>My point was that NEA needed to come to terms with the private schools. He said, more or less, never. They are paranoid about private education.<
Yes, private ANYTHING is not on their agenda. And I wish the Fed would get out of education, too. No Child Left Behind has been taken too far. Even children at risk must take it, which is outrageously ridiculous. The tension on all students is enormous, and unnecessary. It has been said that many teachers teach only for tests so the norm will rise at their schools, by which the student's general education suffers. Local control over education is more than needed to make the schools stop "dumbing down"; and to encourage healthy thinking, individualism and creativity.
It is not the Act that has caused the dumbing down of education. Yeaching to the test may in fact lead to students learning more than they otherwise would. After all,students who face the SAT are cramming for that test, which seems to count more than their GPA. I agree that one can not simply legislate learning. because most lawyers haven';t a clue about how or what to teach youngsters under the age of 20, because they have almost no professional contact with them. On the other hand, hose who actually run the schools, the school administrators and school board members also have little day to day contact with students, and are under constant pressure to please a whole raft of pressure groups. This includes teacher unions, which hard to believe are led by educators who no longer have much contact with students and who are more interested in pushing a political agenda than in improving education. But it also includes those parents who want their children to have the best school record possible with the least effort possible. Very many parents think of high school as a time when youngsters ought to enjoy themselves before they face the rigors of college and then work. This seems to be part of the culture. In Japan students work their asses off to achieve high scores on the equivalent of the SAT. But then they go off to college where they are expected to take a breather before they go to work for high pressure bosses.