ABC’s Good Morning America drew up a report card for NCLB this morning, and despite one A- for the law’s testing component, gave it Cs and Ds for funding, standards, improving teacher quality, and meeting the needs of English language learners and special ed students. GMA’s investigation found that NCLB is working in some areas of [...]
Check out Time’s big story on NCLB, including, in the online version, an interactive map comparing state and national testing — aka My State’s Test Is Harder Than Your State’s Test.
While “the teachers unions” aren’t given much play, I’m loving the last line of the article:
Most important, federal policymakers need to listen hard to the people who are [...]
When Margaret Spellings stopped by the Daily Show this week, Jon Stewart began the interview by giving the Education Secretary an apple – not how you’d expect the acerbic comedian to handle a captive Bush cabinet member.
The segment featured mostly softball questions (well, there was that student loan scandal) and predictable answers (we all –including Stewart – groaned at “the soft bigotry of low expections”).
Yet when Stewart [...]
An editorial from the Spartanburg (SC) Herald Journal supports the state sup’s plan to retool the testing system to better mesh with NCLB — and gets in some digs at the federal law, which “took the state’s high standards and turned them against South Carolina schools.”
For those of you who oppose NCLB on the principle of states’ rights, here’s your [...]
Schools Matter reports on a campaign kick-off in Boston this week, in which hundreds of teachers and parents vowed to end NCLB’s overemphasis on standardized testing.
The event was sponsored by FairTest and Jonathan Kozol’s group, Education Action.
Kozol, never one to mince words, says the current testing mania turns teachers into “drill sergeants for the state.”
Read more juicy quotes (”reign of [...]
From the Chicago Sun-Times:
The Chicago Public Schools spent $50 million in federal money on after-school tutoring for 56,000 students last year but test scores show it got limited bang for its buck.
The NCLB-mandated tutoring had “a minimal impact, at best,” a CPS official told the Sun-Times. According to a CPS study, tutored elementary students performed only slightly better on [...]
High school English teacher Susan Boesch rants about her school being labeled failing and raves about the students’ impressive accomplishments in Sunday’s Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.
“As teachers, parents and students, we should be accountable for our performance, but the deck should not be stacked against students before they even begin,” she writes, citing NCLB’s one-size-fits-all testing requirements as putting her English Language [...]
In talking about NCLB, many people latch on to the notion of “holding teachers accountable” like my sister’s old pit bull used to latch on to the sofa cushion. The result is the same — a beat-up sofa cushion and a lot of beat-up teachers.
Missing from the dogfight over accountability, says Dennis Fermoyle at From the Trenches [...]
It was a story tailor-made for the gaping 24-hour news maw and the talk shows — an Ohio sixth-grader was denied a bathroom break during standardized testing and had an accident. And the outcry was predictable — “What was that teacher thinking?”
If you’ve had to administer a standardized test, you know exactly what she was thinking. [...]
