Can the No Child Left Behind Act be revised and improved?

Education is a public service funded by state and local taxes. When Title I and other Federal programs provided enrichment money in the 70s, they gained control over the administration of that money. Those programs were so generous that they were almost impossible to decline.

By contrast, NCLB is very expensive to administer and provides relatively sparce funding. I think it is time for states to run audits to find out whether or not they are coming out ahead on this deal. Why not just tell the Feds to take a flying leap and take back local control over OUR schools?

This program is a disaster and needs to be scrapped. Certainly, we need nationwide standards for reading, math, and other subjects, but professional organizations should follow the example of the NCTM and create these structures. People who know what they are doing creating the curriculum? What a concept!

This act can work and become very meaningful in the lives of all children. Originally, it was titled Leave No Child Behind and was developed by Marion Wright Edelman, founder of Children's Defense Fund. Her mission was to empower every child by teaching them to read at an age appropriate level. She has been extremely successful in her movement. Children who can read, generally perform better in all of their courses. Instead of stealing someone elses ideas and relabeling them, perhaps President Bush should just provide her with the funding to reach more children. Currently, they have only been able to serve approximately 9000 children.

Your question about NCLB and the article you base it on are both flawed.

The article is another case of pure Bush-bashing. When the president points out successes in NCLB, some educators are quick to shout "Not enough!" but the real problem is not with federal guidelines but with local schools, school boards, administrators, teachers and parents. We, as teachers, need to quit whining and do something for ourselves and our students. The federal government cannot make me discipline my classes nor can it make students do homework. It can't make me give my high school kids bell to bell content and well-designed assignments, and it can't make parents read to their pre-schoolers.

One of the author's primary points was that Bush's budget didn't keep up with the growth in research costs, but when I checked out the U.S. Civilian Research $ Development website, I found that millions are given in grants to programs that are meaningless to human beings or that are for other countries. Maybe the president would like to see more taxpayers' funds go to American projects that really enhance quality of human life.

The question is flawed because, again, the problem is not with NCLB, but with us as educators. When we start making education matter again and drive ourselves to prepare our students for a global economy, maybe kids would take school seriously and we could graduate more of them. I teach at a small, rural district with a very low socio-economic status, but our kids score well on standardized tests and a very high percentage graduate. But that's be cause our teachers are engaged with the students and their education, and parents are involved.

It's not NCLB or Bush, it's us!

It would take hours to explain all the ways that this act has actually pushed education backwards. Starting with not all children learn in the same way. This would take a very long time to qualify and quantify to people that are not in the classroom.

Then there is the testing of all children by grade. We are again in the middle of a large immigration. Many of these students are placed in a grade by their age rather than their academic ability.

A very important fact that surfaces is the diversion of huge amounts of money to test generating, analysis, and test preparation. Schools are spending large amount of curriculum time on test preparation. Students lose class time where learning experiences are replaced with cookie cutter activities to prepare the student for (in many cases) useless standardized tests.

What is needed is a new approach to education rather than trying to make everyone the same. We should understand that all types of people are needed to make our society. We need to make education something that people of all ages would choose rather than dread. Students need to have options about the direction of education. Will it take them in the direction they want to go? Yes we need more technical education.

NCLB is worse than worthless, it is damaging kids. Preping for exams without any thought as to why, is foolish. As an unfunded mandate, schools, counties and states should consider one of two options. Either ignore it, and challenge the fact that new 'rules' are in play without the money to make them happen, or to examine how much money is spent to institute federal proclamations, and how much money is actually received from the federal government. Then see what the shortfall of dollars is, and we all know that there is a shortfall, and simply refuse federal dollars, and cut all of the mandates from Washington. If local schools can not decide on their own, why does a beaurocrat some hundreds to thousands of kilometres away know how to do it better ????

Oh, that's right, such a wonderful job was done with the man who trumpets NCLB....

20 January 2009, relief.

I am curious if anyone has any information/data about the dropout rate directly related to NCLB?

Do people really know what the NCLB curriculum is?? It is a book with 'stories' and and a list of words. Each word needs to be repeated out loud after the snap of the teacher's hand. If not everyone participates, you have to repeat the word list. After the boring process of repeating about 20 words, the 'story' is read. "How The Mustard Seed Becomes a Spy" was one of the 'stories' for 16 year olds. Yup.

Most of the kids in the class were smart, but somewhat delinquent. They did not show up for the State testing, so they were put in this class. They were 'problem kids', always getting in trouble. They had bad home lives. English Language Learners and some special ed kids who did not score well on the Star test (California) were also put in this class. A Boot Camp Monitor from NCLB would come once every 2 weeks to "check" on the progress of the 'snapping".Teaching these classes was a nightmare.

The kids HATED being in the class. After 3 months of torture, I got through the next 3 months by bribing them. If the Boot Camp Monitor was coming on a Thursday, we would practice, perform and then they could watch a video on Friday. Awful? It was a relief! FINALLY, the monitor stopped coming. I threw the workbooks out, got some classic plays, created Mystery Friday( Sherlock Holmes, Edgar Allen Poe) and we actually read literature for the rest of the year. The kids loved the plays and I did not have to call Security every other day. That was my first and last year teaching high school.

s an educator of 20 years, I wonder how Gov. Tim Pawlenty concludes, as he did last year, that a small increase in Minnesota students' test scores proves "No Child Left behind is working."
His statement flies in the face of evidence that, in fact, No Child Left Behind not only is not working, but results in negative impacts up and down the educational continuum - from distorting educational experiences for our youngest to ensuring when they get to college, more students than ever will need remedial courses in reading and math.

In these cash-strapped times, it is a fact that No Child Left Behind has driven up costs in terms of administering exams, tutoring students, altering curriculum, increasing teacher dissatisfaction and turnover, as well as outsourcing education dollars to corporations that create further exams exacerbating the downward spiral.

Some states are spending additional sums seeking court judgments to force the federal government to pay these costs as unfunded mandates.

Add to this that two recent studies have put the lie to the Bush administration claim that No Child Left Behind is nonpartisan and that its principal objective - closing the achievement gap between whites and students of color - is being met.

The first study, by David Berliner at Arizona State University, establishes with exhaustive detail that poverty has a cumulative impact which so overwhelms all other interventions, that it is patently ridiculous to believe that public education alone - which occupies a mere 9 percent of a student's yearly life-experience - should be held culpable for such pervasive social disparities.

In fact, as witnessed during Hurricane Katrina, some gaps in life circumstances are so ingrained, intractable and profound that no amount of political grandstanding or public school bashing is enough to make them go away.

The second study, by Harvard researchers Gail Sunderman and Gary Orfield, shows that agreements negotiated by the Department of Education and individual states have created important differences in enforcement of No Child Left Behind, particularly in identifying which schools have met annual yearly progress goals. Such negotiated "deals" favor affluent suburban districts over the urban poor in terms of analyzing progress and what constitutes a highly qualified teacher.

Thus, once hailed as a "bipartisan" initiative to close the achievement gap, No Child Left Behind has been subverted into just another shell game that disadvantages, once again, those with the least resources to fight back.

There are other problems engulfing No Child Left Behind: fairness and accuracy in exams, gaming of numbers by states and school districts, and access to tutoring and summer school programs by those most in need.

All this provides abundant evidence to conclude, unlike Pawlenty, that No Child Left Behind has failed and must be repealed in 2007. Yet, there is more - an even stronger basis for advocating an end to No Child Left Behind.

At its core, this and other "measurable accountability" programs believe in the quantification of learning; that a test more accurately captures what we need to know about learning and human ability than do the actual gifts of being able to speak, write, listen, self-actualize, empathize, synthesize, think, forgive, love and everything else that makes us human.

The truly fundamental problem behind No Child Left Behind is this: What is joyful about learning, and what therefore makes us want to learn as much as we possibly can, are the intangible qualities of creativity, curiosity, compassion, wonder and joy.

By reducing human effectiveness in education to paper, pencil and marking ovals, we are cheapening and even destroying the fundamental inspiration that drives learning.

In the end, we do not learn a subject to the level of excellence because someone tells us to; we learn at a deep level because we want to, because it serves an important purpose.

Humans are meaning-making animals. We love to understand, to connect, to relate. We crave a great purpose for being alive.

By taking these innate desires and relegating them at a very young age to tasks which are by their very nature disconnected, abstract, indifferent and unsatisfying, we are making school the kind of place kids love to hate - particularly those without hope at home or confidence in the existing social contract.

This is the true failure of No Child Left Behind, one that no amount of tweaking or funding or negotiating will ever repair.

We will not produce world-class thinkers or artists or scientists through threats or fear or punishment. Education is not - and has never been - a coercive act imposed by a government on its people. Nor is it, except in extremely authoritarian societies, so strictly controlled, mandated and circumscribed by bureaucrats and politicians.

What really matters - and especially for the disadvantaged - is the deep, abiding connection that learning provides. It starts with the caring ethos of adults at home, at school and in the community and naturally infects children, who are given to understand that their humanity - the same spirit found in Socrates, Shakespeare, Einstein and all great achievements of humankind - is their strongest asset in making a better world for themselves and others.

If No Child Left Behind is really going to not leave any child behind, we need to change our focus. One of the most frustrating things to deal with as a teacher is that politicians and other people who spend little to no time in the classroom setting are the ones enforcing all of the policies and expectations. If we are to have realistic expectations and policies for schools and teachers, we need to hear from the experts. It is very easy for onlookers to say what they would do if they were in certain situations but it's quite different when you are right in the middle of the situation. The government and others in power put all of these unrealistic expectations on teachers and students and when they are not met, we say the system failed or the students are failing. The experts are the ones who deal with the reality of teaching and learning on a daily basis. If our country really wants to how to be successful in effectively educating our children, we need to listen to the experts - the teachers and the learners.