Obama's War On Schools: NCLB has been deadly to public education. So why has Obama embraced it?

[Karmadillo]

So many wars, so little time.

http://www.newsweek.com/2011/03/20/obama-s-war-on-schools.html

Obama’s War on Schools
The No Child Left Behind Act has been deadly to public education. So why has the president embraced it?
By Diane Ravitch

Obama has made only cosmetic changes to George W. Bush's signature education crusade.
Over the past year, I have traveled the nation speaking to nearly 100,000 educators, parents, and school-board members. No matter the city, state, or region, those who know schools best are frightened for the future of public education. They see no one in a position of leadership who understands the damage being done to their schools by federal policies.

They feel keenly betrayed by President Obama. Most voted for him, hoping he would reverse the ruinous No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation of George W. Bush. But Obama has not sought to turn back NCLB. His own approach, called Race to the Top, is even more punitive than NCLB. And though over the past week the president has repeatedly called on Congress to amend the law, his proposed reforms are largely cosmetic and would leave the worst aspects of NCLB intact.

The theory behind NCLB was that schools would improve dramatically if every child in grades 3 to 8 were tested every year and the results made public. Texas did exactly this, and advocates claimed it had seen remarkable results: test scores went up, the achievement gap between students of different races was closing, and graduation rates rose. At the time, a few scholars questionedthe claims of a “Texas miracle,” but Congress didn’t listen.

America's Best High Schools: Profiles of the Top 20 In fact, the “Texas miracle” never happened. On federal tests, the state’s reading scores for eighth-grade students were flat from 1998 to 2009. And just weeks ago, former first lady Barbara Bush wrote an opinion piece in the Houston Chronicle opposing education budget cuts on the grounds that Texas students ranked in the bottom 10 percent in math and literacy nationally. After two decades of testing and accountability, Texas students have certainly not experienced a miracle when judged by the very measures that were foisted on students across the nation.

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[bread_and_roses]

1. Purely and simply, because it benefits our Oligarch Overlords

to have a robotized, ill-educated populace. It always comes down to "which side are you on?" And I think he's shown indisputably which side he's embraced.

[CelticThunder]

5. +1

[Karmadillo]

6. +1

nt

[Angry Dragon]

2. Perhaps he is just ignorant about what makes for good education

[grahamhgreen]

3. When he shows you who he is, believe him. He is not on our side.

[Lasher]

4. NCLB fits in with his scheme to privatize schools.

That's why.

[jwirr]

7. After seeing the teachers from WI fight back I really think that any

answer the feds have will fail because we do not have a problem with teachers. We have a problem with not enough money for the things teachers need in the classrooms. And that includes more teachers.

[Initech]

8. I'm gonna keep repeating this: Obama is the president in name only!

Someone else is pulling his strings, and it's getting to be more and more noticeable lately. He's literally enacting or reenacting every failed Bush policy in the books. And this is not the same man who we voted for in 2008.