As Congress begins hearings on the renewal of No Child Left Behind this week, USA Today weighs in with five ways the law can be improved.
Unfortunately, their suggestions fail to address the fundamental flaws in the original concepts on which the law is based.
Starting with the fact that there is no research (NONE!) demonstrating that a program of constant standardized testing on a narrow range of subjects (accompanied by penalties for the school staff) will improve student learning.
On the other hand, there are plenty of studies showing that children learn at different rates based on many, many factors, despite NCLB’s insistence that each age must arrive at the end of each school year with the same body of knowledge.
And then there’s the idea of a teacher being “highly qualified” based solely on a few paper qualifications having nothing (NOTHING!) to do with their ability to teach kids.
Finally, on what basis does this writer claim that the law has achieved “notable success”? Even the statistics cobbled together by Spellings and company are suspect at best.
The bottom line is that nothing about NCLB is worth keeping. NOTHING!
The one (and only) beneficial thing that I have seen result from NCLB is that districts now are teaching to all students including students with disabilities. A “watered-down” curriculum is no longer acceptable. Now students with learning disabilities have access to the same curriculum as their peers. This was not the case pre-NCLB.
There wasn’t any accountable for students on IEPs.
And when I was in grammer school, with Cerebral Palsy and a learning disability, I was passed trough 12 years of schooling not learning a thing!!!!