NCLB change good but not good enough

It’s good that the U.S. Department of Education is going to allow some states to track the educational progress of individual students as part of the No Child Left Behind mandate. It never made sense that the NCLB tests compared different groups of kids from one grade year to the next (such as comparing this year’s fourth-graders to last year’s fourth-graders). Still, the requirement that every student — including those with learning disabilities and who are learning English as a second language — must be proficient in reading and math remains statistically impossible, regardless of how it is measured.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee

2 Comments

  1. J M Walker
    Posted November 25, 2005 at 5:38 am | Permalink

    One of the few things accomplished by the Bush administration has been the increase in education. A 100% increase, to be exact, over the Clinton Administration.

    The problem is the NCLB program was written using Liberals “one size fits all” model. That is what will have to change. And it will take some forward thinking people to do that. The current administration certainly is incapable of doing that, so hopefully the next administration, be it either party, will have enough commomn sense to keep the program, but tune it so the states have some say in how it is applied.

  2. Rage
    Posted November 25, 2005 at 9:44 pm | Permalink

    J.W.,A 100% “increase in education”? O–kay. . .that reminds me of the old Monty Python skit:

    “This figure represents 45% of the population! This figure represents 57% of the population! This figure represents 69% of the population!!”

    “Telling figures, indeed!”

    Whatever. Phillip points out the real problem with NCLB: The way it’s been implemented (never mind what was “supposed to happen”–that’s a black hole) schools are being stuck with the dreaded “unfunded mandates” conservative politicians used to pretend to dislike. Testing alone doesn’t do squat to improve education. Many schools find themselves teaching to the damn tests (which aren’t exactly intellectually stimulating), and face draconian cuts in funding if they fail to meet the goals. If you have a lot of underperforming kids, you’re out of luck.

    Cutting off funds to an underperforming agency is self-evident idiocy in any circumstances. Without any attempt to identify and correct the source of the problems, it merely ensures that the sucky performance will get even worse.

    But when public schools are involved, we’re talking about educating kids of widely different skill levels and backgrounds. They have no choice. It’s criminal to threaten those schools with financial oblivion, especially since they are typically the poorest districts in the first place. We should instead be focusing on the best means to improve acheivement across the board, at all skill levels–a complex, messy task that doesn’t lend itself to simple solutions.

    NCLB also contains a nasty provision wherein parents specifically must opt-out, otherwise military recruiters can and will harrass their kids to join up–and will continue to do so whether the parents protest or not.