"We Don't Need No Education"

Apparently even former supporters of No Child Left Behind are finally seeing the light and speaking against it.

As a teacher, I've had to contend with this steaming turd of a piece of legislation for the past couple of years now, and I don't think it's actually accomplished anything. The thing about government initiatives in education is that it takes the better part of a decade before they're really implemented, and then it takes two or three years to actually see any effect. So the claims that NCLB has already had an impact is absurd. The improvement in American children's reading and math test scores are more likely the result of something Clinton implemented back in the late '90s than of Bush's NCLB.

The other problem with the law, of course, is that it puts so much weight and importance on those damn standardized tests. Standardized tests (like Virginia's SOLS)have consistently been proven by independent research to be one of the worst ways to measure what a student knows. In some instances, such as with the Woodcock-Johnson III assessment, they can be a useful way to measure ability in basic skill sets, but using them to see if a student learned anything in History or Science or Algebra? Crap. So many students suffer from nigh-crippling test anxiety or simply cannot take standardized tests. And at the other end of the spectrum, you've got the students who test higher than they actually are. I was always good at standardized tests. I knew how to work the test, knew how to pick answers and guess when I didn't know the actual answer. It's no more an accurate measure for someone like me, then, than it is for someone who has difficulty with word problems and test anxiety.

The other issue I have with NCLB is that it's supposed to create "accountability." Okay, yeah, we want to make sure kids are actually learning something in school. I get that and can appreciate the concern. But there's a quote in the article I linked by Bush where he says that he wanted to "insist you measure in return for the billions we spend on your behalf."

Because, y'know, the best way to get a school that's performing below expectations is to threaten to cut their federal funding. That's freakin' brilliant.

Of course, the very notion of this administration asking for someone to be accountable for something would be laughable if it wasn't so depressing. Between the President throwing money at the Iraq conflict, the Vice President deciding his office basically doesn't belong to the Executive Branch (the fact that the Vice President's office was created in the same constitutional article that created the executive branch notwithstanding), and the way they've handled everything from taxation to immigration to classified information and documents, it's absurd that they'd want someone else to be accountable when they still don't even seem to know the meaning of the word. Of course, at the same time, it makes perfect sense: someone else has to be accountable, not Bush or his administration. It's SEP: Somebody Else's Problem.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, "Teach Your Children Well"