Posted on 03/17/2010 6:01:57 AM PDT by Kaslin
To date, the only area in which we have found ourselves in agreement with President Obama was over his announced intention to enforce strict and elevated education standards and move toward paying teachers based on merit.
Now, Obama has retreated from his position of principle and embraced a mealy-mouthed compromise designed to placate school administrators, teachers unions and their political acolytes at the expense of educational standards.
Over the weekend, Obama announced a series of changes in the No Child Left Behind Law, most of which will weaken it and might even cripple the efforts to raise school standards. The law -- and most education terminology -- is coded with euphemisms and generalities that must be translated, so let us help to provide a codebook.
The New York Times reports that Obama's plan would "use annual tests along with other indicators" to measure achievement in the nation's schools. What are the other indicators? The Times says they include "pupil attendance, graduation rates and learning climate."
This proposed change will totally undermine the central principle of No Child Left Behind: that schools be judged by objective indices of student performance. By factoring in attendance rates, the changes give credit for putting warm bodies in seats. By focusing on graduation rates, they permit schools to push up their ratings by passing out good grades to incompetent students. And by looking at the "learning climate," the changes would inject subjective and vague criteria that would permit failing schools to disguise that fact.
While it is not always good to base measurements of performance only on tests of reading and math, these examination scores at least afford independent, objective indications of student ability. By permitting fudging through these new subjective or self-vindicating standards, Obama undermines the whole concept of educational reform.
The Times indicates that Obama wants to find the "5,000 chronically failing schools" while also identifying the 10,000 to 15,000 excellent ones and the 80,000 schools in between. This quota system ignores two abysmal facts: Under No Child Left Behind, one school in three was found to be failing, and there has been no appreciable increase in either reading or math scores for the past decade.
By sweeping the problem of bad schools under the rug through a numerical quota (or goal) and subjective criteria for measuring performance, Obama lets the legacy of failing public schools continue while parents are dosed with the soothing syrup of reassurance.
Obama also wants to shift the focus from forcing students to achieve proficiency at each grade level to "measuring each student's academic growth regardless of the performance level at which they started." In other words, Obama wants to allow students who cannot read, write or do math with appropriate ability to be coddled as long as they are improving. When will we learn that flexible standards that bend to accommodate those who cannot meet them do the disadvantaged no good and plenty of harm?
Two parts of the proposed reforms make sense. He would replace the emphasis on teachers' academic credentials with a focus on evaluating how their pupils are doing and would intervene in otherwise proficient schools where disadvantaged students are falling far behind the bulk of the pupil population.
But these two saving graces are not enough to redeem a program designed to restore the good old days of flattering self-evaluation in education and reassuring, if phony, good news to feed to parents and the community.
Until now, Obama has stood firm on the subject of education reform, resisting efforts to cripple the Bush standards. Now he has retreated even from this position to the detriment of our children.
They didn't get educated themselves and see no reason why we should waste money on educating others.
Here's an idea: Let's dump the Bush standards entirely. And let's tell Obama to butt out as well. The federal government has no business meddling in education.
Trend here? “Obama announced a series of changes in the No Child Left Behind Law, most of which will weaken it and might even cripple the efforts to raise school standards.”
And for welfare reform, “Under the new (Obama stimulus) system, states will once again be paid more if their Welfare roles increase. States will actually be paid even more than under the system that was in effect prior to 1996. The government has added $4 billion per year to help states increase their welfare roles.”
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1525977/president_obama_ends_welfare_reform_pg2.html
I don’t think he can hurt “no child left behind”, it doesn’t work, students are getting a very limited education as they teach to the test.
I think that students should take the same grade appropriate test in the first and last week of school and if the majority of the students have learned what they should have then great if they haven’t then the teacher needs to be fired.
Hey, Barry--let me make that easy for you. Look in the cities where you got the highest percentage of votes.
Given this administration’s racist and union proclivities, maybe there will be a new program named “No Black Teacher Left Behind.” The heck with the students.
Obama needs to go.
How else will he gain & maintain the prolitariate class.
This is how he does everything. He says something that has appeal to moderates or conservatives, making them think hes not some far left guy and it gets played up in the media. Then when time comes for the rubber to hit the road, he walks away from it quietly and the media never reports on it.
There is real truth in that!
Oh yes they do! Students are a key Democrat constituency, to be massaged into brainwashed dependents and frantic acolytes of the Slave Party: welfare cases, criminal-justice sponges of all sorts (the irony of the term speaks volumes), unionized bureaucrats, and academics.
Only if the teacher is free to teach. In the government schools, few are. And the curriculum is a joke. It’s the system (which, yes, included bad teachers). And people have been “reforming” the sytem for 40 years. The whole thing is a joke. We need to abandon it, and go to vouchers, tuition tax credits, private and religious schools only.
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