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.

snowy

If the government wants to keep NCLB, they need to fund it. Period. And they need to stop punishing low-performing schools by taking their funding away. That's ridiculous.

That said, I would prefer to see it killed. It does nothing to improve or facilitate actual learning or actual teaching on the part of educators. It allows lazy teachers to teach to a test. Furthermore, I see more time spent in lower-scoring classrooms on skills that focus around how to take a test versus skills that will actually give them a good foundation beyond how to take a standardized test. It's also caused a proliferation of similar testing in schools, which is not a good way of assessing actual learning. Schools are testing students more and more often, and in some schools, it's dehumanizing them; these students are becoming nothing more than a test score to their teachers and administrators. There is something seriously wrong with that.

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Derwood

It should be renamed "No Average Child With No Learning Disabilities or Child who is Gifted Behind."

Seriously, this thing shoots straight for the middle of the bell curve when it comes to students, and everyone who is a little behind or a little ahead of the curve falls by the wayside

Cheater

No Child Left Behind - I thought that meant making sure that everyone was on the bus after a field trip.

Seriously, I agree that it should be killed. It is just pushing kids through the system, and some really need to repeat a subject if they just didn't get it the first time. I also agree that it has created some poor teachers that only teach to the test.

pig

I was looking for an article that I read concerning this a while back that was focused on the inherent problems of NCLB and the school voucher system. The gist of it was that you don't really want market-style competition in public schools. This system is one of those things that I think might sound good to someone who pushes paper around, but simply doesn't work when put into practice. I think it's a great idea to test students in order to determine their progress, and to allow them to be identified for special needs within the educational system. However, the public school system is already limping along in many areas; denying them further funding is only adding insult to injury. I also draw umbrage with the common notion that public teachers are lazy, or that they have a really sweet deal. In my opinion and experience, they bust their asses in a relatively low-paying job to try and make other people's children able to take care of themselves in society. Fifteen minute lunch breaks suck.

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Willravel

Of course kill it. Moreover, let's see if we can't undo some of the incredible damage it's done and increase school funding to all the schools that suffered under NCLB.

snowy

I didn't mean to imply that all public school teachers are lazy. I spend a lot of time around the public schools and have had an opportunity to observe a lot of different kinds of teachers. Sure, there are lots of teachers who work very hard, but there are also those who don't, just like in any field. NCLB enables already lazy teachers to be even lazier, because they don't have to think critically about their pedagogy, their lesson plans, or even the curriculum, because it all goes towards the test anyways, right?. It is now handed to them in one federally-mandated package (with obvious tweaks at both the state and local level), and they only have to work towards the goal of satisfactory test scores, not actual learning. I met one teacher last fall who made me sick to my stomach--she refused to teach her 6th grade social studies class because the teacher's edition of the required text had not arrived yet, and it was six weeks into the school year. She said she absolutely had to have that text, or else she wouldn't know what to teach. So they had study hall instead.

Good teachers always think critically about the methods they use and self-reflect on how to become a better teacher. That was one of the most important lessons I've learned over the course of my observations, from a veteran teacher who works his ass off everyday for the sake of his students, trying to figure out new ways to reach them. He's been in the classroom for thirty years, but he's still thinking about what he does and how he does it. For most good teachers, NCLB is irrelevant and a waste of time. They don't think about it until the kids get taken out of the classroom for a week of testing.

And I don't know where teachers only get 15-minute lunch breaks. Around here, teachers get 30-45 minutes.

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pig

Sorry snowy, that actually wasn't directed at you. Down here in SC, we're in the middle of a lot of contention about school choice, vouchers, and the failure of our public education system. My mom taught public school for 27 years, and I know firsthand how tough the job is. One of the common complaints I hear from people in favor of systems like NCLB, school vouchers, etc is the notion that public school teachers, in general, have a sweet set up and don't really work that hard. This is from people how graze around cubicles 3 hours out of the day, play golf for business purposes, and push paper. Therefore, I tend to conflate the two criticisms; people in support of NCLB seem to think that by moving the public school system to a quasi-capitalist competitive structure, they will weed out the lazy teachers who have this sweet setup, when most teachers only want to do their job well. I agree with you - there are some real pieces of shit in the public teaching profession who give it a bad image, much like any other field.

So I wasn't responding to your post really - just giving an opinion on the NCLB issue.

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robot_parade

NCLB is a scourge. It had very few benefits, and encourages all kinds of bad practices, in addition to being an under-funded mandate.

Paq

Kill it. nothing about it makes sense.

i'm with pig, though, most of my teaching friends work their butts off...but my principal friend has several teachers who have been there for 15-20 yrs and are unwilling to change anything and have caused the school to be put in the endangered list. My friend was hired to turn it around and so far, they are doing 'better' but it's a struggle to get anyone to change and adapt. I really think there should be a rule against anyone doing the 'same' job for 10+ yrs (certain things excluded: surgeons, doctors, things that force you to improve or die)...but people tend to get too complacent after a time at the same job.

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