why lefties are wrong about no child left behind.
it’s about time for my quarterly blog post… 
i am currently reading my life in france, julia child’s lovely memoir of falling in love with france and french cuisine. i was surprised to find that julia had a realization unrelated to food at a dinner party talking with a man with whom she fervently disagreed politically. it sums up perfectly the frustration that i have with left-leaning folks and the public debate about the elementary and secondary education act of 2001, a.k.a. no child left behind.
julia wrote:
Under pressure…my “positions” on important questions…were revealed to be emotions masquerading as ideas. This would not do!
the same folks who claim to want to close the achievement gap for minority students, claim to want to end the vicious circle of poverty, claim to want all children to have the opportunity to attain an excellent education are also coming out in droves against no child left behind (NCLB), a law that changed the way most states evaluate their public education systems.
these folks, including many individuals that i adore and respect, need to get real, get informed and get rid of their emotions masquerading as ideas.
i concede that there are problems with the legislation, but no law is perfect on the first go-round, and, in the end, political compromises will happen. this is a fact of the way our political system works, and that will never change. even if we see a day when there are more than 2 major parties, the nature of the bicameral legislature demands compromise. it’s called the conference committee. the nature of our system of checks and balances also demands compromise to secure executive (presidential) approval for legislative actions.
anyway, that is beside the point. the point is that we need no child left behind if for no other reason than the wealth of information that we now have about how students are really performing in our public schools. if all of the rest of the 850 pages of the law are bunk, real information about how the gaps in student achievement are too big to ignore is the first step in fixing the system.
for the first 100 years of the US public education system, we turned the other cheek. we ignored the gaps that are relics of slavery and segregation, markers of poverty. we didn’t want to see that the american dream was a joke for most of those born into poor and minority families. we used anecdotes to show that, “see, this one kid from this poor neighborhood made it. that means They have a chance.”
but now, thanks to NCLB, we know. yes, i am saying that we need tests. we need to do what we can to make those tests as good as they can possibly be and we’re not there yet, but tests are not a bad thing. bad teachers are a bad thing. without tests, we don’t know where the kids are, and we can’t fix the system if we don’t know where to start.
so all you lefties out there who think that NCLB must be bad because it was signed by W? shut yer yaps.
teachers unions/HR practices that treat all teachers the same, lack of accountability and status quo are what got us here. these issues (among others) are why the education system before NCLB (except in a few states) was focused entirely on inputs — teacher salaries, per pupil expenditures, hours in the classroom — instead of outcomes – students who are proficient in the things they should know.
the real racists are the ones who want to keep ignoring it and letting the influence and resources available to parents determine which kids get put on the road to college and which get put on the road to poverty and prison.
on 24 August 2007 on 9:02 am
I encourage you to check out the positions of The Education Trust, a nonprofit advocacy group that works on behalf of educational equity issues for poor and minority kids — http://www.edtrust.org.
Our specific recommendations for NCLB reauthorization (which I think you might like) can be found here: http://www2.edtrust.org/EdTrust/Press+Room/NCLB+Recommendations.htm.
on 24 August 2007 on 2:44 pm
heh. i’m very aware of the ed trust’s positions and also aware of how much influence ET had on NCLB the first go ’round. thanks for sending my 2 readers in the right direction, though.
on 30 August 2007 on 11:05 am
My distaste of NCLB has little to nothing to do with the fact that it bears W’s signature. I’ve seen with my own two eyes the means by which strictly quantitative data interpreted in one skewed way has been used to justify firing an excellent superintendent from my mother’s school district.
No one had anticipated the migration of Hispanic day laborers to her city. Nonetheless, upon their arrival, significant changes were made to accommodate their presence. Several dozen ESL teachers were hired. The district’s boundaries were redrawn in an effort to not give any one school a majority of non-native English speakers.
As an aside, the elementary school I attended is now 1/3 ESL.
If one considers that many children came from extremely impoverished areas of Mexico and also keeps in mind that most could not speak grammatically correct Spanish, to say nothing of English, then it’s highly unrealistic to expect that the system would make Annual Yearly Progress (AYP).
When the system came up deficient in several key areas, that was all the justification the school board needed to end the superintendent’s contract. That’s my major beef with NCLB.
I agree that there are a lot of bad teachers out there–but then again, I wouldn’t want to be a teacher in this day and age. Dealing with helicopter parents and their insatiable demands would drive me up the wall. School systems don’t want to have any bad press whatsoever so they strive to be parent pleasers to a ridiculous degree. A majority of these unreasonable demands would be laughed out of court if they ever went to trial. A generation of kids have been somehow duped by overprotective parents into believing that life is supposed to be fair. I know from hard experience that nowhere is it decreed that life is supposed to be fair, but it can often be good.