A Lesson For Schools

I have personally argued since its inception that No Child Left Behind is the worst piece of legislation outside of the Patriot Act.  While the Patriot Act can be seen as responsible for breaking most constitutional standards of privacy or due process, NCLB is just badly put together.  The idea is great: get the kids who are doing the worst to do better.  Anybody can agree with that.  Education is society's equalizer, goes the saying.  With an education anybody can do anything.  Unless the economy goes into the biggest recession since '29, butI'm going to leave my diary out of this.

Here's the problem: local schools are run by local districts who are elected at the local level and are paid for by local school district and property taxes.  Anytime a person starts talking about a national educational standard, Parents and educators across the country are up in arms about losing the control of their schools.  This act of Congress, however, neither leaves control of local schools in the hands of local school boards nor creates a national standard of education.

Proficient in Mississippi is failing in Maryland.  Schools are told by a federal agency that they have to get certain numbers on their tests or else they don't get funding.  Now kids' performance on tests is directly linked with the school's ability to buy books.  If a school falls behind, they get less funding.  This would be fine if they were like any other business.  Unfortunately, Wall Street is getting tons of cash for not being able to keep their business together and children are told that if they just did better they'd be fine.  So what's a state to do?  Ah, the wonderful teacher's union will tell you.  Lower the standards and then it becomes easier for the teachers to bring all children up to the standard.  I'm glad we're so worried about the kids at the bottom.  What about all the wasted talent at the top?

I already wrote a post about W.E.B. DuBois and his theory of the talented tenth.  I'm not going to mention it again for the fear of sounding redundant.  Now Ohio wants to make a child's score on the ACT part of graduation requirements.  Anybody else see anything wrong with this?

I have tried for years to express the problems with our educational system.  Unfortunately, everybody's too worried about the kid next to me who can't spell to talk to me.  Tying school funding to test performance is not the appropriate method for teaching children about work and rewards.  That's what jobs are for. 

In an era that recognizes the existence of different learning styles, the value of different assessment techniques, and the relationship between school funding and school performance, I would have thought we would understand that giving every student across the country the same test but having different standards set at the state level by people who haven't taken a test in 20 years and making the results of that test make the difference between firing teachers and buying computers is not acceptable.  Maybe Congress missed that day in class.  I hope it's not on the test...