On the day of the latest edition of “super Tuesday”, a commentary in the San Jose Mercury News has some suggestions for the next “education president”.
The writer offers to provide a section of the 2009 State of the Union address on the subject for whomever will be delivering it.
“I will be submitting to Congress within 90 days a new omnibus education bill that must be passed immediately. In this bill titled Every American Child Succeeds, we propose eliminating the testing provisions in No Child Left Behind that have left millions of children behind. National accountability benchmarks in this bill will be developed into authentic, real-world applications of skills rather than fill-in bubble tests.
“Reading and mathematics will be equally assessed on a national system of authentic accountability along with science, history-social science and writing. We will bring music, art, drama, dance, world languages, and physical education into our rubric in scoring schools on national accountability standards. Empowering all children with grade-level proficient reading skills by the end of third grade will be a central tenet of this bill.”
The move to nationalize American education over the past seven years has been pretty much a disaster so I’m not sure taking another whack at it is necessarily a good idea.
However, the next president definitely needs to dump NCLB and the narrow minded concept that a good education consists only of being able to read and do math arithmetic at a basic level.