Not to change the subject, but we’ve beaten “free trade” to death.
So what’s wrong with “No Child Left Behind”? I’m usually against top-down micro-management, but when we have a politicized educational establishment and a teachers gone wild workforce, I’d call “No Child Left Behind” a valiant effort at stopping a runaway train.
Unfortunately, our Dept of Education was already an insane asylum when “No Child Left Behind” was conceived, and no cure is possible. So let’s use the remainder of the “education” budget to put the education administrators on a one way cruise ship to any continent that will accept them. Global Warming makes Antarctica the perfect destination.
“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