A slow death for No Child Left Behind?

[struggle4progress]

July 6, 2012 11:36 AM
By Brian Montopoli

The Department of Education announced Friday that two more states - Washington and Wisconsin - have been granted waivers from the No Child Left Behind education law. That brings the total number of states that have been granted waivers from the program to 26, which means more than half of states have now been freed from having to meet the law's requirements.

Ten other states and the District of Columbia have also requested waivers; their applications are currently under review. Just 14 states have not sought waivers from the law, and they are eligible to do so in the future.

In a press release announcing the latest waivers, the Department of Education made clear the Obama administration's dim view of the law. The Department said that NCLB's "rigid, top-down prescriptions for reform, while well-intentioned, proved burdensome for many states." ...

Critics said the law led to a misguided focus on "teaching to the test" and deemed the requirement that all students be proficient by the 2013-2014 school year unrealistic. The also noted that nearly half of schools in the country were being branded as failures under the law for not meeting targets for achievement on standardized tests ...

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57467613-503544/a-slow-death-for-no-child-left-behind/

[LynneSin]

1. That's something that should have never been left out of the starting gate

I still remmeber Al Gore's skit when he was hosting SNL. He did a Trent Lott impersonation where he called NCLB the 'Leave no white child behind'.

Pretty much what it is!

[Igel]

3. Strange.

One thing NCLB insisted on was looking at and closing the achievement gap between different ethnicities/races. If you look like you're making adequate yearly progress but that achievement gap's unchanged, you might fail.

It required breaking out achievement numbers--both GPA, graduation, standardized tests--in various ways. We have the usual ethnicities, plus SpEd, "at risk" and "economically disadvantaged."

Some districts did that before. Many did not. NCLB, Kennedy's unloved co-child, required it.

For some districts, there was an easy way out of the conundrum of raising minority achievement: Reclassify them as SpEd. But NCLB said there was a maximum percentage of SpEd students you could have. After that, the SpEd scores aren't just merged with the gen ed scores, they're counted as 0. I know schools that went from good to average because of those 0s.

In a number of schools it resulted in wholesale firing of administrators and staff. Sometimes the shake-up helped. Usually the administrators that went in were more draconian than those who left, and things, after a year or two, returned to status quo. Hard to shift an entire community's offspring's attitude and achievement level in just a year or two, esp. when you can't affect the community's true anchor, the parents.

The 100% "at level" goal was nonsense from the get-go. Yet it was what most people liked the most.

[LynneSin]

5. It turned our schools into standardize test takers and didn't really have them learn anything

And because it included all children to meet that requirement, including special needs, the program really was setup to fail our children.

Children all have different ways of learning and that's what we should embrace. And we need to find ways to add the arts, music and physical education back into our schools.

[bemildred]

2. Time to wind up this scam and trot out the next one. nt

[Igel]

4. But the replacement is little better.

It's just better liked by the waiver wielder, that's all.

It helps mask the problem and makes the politicians look good for a year or two. Long term, it keeps the problem unidentified, which also makes the politicians look good.

[jade3000]

6. Interesting how little coverage this is getting

Back when NCLB was bein first implemented and resisted, it got a lot of media and nonprofit attention. Now it's seemingly dying a slow, quiet death. I wonder if this is how a republican president would try to handle the health care law. Hopefully we won't find out anytime soon.