Associate Press is reporting that schools are "gaming the system" to meet "No Child Left Behind" requirements.
Revelations like this are nothing new. It was widely known and reported that the schools in Texas were "gaming the system" when Bush proposed the legislation and brought former Secretary of Education Rod Paige from Houston to Washington to run the program.
"No Child Left Behind" has nothing to do with quality education for all children. It has everything to do with making sure that there are no public schools left when this President leaves office. "No Child Left Behind" was designed to make it appear that every public school in America is failing. The solution will be a system of vouchers to fund private and religious schools. Those schools will not be subject to the same "No Child Left Behind" standards.
You'll know that politicians are serious about quality education for all children when they insist that every school receiving public funds must meet the same standards. Until then, they are just regulating public schools out of existence and creating yet another way to transfer funds from the public treasury into the coffers of the Religious Right.
1 comment:
Wow that is one flawed article. It goes on and on about how children aren't being counted. Which isn't true. They are counted along with the entire population in the complete population statistics. They simply aren't being broken out separately by ethnic group.
Is this a problem? Maybe. It is completely reasonable not to require full descriptive statistics on a population smaller than 20 to 30. Any statistics you create would be flawed anyway. On the other hand it may be possible to report those kids scores by aggregating them differently (like by school district instead of individual school, etc). And if people are failing to report groups of up to 50 members, there is something wrong. 30 should be a hard upper limit.
On the other hand schools are also gaming NCLB by emphasizing fundamental educational skills. This is a very very good thing. If kids can't read, write, or do basic math then they aren't equipped to handle more advanced concepts in the humanities and sciences. To misplace a biblical analogy we need to build our children's educations on rock not sand.
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