Obama's Awful Education Plan
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By Diane Ravitch
No group had greater hopes for President Obama and his promise of change than the nation's teachers. Poll after poll showed that they despised President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) law with its demand for testing, testing, testing. When asked, teachers said that NCLB was driving out everything except reading and math, because they were the only subjects that counted. Science, the arts, history, literature, geography, civics, all gave way to make more time for students to take practice tests in reading and math. In some districts, the time set aside for practice tests consumed hours of every school day.
NCLB was a failure, and not just because teachers didn't like it. Test scores inched up, but no more than they had before NCLB was passed. Scores on college-entrance exams remained stagnant. Just last week, the ACT reported that only 23% of the class of 2009 was prepared to earn as much as a C average in college. ACT tests over a million students, not only in reading and math, but also in science and social studies. ACT found that more than three-quarters of this year's graduates--who were in fifth grade when NCLB was passed--are not ready for college-level studies.
Part of the problem is that the tests on which so much attention is now lavished are low-level. Students don't have to know much to pass them.
Another part of the problem is that the states have been quietly but decisively lowering their expectations and passing students who know little or nothing. New Yo rk State's tests have recently been deconstructed and shown to be a sham. Diana Senechal, a New York City teacher, demonstrated on gothamschools.
So, what is the Obama administration now doing? Its $4.3 Billion "Race to the Top" fund will supposedly promote "innovation.
This is not change that teachers can believe in. These are exactly the same reforms that President G eorge W. Bush and his Secretary Margaret Spellings would have promoted if they had had a sympathetic Congress. They too wanted more charter schools, more merit pay, more testing, and more "accountability" for teachers based on those same low-level tests. But Congress would never have allowed them to do it.
Now that President Obama and Secretary Arne Duncan have become the standard-bearer for the privatization and testing agenda, we hear nothing more about ditching NCLB, except perhaps changing its name. The fundamental features of NCLB remain intact regardless of what they call it.
The real winners here are the edu-entrepreneurs who are running President Obama's so-called "Race to the Top" fund and distributing the billions to other edu-entrepreneurs, who will manage the thousands of new charter schools and make mega-bucks selling test-prep programs to the schools.
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1 comment:
All of these standardized tests for NCLB have one fatal flaw. There are absolutely no consequences to the students if they 'blow it off' and purposely do poorly. The results from the tests are not available until the students are part way into their next school year. Unfortunately the students know this and their parents do too. There is a growing trend of parents who know that these test have no bearing on their student's schooling and do not want their child going through the stress of the testing so they refuse to have their child tested. The student's score is still recorded in the school's numbers - a big fat zero. As a matter of fact, every student even the severely mentally handicapped have their scores counted toward the school's NCLB score. The nice thing about charter schools is that they can be picky. No charter schools will be taking students that will automatically give them a zero. Private schools are even better, they can be picky with their students, they don't have to have licensed teachers, and they don't do any of the state testing.
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