, but state laws mandating "inclusion".
A comment made to me about this which has frosted my husband to no end it that the bighter ones become an incentive to the underachievers, they can help them. My husband's attitude to that is "Fine, where's her paycheck if she is expected to teach the others"
Whole language, whole math, group learning, guessing, Earth worship, social justice, etc. etc etc. have been crammed into kids heads for thirty years and NOW the best and brightest are being hurt? Bah.
It was a bad thing when I was in grade school in California in the mid-70's. In Iowa in the early 70's, I seem to remember that overachieving was rewarded - by the time I got to California, it was punished. Now the whole country has adopted the punishment ideal. ;)
I'm now in favor of "unschooling" for gifted children.
I think part of the problem with public schools is that they are much like the NEA or AFT, they are designed to protect the mediocre.
You have protected mediocracy promoting more mediocracy.
There is no place to for high expectations or making children rise above the expectation of "average"
The problem is that the Education "Thugocracy" doesn't want an intelligent and self-supporting product. They refuse to divide their classes into the Advanced, Average and Slow Learners like when I was a kid. You were encouraged to "raise caste". Now, nobedy "fails", but nobody is encouraged to succeed!
The solution would require streaming [i.e. rigorous segregation by ability] of students. Other countries are doing/have done that. It would be nice to have a school with all the pupils above IQ 150.
Human abilities are distributed along a bell curve. Therefore, excellence and equality are mutually exclusive.
No amount of testing, curriculum tweaking, or funding redistribution will have any effect whatsoever on this.
NCLB amounts to the largest expansion yet of the strategy of directing more resources towards the students making up the lower end of the curve. This isn't a new idea, and there's no reason to believe it will be any more effective on a national scale than it has been in repeated district and county level attempts.
Special education programs make up one quarter of all public K-12 education expenditures.
The bottom one fourth of public special education students (about 1.35 million students, out of 49 million total) absorb close to 40 billion dollars a year. For this staggering investment, as a group they don't even come close to meeting the low state standards, let alone excellence.
Imagine what the top 1.35 million students would accomplish with that same 30,000 dollars a year of personalized instruction.
The "No Child Left Behind" policy is pure demogoguery. For more on the subject and on education, in general, see Public Schools: Issues & Reality.
Hopefully, President Bush's new appointee to the Supreme Court will provide a partial atonement for his (the President's) pushing such unconstitutional and counter-productive nonsense.
William Flax
Teaching to the lowest part of the class is only taking it one step further than what I was told to do when I taught - I was supposed to teach to the "middle third" of the class.
That formula pretty much ensured that the really bright kids would get bored, and the really dumb ones would fail.
(Which is why I never followed it, and kept hellacious long office hours.)