argh

[learnteach]

 

"Tomorrow is the 6th anniversary of the day that I signed the No Child Left Behind Act into law. And since that day we've come a long way, fewer students are falling behind. People are beginning to get used to the notion that there's accountability in the public school system. Look, I recognize some people don't like accountability. In other words, accountability says if you're failing, we're going to expose that and expect you to change. Accountability also says that when you're succeeding you'll get plenty of praise. "

President George W. Bush
January 7, 2008


I can't even begin to respond to this.  Well, I can begin, but it's not very reasoned.  3 points:  The administration load of the program, and the continual testing (4 times a year by the school) suck up any advantage.  Secondly, the metric (the test) is incredibly poor.   Testing of this sort doesn't really work.   Finally, the amount of funds pledged versus the amount of changes and work, and the codicil requirements which require many extra resources to pull up the low performing students, mean that we're taking all the programs that reward intelligence and achievement to try and enact basic social programs in schools.  

Comments

Re: No Teacher Left Standing

[terpsichoros.livejournal.com]

Teaching reading without phonics is like teaching math without counting. Seriously - just because there are more rules for sounds in English than in most other languages, and there are more exceptions than in many, doesn't mean that most words don't actually obey the rules of phonics, nor that one can eliminate phonics from reading.

I had a teacher whose approach was "look at the shape of the word". Even in third grade, I thought that was bullshit - if I didn't already know how to read, I wouldn't have learned by trying to memorize thousands of words, instead of 26 letters and about 20 supplemental rules. Abandoning phonics in reading is the primary cause of dyslexia. Countries like France, which have letter to sound correspondence rules as complicated as those in English, but thoroughly use phonics when teaching reading, have dyslexia rates about 10% of ours.

I had lots of real science in school, but I also remember teachers pushing ideas like recycling would save the world (when the economics of most recycling were really poor), or that electric cars would save us all (where would the electricity come from?) and that nuclear power was dangerous because of its similarity to nuclear weapons, or that catastrophic meltdowns would kill us all. Oh - and air pollution might cause irreversible global cooling.

There are some significant flaws in NCLB, though many of its opponents would find some of those to be features. But I'd be willing to bet that in the long run, NCLB will be blamed for more things it didn't require or cause than even the Patriot Act.