The NRP Report: What
went wrong? And what's this about SSR doesn't
work?
NCLB is sinking fast.
While some think it's because of false hopes,
others think there's a false foundation: There
was no education miracle in Texas. How
much did Rod Paige know and when did he know
it?
Long-time education
writer and teacher Susan Ohanian takes
stock of NCLB in "Bush
Flunks Schools" in The Nation.
What
if the NCLB research is as flawed as
the intelligence was on those "weapons
of mass destruction"?
The connection
between learning to read and learning to
ride a horse: the
advantage of owning a horse or book,
and why those who have the fewest books are
left behind.
A "national
superintendent of the year"
finalist, William J. Mathis examines
NCLB and finds that beneath the noble promises
lurks a price-tag well beyond the range of
the 10 states he studied. Here online in
the May 2003 issue of Phi Delta
Kappan is his study, "No
Child Left Behind: Costs and Benefits."
Heard
about the 'Texas miracle' —
a "zero" dropout rate in Houston
high schools? Sorry, not a miracle;
just Enron behavior, number changing, and "incentives" that
brought new meaning to the term "education
mandates." What
nosey reporters (and a whistle-blowing vice
principal) found.
The man who had
President Bush's ear on school accountability
has been a lobbyist for some of America's
biggest testing and education publishers: Atty.
and lobbyist Sandy Kress.
It took one gutsy educator
in Georgia almost two years,
but she (and the U.S. Dept. of Ed.'s
Inspector General) brought Reading First
bosses to their knees in
a major mess that smelled like FEMA
in New Orleans. Follow
the investigation through
nine pages of national news media coverage.
There was
a $20 million precursor to NCLB that forecast
the future of the latter. Intended to
cure children's obesity woes by fixing
their classroom diets and
curriculum, it failed because no one
bothered to fix the home where a child
spends 7,800 hours a year (vs. 900 in class).
In 2007, the U. S.
Department of Ed. found an astounding range
of disparity
in state standards for competency via
testing. Thus a child who is a competent
reader in Missouri is going to be failing
in South Carolina.
More and more teachers
(young and old) are resigning
out of frustration with NCLB's testing and its
anti-child measures. Thus NCLB is depriving
at-risk students of both veteran and
fresh-blood faculty.
A veteran Ohio principal
at an "excellent" middle school
offers a public
apology for all that his students
missed while pursuing higher test scores
for the school.
There was no more ardent
booster of standardized testing, charter
schools, or No Child Left Behind than Dr.
Diane Ravitch, the former Bush
I advisor at the Department of Education.
The verb here is "was." Not any more. She
now fully admits to being mistaken and
badly misled, as described in The
New York Times article
of Mar. 2, 2010: Scholar’s
School Reform U-Turn
Shakes Up Debate.
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