Excellent historical analysis and comment on school reform at Schools Matter. Among many highlights:
No Child Left Behind is different from all the other educational reforms that have preceded it—this time the reformers are assured of a win, regardless of the outcome. If schools are able to achieve the impossible and attain the 100 percent math and reading proficiency by 2014 that the legislation requires, then the reformers will have threatened, bullied, and shamed their way to educational success by having rendered our schools into scripted testing factories. If the more probable scenario develops (psychometricians say certain), however, and a large majority of American schools are clear failures or on the “Federal watch-list” before or by 2014, then the road to school privatization will be clear sailing. By then, American parents will be shell-shocked and willing to try anything to avoid another one of those Federally-mandated letters telling them that their children are failing because their schools are failing. And state legislatures, broken financially and in spirit by then from the under-funded burdens of NCLB implementation, will be desperate enough to turn the whole effort over to the EMOs of an education industry that will be ramped up, ready, and waiting to pounce.
I see the “scripted testing factory” every day I walk into my school, my classroom and into a meeting (this week we have an extended, two-three hour faculty meeting to analyze our test scores).
It is this “reform” that has me seriously questioning the value of the public school system in which I teach and my place in that system.
1 comment:
I don’t seem to understand “No Child Left Behind.” The title seems a bit vague.
Does it mean that all children will be promoted from grade to grade? Even those who have not mastered the material necessary to proceed to the next grade? Surely, you jest! Why would anyone suggest such a cruel idea. A child placed in a grade for which he is unprepared will just fall further behind and be tormented by his classmates. He will certainly not receive a proper education. What kind of idiot would suggest such a thing.
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