People who are paid tax money should be held responsible for what they're paid to do. Period. End of story.
I seriously believe that a lot of the idiocies going on in the name of NCLB are attempts by entrenched administrators to make NCLB look ridiculous, to generate pressure against it. NCLB doesn't require testing progress 4 times a year; but learnteach's school implements quarterly tests, and blames it on NCLB.
On the other hand, a lot of the failures of schools can be laid directly at the feet of the "education leadership". Whoever came up with the idea that phonics is not necessary to teach children to read ought to be tortured, slowly, enduring the death of a thousand paper cuts with all the misspelled words they've caused. Similar torture ought to await whoever came up with the phrase "drill and kill", and at a higher level, the idiots who replaced courses which taught facts with "critical thinking" courses which leave the student with no factual knowledge, so that all their "critical thinking" decays into parrotting the platitudes current among their teachers and peers. The originator of the idea of replacing actual science content with environmentalist propaganda needs to be composted. Slowly.
Fixing any of these problems won't take money, which is a good thing, as additional money correlates with poorer results. We're spending more and more per pupil on education, and getting less and less. NCLB is a reaction to that, which says "You have to show that you are actually *educating* *all* your students. Not just the middle-class white ones."
Re: No Teacher Left Standing
I seriously believe that a lot of the idiocies going on in the name of NCLB are attempts by entrenched administrators to make NCLB look ridiculous, to generate pressure against it. NCLB doesn't require testing progress 4 times a year; but
On the other hand, a lot of the failures of schools can be laid directly at the feet of the "education leadership". Whoever came up with the idea that phonics is not necessary to teach children to read ought to be tortured, slowly, enduring the death of a thousand paper cuts with all the misspelled words they've caused. Similar torture ought to await whoever came up with the phrase "drill and kill", and at a higher level, the idiots who replaced courses which taught facts with "critical thinking" courses which leave the student with no factual knowledge, so that all their "critical thinking" decays into parrotting the platitudes current among their teachers and peers. The originator of the idea of replacing actual science content with environmentalist propaganda needs to be composted. Slowly.
Fixing any of these problems won't take money, which is a good thing, as additional money correlates with poorer results. We're spending more and more per pupil on education, and getting less and less. NCLB is a reaction to that, which says "You have to show that you are actually *educating* *all* your students. Not just the middle-class white ones."