Free Republic

One thing about teaching that is easy for parents, policy-makers and others to forget is that working with students for hours every weekday to help them learn is very, very hard work. Even in the best of schools and even with supportive administrators, teachers have unrelenting jobs. In recent years, a growing number of teachers have found that reforms which force them to test students more than ever, collect more data than ever and attend more meetings than ever, are making the job literally impossible. That’s what happened to Scott Ervin, who has worked as a teacher, principal and discipline...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama today will free 10 states from the strict and sweeping requirements of the No Child Left Behind law, giving leeway to states that promise to improve how they prepare and evaluate students, The Associated Press has learned. The first 10 states to receive the waivers are Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oklahoma and Tennessee. The only state that applied for the flexibility and did not get it, New Mexico, is working with the administration to get approval, a White House official told the AP.

WASHINGTON - President Bush said Tuesday that he's open to new ideas for changing the "No Child Left Behind" education law, but will not accept watered-down standards or rollbacks in accountability. The president and lawmakers in both parties want changes to the five-year-old law — a key piece of his domestic policy legacy, which faces a tough renewal fight in Congress. "There can be no compromise on the basic principle: Every child must learn to read and do math at, or above, grade level," he said in a statement from the Rose Garden that was directed at Congress and critics...

NEW YORK - The scarlet letter in education these days is an "R." It stands for restructuring — the purgatory that schools are pushed into if they fail to meet testing goals for six straight years under the No Child Left Behind law. Nationwide, about 2,300 schools are either in restructuring or are a year away and planning for such drastic action as firing the principal and moving many of the teachers, according to a database provided to The Associated Press by the Education Department. Those schools are being warily eyed by educators elsewhere as the law's consequences begin to...

LOS ANGELES -- This city is the main front in the pitched battle over the No Child Left Behind Act. Like many large urban school districts across the nation -- though more brazenly -- the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is resisting the law's core command: that no child be forced to attend a failing school. In LAUSD, there are over 300,000 children in schools the state has declared failing under NCLB's requirements for adequate yearly progress. Under the law, such children must be provided opportunities to transfer to better-performing schools within the district. To date, fewer than two...

WASHINGTON - Congressional leaders and a former Bush Cabinet member said Tuesday that schools should stop excluding large numbers of minority students' test scores when they report progress under the No Child Left Behind law. The Associated Press reported Monday that schools have gotten federal permission to deliberately not count the test scores of nearly 2 million students when they report academic progress by race as required by the law. The scores excluded were overwhelmingly from minorities, the AP found. Some leaders said Congress may need to intervene. The Education Department and others owe the public an explanation, said the...

Four years after President Bush signed the landmark No Child Left Behind education law, vast numbers of students are not getting the tutoring that the law offers as one of its hallmarks. In the nation's largest school district, New York City, fewer than half of the 215,000 eligible students sought the free tutoring, according to figures from the city's Department of Education for the school year that ended in June 2005. In one area of the city, District 19 in eastern Brooklyn, about 3,700 students completed a tutoring program last year, even though more than 13,000 students qualified. Yet New...

N.A.A.C.P. officials said on Tuesday that they were trying to intervene in a lawsuit over the No Child Left Behind Law on the side of the Bush administration and against the State of Connecticut because of a core principle: that states do not have the right to ignore federal legislation that aims to help minorities. "The issue goes beyond the specifics of No Child Left Behind to potentially affect other federal statutes designed to protect civil rights," said Victor L. Goode, assistant general counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "One can't help but remember...

The No Child Left Behind law, which sailed through Congress with overwhelming majorities two years ago, has a giant problem--one that will cause the act to fail. But no one discusses this problem in public. Even the law's fiercest critics--who now include just about all our country's prominent Democrats--seem not to have noticed the real problem. And it certainly will not be pointed up by such longtime enthusiasts as the Business Roundtable, the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and numerous high-profile chief executives. They like the "accountability" the law promises to deliver. They like its incentive...

A patchwork of state standards is failing to produce high school graduates who are prepared either for college or for work, three education policy organizations say in a new report. The solution, they say, is to adopt rigorous national standards that will turn the high school diploma into a "common national currency." "For too many graduates, the American high school diploma signifies only a broken promise," the groups, which favor standardized testing to improve education, say. Working through what they call the American Diploma Project, the organizations — Achieve Inc., the Education Trust and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation —...

Last year at this time, we offered three wishes for the new year that seemed both critically important and eminently doable. Alas, none of them came true. A few updates seem in order. When looking at foreign affairs in January 2003, we presciently concluded that the two biggest trouble spots — Iraq and North Korea — posed too large a challenge for our wish-making capacities. So we settled on offering hopes that Israel would start dismantling its settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. While that didn't happen, Ariel Sharon's government does at least seem to be facing up to...

Beginning in the 2005–6 school year, states will be required to test all students in grades 3–8 in reading and mathematics and to make "adequate yearly progress" to get all students to a proficient level of achievement within twelve years. These are the most important provisions of the "No Child Left Behind" Act, passed by Congress earlier this year, a compromise with President Bush's original plan. This significant act places the federal government squarely behind testing and accountability on a nationwide basis. Most states will have to beef up their testing systems substantially to track student progress from grade 3...