About education

Let me call your attention to a USA Today opinion piece about education. It's entitled "NCLB: ‘Too Destructive To Salvage’": Here's how it gets started:

It’s time to say in a national newspaper what millions of teachers, students and parents already know: No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is an appalling and unredeemable experiment that has done incalculable damage to our schools — particularly those serving poor, minority and limited-English-proficiency students.

It’s a stretch even to call the law “well-intentioned” given that its creators, including the Bush administration and the right-wing Heritage Foundation, want to privatize public education. Hence NCLB’s merciless testing, absurd timetables and reliance on threats.

Let’s be clear: This law has nothing to do with improving learning. At best, it’s about raising scores on multiple-choice exams. This law is not about discovering which schools need help; we already know. This law is not about narrowing the achievement gap; its main effect has been to sentence poor children to an endless regimen of test-preparation drills. Thus, even if the scores do rise, it’s at the expense of a quality education. Affluent schools are better able to maintain good teaching — and retain good teachers — despite NCLB, so the gap widens.

Sure, it’s senseless for Washington to impose requirements without adequate funding. But more money to implement a bad law isn’t the answer.

As a former classroom teacher, I completely agree.