Posted on 09/14/2007 5:52:23 AM PDT by George W. Bush
Thompson: Leave 'No Child Left Behind' behind
by Mark Silva
Sometimes, it doesn't take long for a party to disavow the gains of its own leaders. And sometimes, candidates regret their own votes.
...
Today, Fred Thompson, the former senator from Tennessee and television and film star who has entered the campaign for the Republican Party presidential nomination in 2008, suggested that it's time to leave No Child Left Behind behind. Thompson, campaignining in Florida -- where the president's brother, former Gov. Jeb Bush, also had made public school funding contingent on public school performance -- suggested that the federal government has gotten too involved.
And there is a certain irony in his position. As a senator, in 2001, Thompson voted for the president's No Child Left Behind Act -- as did most senators on both sides of the aisle. ...
"We've been spending increasing amounts of federal money for decades, with increasing rules, increasing mandates, increasing regulations," Thompson said. "It's not working."
He added that there are problems with the program itself. ...
Instead, he said, the federal government should be providing block grants as long as states set up objective testing programs.A woman asked what he would do for education. He told her decisions on how schools are run should be made by local and state decisions, not dictated out of Washington.
"It's your responsibility," he said. "If you don't like what's going on, don't get in your car and drive by your school board and maybe drive by the capitol and get on an airplane and fly to Washington and say, 'I don't like the way the school down the street is being run."'
(Excerpt) Read more at weblogs.baltimoresun.com ...
Great post #21, thanks.
NCLB isn't as bad as people want to make it. It is forcing schools to be use research based reading programs, rather than the feel-good, loosey-goosey approaches of the past. It is not a perfect policy by any means, and in some areas, it is not even a good policy, but it hold schools accountable and it places the scores right out there for the public to see and judge.
Because Fred is being hypocritical here just like the Fredheads accusing Paul of supporting shrimp/earmark subsidies. Even though I like Fred and will no doubt support him if he's the nominee, I will not actively support him in the primaries. Part of the reason is the Fredheads trashing Paul, nevermind the fact that both Fred and Paul share the same belief of federalism. In fact, Fred was on the tail end of some 99-1 votes himself. He was the Ron Paul of the Senate.
hold = holds
I can hardly believe anyone thinks it’s a good idea to teach them for six weeks and then test, test, and test some more...
Especially when the results of these tests are not used to modify teaching in order to hit the areas the students are struggling in the most.
The first way leads to 12 weeks of school year spent in testing, the second leads to 3 weeks of the school year spent in testing.
Neither. We’re a year-round school, so we do 16 weeks on, 8 weeks off. And during this fall semester, we started school, and seven weeks later had the CAT-6, (I think it’s called; I still have a hard time keeping all the California acronyms straight). A week after that, my English students had their Narrative assessment, and at the same time the ESL students had a series of tests that spread out over about 2 weeks. It was chaos with bubble sheets. And before we leave, the English students will have another assessment in October. The spring semester won’t be quite as bad, but it was three weeks of WTF.
Freddie just lost me. The only problem with NCLB is it didn’t go far enough. Too many compromises were made the first time around. We should have a national curriculum. Otherwise just forget about competing with the rest of the world.
When education becomes a matter of national defense, it is constitutional.
I’m talking about short-term thinking. It is in the process of destroying the left in their obsession to end the war. We need to bring strategic, long-term thinking to Washington.
We’ve long ago left the local schoolhouse on the prairie. If we can’t graduate kids who can compete with the rest of the world, we are going to be a third world nation in a matter of decades.
Tell me which candidates are advocating the abolition of the Department of Education?
The idea of schools without accountability is one whose time has passed. And accountability without tests is impossible.
That was not my point, however. The main index of achievement in countries that are doing better than we are is adherence to curriculum. Not discipline, although that helps. And adherence to some of the curricula we have in disparate parts of this country brings us backward rather than forward.
So if there was a way to mitigate for illegal immigrants (deportation, separate statistics, etc.) it is otherwise not so awful?
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