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If You Can't Beat Them, Test Them: NCLB as Child Abuse

rick@deducation.us — 2007-11-11T13:13:38-05:00

In preparation for seeing Jonathan Kozol and hearing him speak in a couple of days in New York, I'm re-reading Shame of the Nation, a dangerous thing to do as it never fails to make by blood boil. Just in passing, I'd like to know how many of the Presidential candidates have actually read it themselves (not just send a campaign aide to read it and prepare an executive summary). ...In the Introduction to the book, describing the elementary school where he had his first full-time teaching job, Kozol writes, "Children who misbehaved were taken to the basement of the school where whippings were administered by an older teacher who employed a rattan whip which he first dipped in vinegar in order to intensify the pain...."... Even though "Every industrialized country in the world now prohibits school corporal punishment, except the U.S. and Australia" and nearly half of all American states still technically allow corporal punishment, a 2003 Position Paper of the Society for Adolescent Medicine notes "... ...Specific child abuse definitions vary by state, but certain federal guidelines overarch state policies: the Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act defines Child Abuse and Neglect as "[a]ny recent act or failure to act on the part of a parent or caretaker which results in death, serious physical or emotional harm, sexual abuse or exploitation."... While the theme of Shame of the Nation is not specifically that the NCLB is responsible for all bad things in education today but that for a variety of reasons current educational conditions for minorities have regressed to pre Brown v. Board of Education levels, the NCLB can be seen lurking behind much of the "restoration of apartheid schooling." And its results--tiny children reduced to to tears, forced extra drills in dumbed-down test exercises taking the place of elementary school recesses, a seething rage against the system or in some cases a complete numbness to the injustices, children taught to hate school, children deprived of the joy and light of the humanities and art and music--seem to me to qualify as "serious emotional harm." ...So, in the face of societal pressures not to beat children any longer, I just wonder if, given the mean-spiritedness of the conservative world-view in general that I've noted earlier and its highly visible instantiation in the NCLB, beating children into submission is being sublimated and resurfacing as testing and humiliating them into submission.

The Silence of the Dems

rick@deducation.us — 2007-11-07T12:24:41-05:00

There's a lot going on in our country today, and the Presidential candidates have a lot to think about and a lot to talk about.... But that's just a short term goal--in a year or two we will not have the war to kick around anymore, though we have decades of recovering from this abomination mentally and spiritually to get through.... Health care and Social Security, a looming recession/depression, pervasive racism, the increasingly large gap between the rich and the poor, terrorism, and (my other most pressing issue) energy independence: all these are getting at least some attention from the candidates. ...Edweek, in its November 6 article "The Next Education President?", writes, "But with the campaigns for the 2008 presidential nominations in full swing, few of the current candidates have laid out detailed strategies for improving the quality of American schools and increasing the knowledge and skills of the nation’s elementary and secondary students." ...Over the summer, it seemed as focus on the renewal of the NCLB and especially during the NEA Convention, when the candidates were trying to curry some favor with educators, there was a certain amount of awareness and lip-service from the candidates. I just searched YouTube for some candidates' video from the NEA convention and found a couple of interesting ones: Senator Clinton: "The test is becoming the curriculum"; and Senator Obama: "Don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend too much of the year preparing him to fill out a few bubbles on a standardized test." ...So what's the appeal of the NCLB for the voters or the constituencies or the financial backers that the major candidates are afraid to come out and say, with minor candidate Bill Richardson, "Scrap it!"? When the Bush-NCLB timebomb goes off in 10 years or so, when today's sixth graders are beginning to enter the workforce, the voting ranks, major positions of power and authority and decision-making, we'll all look at each other, and say "how come everyone is so stupid?

Where the Candidates Stand

rick@deducation.us — 2007-10-02T17:59:08-04:00

But a colleague recently sent me a link to a YouTube clip of John Edwards speaking on the NCLB, saying that this video had swung him over to the Edwards camp.... He's not saying repeal the NCLB, which he should be, but he seems to understand the immense problems the Act has occasioned and he's got a lot of good, if still rather vague, ideas about what to do. ...A summary by Margaret Paynich in the January 22, 2007, EdWeek says, "doesn't support school vouchers, supports types of performance pay, one-time testing for teachers - but no word yet on National Standards.... In Clinton's publicly-released statement, she says, "While I firmly believe in the goals of the No Child Left Behind Act, the under-funding of this crucial law makes it impossible for teachers and schools to reach these goals." ...In her depressingly full section entitled "Outrages," she includes an article by Obama, "created by the Center for American Progress," which plays into the hands of the corporate technocrats who see the only function of education as enabling students to more fully participate in the "competition" for "global jobs."... This is disappointing in two ways: first, that Senator Obama, as intelligent and articulate as he is (the two qualities I have admired in him), either isn't bold enough or wise enough to stand up to the corporate types who want to take over our educational system.... Its "State-by-State Report Card on Educational Effectiveness" is jointly written by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and contains troubling conclusions like "too many of our nation’s schools and students are unprepared for the demands of the 21st century’s knowledge-based economy" and "These shortcomings are unacceptable and spell trouble for the economic prospects of individual Americans and for the competitiveness of the country as a whole." ...a new educational structure where the focus would be on helping to bring forth the creativity of our children in stressing arts and language, music; to invite the participation of educational philosophers and psychologists and administrators and teachers and parents and children; to take a new focus on our education, to stop this incessant direction of trying to make us a nation of test-takers, of putting the pressure on teachers to teach to the test, and then school districts depending on the results of those tests for their funding."

NCLB and the Commoditization of Education

rick@deducation.us — 2007-08-12T13:26:58-04:00

One of the issues bound up with the conservatives' view of education is "commoditization, " the belief that something has become so commonplace and unremarkable that it can be mass-produced, packaged and sold, like potato chips or ten-penny nails or Windows computers. Originally the person who invented potato chips had something new and remarkable; over time the process for making them became so refined and streamlined and advanced that almost anyone could make them, and the only difference between potato chips became price.... As Thomas Friedman has shown in The World is Flat, when an item becomes commoditized, it can be outsourced to Asian workers who will do it more cheaply or it can be computerized, mass-produced by algorithms that can be programmed, measured, and assessed. ...You see this happening already, and, even worse, in the way in which education is talked about, you have to fear that it's only going to get worse. ...Item: In the book Many Children Left Behind, Stan Karp makes the point that, "critics see NCLB as part of a calculated political campaign to use achievement gaps to label schools as failures" (page 54).... Since there will always be gaps between the best and the worst, this means there will always, inevitably, be "failures" which opens the door for "market measures, vouchers, and other other steps towards privatization" to move in and "reform" public education (58). It's either planned from the start (which I sort of doubt, knowing that at the very least Ted Kennedy was one of the co-authors of the original No Child Left Behind legislation), or a lucky break of cosmic proportions for the free-marketers. ...Real education--the kind that requires attentive and informed intervention by real teachers--can't be commoditized, so it apparently must be sacrificed to mindless computer programs and state tests of trivia.

NCLB NIMBYism

rick@deducation.us — 2007-08-05T10:06:02-04:00

A new study co-sponsored by "Education Next" from Stanford's Hoover Institution and the "Program on Education Policy and Governance" at Harvard reveals some interesting insight into the turmoil surrounding the re-authorization of NCLB. The study, a survey entitled The 2007 Education Next—PEPG Survey, shows that a slim majority of surveyed Americans favor re-authorizing the NCLB with few or no changes, with the strongest support registered for "accountability" in the abstract, whatever that means. ...In New England right now, we are seeing the same attitude regarding the "wind farms" proposed off the coast of Cape Cod, a large collection of huge wind-powered turbines that would make a dent in our region's energy crisis. ...One of the interesting tangential conclusions of the survey was that support for the NCLB's "if it breathes, test it" accountability policy rises if the phrase "NCLB" is not mentioned, just referred to generically as "federal accountability legislation." ...I'd like to see the Education Next-PEPG survey re-done, asking the question, "Are you in favor of re-authorizing the Federal legislation that requires that your child fail the entire grade if he or she doesn't pass a specific multiple-choice test at the end of the school year?" Or how about, "Are you in favor of re-authorizing the Federal legislation that allows wealthier parents to remove their children from the public schools and send them to private charter schools with support from your tax dollars?" Or maybe "Are you in favor of re-authorizing the Federal legislation that may identify your school as not good enough and then withdraw federal support from your school as punishment?" ...Or, given that 68% of African-Americans support vouchers, ask, "Are you in favor of re-authorizing the Federal legislation that would allow students from poor black school districts to attend your child's school instead at taxpayer expense?"

NCLB: Old Education for a New World

rick@deducation.us — 2007-07-29T20:59:04-04:00

I’m rereading Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind, and though it’s not a book about education, it’s a book about the future, in fact the future that is already so close as to be tangible.... Both give pretty clear portraits of the world of the 1990s and the early part of this century, and both are able to clearly extrapolate what the coming world will be like and, mostly by implication (since they are not education books), what education for American citizens must be right now. And of course No Child Left Behind and what Pink calls “test-happy America” have it all wrong.  Pink’s general thesis is that, because of what he calls “Abundance, Asia, and Automation,” the old jobs associated with the Information Age are going, going, almost gone. Those jobs—the ones that can be automated by computers or outsourced to Asian workforces who are skilled, educated, and willing to work for 20 cents on the dollar—cannot be reclaimed by American workers.... And, for our purposes here, they are comprised of mostly testable skills: right or wrong, black or white.  Though left-brained skills will not disappear from the new society, right brained skills will be of equal or greater value.... Tougher to quantify: quantification is exactly what the NCLB is trying to do, and because of this it’s missing the more important qualities of a 21st centruy education.  One of the impetuses that drives the conservative support for the NCLB is the need to ward off ambiguity and change, to reduce the world to neat tests of correct answers.... Regardless of Bush and Spellings and the rest of the NCLB supporters, the world is changing.  The NCLB, giving in to this outdated urge for correct answers and left-brained algorithms, is doing a great job of preparing American children and future citizens with all the skills they will need to compete for 19th and 20th century jobs. We are testing our children back into the cotton mills and auto assembly lines.  However, someone should tell test-happy and obsessed-with-punishment Congress, as it debates the re-authorization of the NCLB, that it’s unfortunately now the 21st century.

The Definition of Proficiency and, Ultimately, of Education

rick@deducation.us — 2007-07-26T07:14:45-04:00

An entry, pretty insightful in many ways, by Erin Richards in the July 21 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel School Zone Blog brings up a couple of interesting points, but I believe that she has misunderstood the value of her observations and misinterpreted the results. ...He concludes from this, rightly, that "[s]chools are spending more time on reading and math [the two areas required to be tested by the NCLB]and less time on other subjects such as science, social studies and various kinds of arts, as a general trend." ...Even the report from the Center on Education Policy, which occasions Borsuk's article, falls into the trap: The press release, kind of an executive summary, states, "[t]he weight of evidence indicates that state test scores in reading and mathematics have increased overall since No Child Left Behind was enacted."... In fact, decrying the demise of other subjects such as social studies and science, the Center on Education Policy's report calls for more testing in these subjects. ...It's akin to the difference in the Olympics between swimming and diving, or between speed skating and figure skating: swimming and speed skating are races, and excellence is determined by who wins, an assessment that can be objectively determined (and with modern technology, there can't even be any arguments in the case of races that are decided by .001 second and cannot be assessed by the eyes of observers). ...While there are rubrics for the judges to follow and clear scales of performance to be applied, it comes down to the judges: experienced experts carefully who apply all their knowledge and skill and experience to determine a "winner." ...This is a great model of education, a sort of No Gymnast Left Behind (Really!), if you will: you have experienced coaches [teachers]; you have an almost one-to-one educational situation, not 8 classes a day of 35 students each; you have the necessary equipment and supplies; you have careful and constant feedback [not one-time, high stakes tests] from the coach [teacher]; and the result of a poorly executed move is positive advice and feedback designed to help, not punish; the penalty for a mistake [such as failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress] is not immediate termination. ...You have to be very careful of "education" reports that profess to show increases in "proficiency" when what they really show is that force-feeding our children a steady diet of test-taking strategies produces higher scores on a limited number of trivial tests.

Funding for NCLB?

rick@deducation.us — 2007-07-15T12:06:04-04:00

One major focus of all the criticism directed against No Child Left Behind is the fact that it makes excessive demands on students, teachers, and schools, without providing the necessary federal funding to implement all its directives and achieve its goals. ...Typical criticism (I could quote many many more): "No Child Left Behind attempted to curtail the problem [narrowing the achievement gap], but simply continued the administrative trend of over-mandating and under-funding initiatives." ...But let's imagine for a moment what a fully-funded NCLB means: as more resources are poured into the tested subjects ("math" and "reading"), funds will be pulled out of non-tested subjects. We have already seen that time is being taken away from non-tested subjects--everything from kindergarten naps and elementary school recesses to music, art, and social studies is being cut to the bone to make time for teaching to the math and reading tests. Now, as money for these programs continues to dry up, more time and resources will be spent on testable stuff, such as reading and math. ...A score on invalid current tests of reading and math is meaningless, but it seems to mean something, and the politicians currently hawking NCLB use these meaningless scores to create votes for themselves, giving the illusion that they are doing something. ...The illusion of testability, the reliance on test scores as if they meant something, is one of the most dangerous aspects of NCLB that threatens to spread beyond education and into society in general. ...In A Whole New Mind he shows that left-brained abilities (the kinds of tasks which can be reduced to rote or automation or algorithm) were valuable in the Industrial Age and even the early parts of the Information Age, but that right-brained abilities are crucial to success in the 21st century.

Is the NCLB Horrific?

rick@deducation.us — 2007-07-08T11:44:45-04:00

In his July 5 entry, Rotherham, who, among his numerous books on education counts a book he has co-edited with Chester Finn (remember him?), notes "I'd still really like to see someone make the true and courageous point that while hardly perfect, No Child Left Behind isn't nearly as horrific as it's made out to be." ...Also commenting on Rotherham's observation is blogger TeacherJay, who offers caution about jumping on the NCLB-bashing bandwagon because, "When you get right down to it though isn’t NCLB’s goal to help children and reform schools?" ...A geography teacher's merit being based on his students' scores on multiple choice tests that include questions such as, "The capital of Yugoslavia is (A, B, C, or D)...?" ...By the way, Elizabeth Kantor has come very near to advocating this in her speech before the Conservative Women's Network, reprinted on the Heritage Foundation's site: ranting about "politically correct" liberal English teachers, as one example, she laments the loss of "...the 'permanent things' that conservatives are supposed to be defending. ...The concept of charter schools is part of the larger goal of privatizing education, based on the theory that anything people like parents and teachers and local school boards can do, private corporations can do better, or at least make money from it. (A number of observers--see Stan Karp's chapter in Many Children Left Behind--have asserted that, underneath, this is the real goal of the NCLB--to manipulate the tests so public schools will be deemed failing, and then re-channel the money into private for-profit schools.) Under the much-hyped voucher system, charter schools get to take money from the public coffers intended for public education and spend it on their own students, whom they have taken out of the public school systems. ...When teachers' pay is based partly on how well they teach their students to be little more than mindless test-takers, the search for truth suffers.

Education and the Unemployed

rick@deducation.us — 2007-07-01T08:06:22-04:00

Barbara Ehrenreich makes the point in her new Bait and Switch that modern corporate practices of laying off workers of long-standing loyalty and productiveness will ultimately be counter-productive for this nation. ...In fact, those who get a good education and work hard are likely to be among the tens of millions of workers laid off summarily and unable to find any form of employment even close to what they have a right to expect or what the nation and world need of them. ...It is of course too early for the NCLB to have affected these people, most of who are in their forties or fifties with decades of productive work behind them, but it's important to examine the role the current trends in education will play in perpetuating that world. On one hand, it may be argued that a mindless education that teaches nothing so much as how to take dumbed-down tests, follow orders, and not think may be the perfect education for a corporate America that values exactly those traits.... She ends her book with a sobering recounting of the challenges facing America's educated and experienced and skillful unemployed and a sort of call to action: "Nothing will change until America's disposable and disposed-of white-collar workers begin to come together to reclaim their dignity and self-worth...." ...Which is why education is such a threat to the wealthy Republican right, why they take such amazing steps as teaching "creationism" in place of real science, promoting private school vouchers so that privatized schools can make more money off our children, continuing to channel huge amounts of money into already wealthy suburban white school systems while withholding funds from inner city schools as "punishment" for failing to meet "standards," and, most important, using the NCLB to dumb down education to ensure generations of non-thinking, multiple-choice-test-taking, order-accepting students. ...Ehrenreich makes a good case that it's not only profits that impel them; even worse, it's sheer incompetence, a culture built on firing the educated and talented and experienced and creative and successful, and rewarding the glassy-eyed yes-men. ...And we have them, but they are being systematically cut out of useful positions, stripped of healthcare, forced to spend 10-12 hours a day looking for a job--any job, even if it's a people greeter at a Walmart.

Dihydrogen Monoxide and the NCLB

rick@deducation.us — 2007-06-25T16:29:18-04:00

It's described in the most dire terms imaginable, "colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people every year," etc. One city in California almost passed a city ordinance banning it until they realized....dihydrogen monoxide is water! ...ETS surveyed a large number of Americans about the NCLB and found a roughly even split in favor of and opposed to renewal of the program. Not satisfied, they reworded the survey questions, throwing about vague terms like "standards" and "accountability" and "flexibility," apparently apple-pie terms for the survey respondents, and the second time around concluded that a strong majority of Americans support the law's renewal and also that most Americans don't really understand the law. "Despite the American public’s clear lack of knowledge about the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and the strong misgivings of teachers and school administrators have about the legislation [sic], the public and public school teachers and administrators strongly support reauthorization" ("Standards, Accountability and Flexibility: Americans Speak on No Child Left Behind Reauthorization"). ...logjams of students stuck in the ninth grade year after year so they won't have to take the 10th grade achievement tests and possibly embarrass the school systems ...students who have not yet learned to speak English well (like every one of our ancestors) are forced to take all their math, science, and other courses in English, thus guaranteeing they will fail ...schools which have the highest failure rates and presumably need the most help are instead penalized by having their federal aid funds drastically cut Should this law be renewed?" How do you think a majority of Americans will feel about the NCLB when they know these truths and see the sugar-coated and highly-spun Washington-speak selling of the NCLB for what it is?

It's a Bad, Bad, Bad World

rick@deducation.us — 2007-06-17T14:30:59-04:00

In the May 28, 2007, Washington Post, staff writer Jay Mathews opens his article "Core Classes Not Enough, Report Warns," with a standard lament about the wussiness of American education: "It's no secret to most high school students that taking the required courses, getting good grades and receiving a diploma don't take much work."... (The "Report" that does the "warning" comes, not surprisingly, from testing mega-corporation ACT, Inc., which claims to be a not-for-profit organization, but it will be happy to sell each prospective test-taker a "Prep Guide" for $25.00) ...In order to survive, you have to be tough--do a lot of work, take tough exams, pass do-or-die high-stakes tests at every available opportunity. ...In fact, if the world not not such a mean place after all, the intent of high-stakes tests is to make it a mean world. Let me say that again, the intent of NCLB-type testing is to make the world a meaner place than it already is. In places where there is (or at least should be) no competition, no predation (such as, oh, say, first grade), the NCLB introduces it. ...Now I'm sure that not all the supporters of the NCLB are also supporters of Intelligent Design and anti-evolution and natural selection, but I'd guess there is a large overlap between the two.... We are in competition, so goes the reasoning, and either we are stronger than the [fill in the enemy du jour] or we will not survive.

Bushy Logic: Clear Thinking in Kansas

rick@deducation.us — 2007-06-09T12:32:29-04:00

Bemoaning the lack of tough standards in schools ("all they have to do is be there and they will pass"), a Kansas great-grandmother has posted the following in a letter to the editor in the June 7, 2007, The Kansan: "...No Child Left Behind is just another way of passing your child even if they are below average." ...Let's look at this for a moment: by definition, at any given moment, by any criterion, half of any group is "below average."... So the only interpretation of this statement that's possible is that in all cases, half of every student body should not pass.... Bush and Spellings would be in heaven if they heard this (assuming that you believe, as I do, along with Stan Karp that "the AYP [Adequate Yearly Progress] formulas and the 'Leave No Child Behind' rhetoric are transparent attempts to set up schools to fail.") However, it would be really easy to pummel this writer for her thinking, or lack of skills in making a point clearly, or any number of other flaws.... This woman is a great-grandmother, on a fixed Social Security income, and I have no wish whatsoever to embarrass her. I sympathize with her situation, and figure if I were in her shoes, betrayed and overwhelmed, I'd want to blame somebody, too. ...It's just that this kind of bizarre thinking is what's behind the NCLB: the way it's worded, the way it operates (if your school is in trouble and you need to fix things, your federal money will be withdrawn), the way it's promoted by the Bush marketeers.

Massachusetts Considers De-emphasizing High Stakes Test

rick@deducation.us — 2007-06-07T09:34:07-04:00

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, the first Democratic Governor of Massachusetts in recent memory, has called for an improvement of the state's MCAS (High-Stakes Tests) scores and adding new assessments as well, according to the June 6, 2007, Boston Globe. This new idea--expanding the ways in which high-school students may prove they are worthy of graduation--has led to a proposal and hearings before the state legislature's Joint Committee on Education. Patrick was criticized for this in an editorial in the Boston Herald, the city's conservative inflammatory tabloid-style newspaper, who predictably called it "backsliding" and, ironically, a "concession to mediocrity." The MCAS, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, was passed in the mid-90's and became the state's make or break testing system, as required by the NCLB. ...From my experience as an educator in Massachusetts colleges for thirty years, I can testify that in the past five years or so there has been a noticeable shift in freshman students' writing skill: where once there was a wide range of skills--ranging from a percentage of students of extraordinary creativity and imagination and writing abilities to, yes, a percentage of extremely weak students. Now things are much more level--the weak students aren't appearing in the same frequencies as before, and that's good (although it's been documented how weak students are simply forced out of high schools before graduation in order not to bring down aggregate test scores, and thus never even get to apply to a college, so forced attrition may be as much a cause as improved educational practices). But the really exceptional writers are also gone, for the most part, beaten down by school systems teaching to the test and promulgating a mindless essay format known as the "five-paragraph-essay" which guarantees, if mastered, passing the test and never having a creative or useful thought to express. ...Educators know that all a child is and knows cannot be summed up in a few true/false and multiple-choice tests (to its credit, the MCAS does allow for a student to actually write an essay as part of the test).

The Genesis of NCLB: Chester Finn's "A Nation Still at Risk"

rick@deducation.us — 2007-06-06T09:38:02-04:00

Its principles have been bandied about for probably as long as there has been public education, but the genesis of the current incarnation can be traced back specifically to the mid-1980's and the Reagan administration. ...(The title of the article has been recycled by Finn and his followers and collaborators numerous times since then, but as nearly as I can find, the article in the May, 1989, issue of Commentary magazine was the first to use that title.) ...Like much ultra-conservative propaganda, the article is rife with fallacious reasoning and almost laughable assertions, but I'd like to examine the principles underlying the article as a way of getting a handle on what drives the insanity of the NCLB today. Finn lists a litany of problems with current (i.e., 1989) education principles, and follows that with four "obstacles" to education "reform" (which is his term for what most educators see as a return to the dark ages of education.) ...(God did not create the universe and all species 6000 years ago, and man does indeed contribute to global warming, and because there is overwhelming irrefutable evidence for both, education has no business teaching otherwise, but I'm not going there in this blog.) ...For Finn, knowledge is clearly static, stuff to be memorized, all the while knowledge is changing and our students, under his proposals, will have no intellectual tools whatsoever to keep up with the world. ...It's a mean, tough, nasty, dog-eat -dog world out there, and education has to be mean and nasty to equip its "products" (Finn's word, not mine) to survive in this kind of world. Memorize facts as if they never changed; take one-chance-and-out tests on those facts (easy to do if there are clearly right and wrong answers) is the way to cull out the weak.

Technorati link

rick@deducation.us — 2007-06-06T09:36:50-04:00

Steve Jobs and Teachers Unions

rick@deducation.us — 2007-03-10T17:57:54-05:00

At an educational conference on February 16, he said, "I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way." ...Perhaps from his limited view of education, he believes that school-CEO's (AKA principals and deans) are wise and just and knowledgeable about their "product." ...In a perfect world, principals and deans and Academic Vice Presidents and School Boards and State Boards of Education would be wise and just and knowledgeable about education, and unions would not even be necessary.... (The former President of the University of Massachusetts, William Bulger, a staunch opponent of busing and integration of Boston public schools, was President of the Massachusetts State Senate before being appointed to his post, and is the brother of one of the most wanted mobsters in the history of the state.) ...It is to keep their job, to puff up some irrelevant statistical measure of success, to brown-nose a superior who also knows nothing about education, to look good on paper, to get an undeserved raise--everything except how well do the kids learn. ...Yes, there are some bad ones (I have known a few and right know can think of a few others), but for the most part they are well-trained, dedicated, and experienced teachers. They know what needs to be done, and their superiors won't listen to them, because their superiors' superiors won't listen to them, and so on up the whole sorry line to the state boards of education, populated by political appointees and not people who know the ropes of education. So until there is a visionary worthy of Steve Jobs running the boards of education and indeed the federal Department of Education, we have to have unions to protect the teachers, the educational system, and our children from the know-nothings who are running our country's education right now.

Deducation: Repeal the No Child Left Behind Act

rick@deducation.us — 2007-03-09T15:59:42-05:00

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is, perhaps outside of the PATRIOT Act, potentially the most damaging and far reaching legacy of the Bush administration. It applies misguided notions of how kids learn and how to teach them to further a conservative agenda that will guarantee our students will graduate with little more than a mass of irrelevant, testable, and ultimately wrong "facts" and have not the least clue how to think. It believes in tests, it tests the wrong things, it rewards those who score highly on these wrong-headed tests. The damage it has done, and continues to do, to our nation's children is incalculable. It may take generations to undo this. Our educational system is being killed: it's almost dead.... Mind-numbing, teaching to invalid tests, memorization of facts that won't be facts tomorrow, stifling all ability to think critically, taking all teaching decisions out of the hands of teachers, funneling educational funds into the best white schools, leaving behind all children except upper class whites. Repeal the NCLB today and put education back in the hands of people who know what they are doing.

Mystery Maverick

rick@deducation.us — 2007-03-08T19:55:13-05:00