Sydney Schanberg has a good little article in the Village Voice:
The president’s No Child Left Behind law requires every public school system to administer rigorous annual testing of students, starting in the third grade, in such subjects as English and math. If the test scores of any segment of a school’s population耀uch as Latinos struggling with English or disabled students in special-ed classes妖o not meet the proficiency levels set by the law, the entire school is listed as “failing” and students can choose to transfer to a school in the district that is doing well. In other words, averaging the test scores of the entire student body might produce a successful result, but the scores of the struggling segment will still, under the law, brand the school as “failing.” In addition to placing new financial and space demands on successful schools, the law’s requirements will also lay serious new money burdens on the ones with troubles, for such things as additional teacher training and additional classes. If the White House shortchanges the program, who is going to foot the bill?
Foot the bill? There was never any intention of footing the bill. (Funny how those “no more unfunded mandates!” people suddenly become very fond of unfunded mandates once they’re in charge.) The entire mission of “No Child Left Behind” is to eventually label every single school in this nation as “failing”—it’s a backdoor way of forcing vouchers or privatization or whatever the hell they want this time.
There are serious, systemic problems with our current educational system. There are serious, systemic problems with our approaches to fixing that system. No Child Left Behind is stealth euthanasia. And don’t think they didn’t know that when they proposed it. Of course, BushCo had to dress it up in other clothing, because if they actually announced to the American public, “You know what? Fuck your kids, ours are going to private schools anyhow,” I don’t think the proposal would have gotten as far.
Update: This is a good article from the Washington Post about what a sneaky, underhanded disaster No Child Left Behind really is.
It’s hard to tell whether this law is more a product of arrogance or ignorance, but either way it’s shaping up to be a spectacular train wreck of a collision between bureaucracy and reality.
The main thrust of the bill is that it requires all schoolchildren to be “proficient” in reading, math and science by the year 2014. Hard to argue with that, until you learn that proficiency has been arbitrarily defined as the current 40th percentile of the nation.
In other words, in 2014 every child will score better than 40 percent of the nation today, or roughly 19 million children. We will be essentially trying to get every child in the nation to be “above average,” and should probably change our name to something like the United States of Lake Wobegon.