shakran

No Child Left Behind is up for renewal soon and some congresspeople are already hosting "focus groups" of educators and parents to see what needs to be "reworked" in the program. What do you think?


For my part, we should kill the goddamn thing. It's an unfunded federal mandate that kills education and requires nothing but repetitive teaching to the test. Schools have had to cut back on civics, arts, physical education, recess, and history so they could tell the kids the answers to the math tests. Kids don't learn anything under this system and worse, they don't learn /how/ to learn under this system - which of course was its intention to begin with. Bush's crew hates having to spend money to educate other kids - they'd much rather send their own kids to some elite private school and forget about the rest of the country. The best way to get rid of a government expense that you don't like is to break it horribly and then convince the voters that it's so broken we should just scrap it.

And while we're at it, we need to kill education vouchers too. All that does is funnel money out of the public school system. If you wanna send your kids to private school, fine, but you should still have to pay public education taxes. It's not our fault that you choose not to use what's set up for you. Just as I do not get out of paying for the fire department or jails despite the fact that I have never made use of these facilities before, you do not get out of paying for public schools just because you choose not to avail yourself of them.