Dept. of Double Takes: Judge Not, Lest Ye Be Judged

At yesterday’s White House press briefing, Tony Snow said that the Administration shouldn’t be faulted for not making AYP with all subgroups on Iraq. Instead, it was important to look at progress toward 100% proficiency.
“Look,” Snow told reporters, “if you’re trying to do an overall judgment on what’s going on in Iraq, the idea that [...]

PDK/Gallup Poll — No Luv for NCLB

The annual PDK/Gallup Poll on public education is out, and it shows that more Americans are disenchanted with NCLB. They fault it for narrowing the curriculum and relying too much on standardized testing while not preparing kids for the global economy.  
PDK’s highlights from the poll include:

Only 1 in 4 Americans believe that NCLB is helping their local schools; the [...]

Five for Fighting

Professors Kathy Hirsh-Pasek (Temple University) and Roberta Golinkoff (University of Delaware) offer five problems with NCLB in The Providence Journal. They supplement their list with an anecdote from a recent conference, in which they asked 50 teachers if NCLB is working.
The answer was a resounding NO.  “Children are not being supported to advance,” one teacher told the [...]

Dems Reject Merit Pay

The Democratic Presidential candidates came out against merit pay at last night’s debate and called for an overhaul of NCLB.
Here’s NEA’s take on it.

Why NCLB Doesn’t Work, Springfield Edition

The Springfield (MO) News-Leader looks at local schools’ AYP report cards and explains why they’re “meaningless”:
The key to true accountability in local schools should be this: Do the students who didn’t meet a certain standard this year improve next year when they are retested? That’s the ultimate flaw of No Child Left Behind. We won’t [...]

Howl

The nice thing about taking a vacation last week was that I didn’t have to stomp my feet over another Washington (We love testing! We love it, we love it, we love it!) Post editorial on NCLB.
Instead, the Daily Howler stomped for me.
As often occurs when the Post writes about testing programs, the editorial makes [...]

Report Card Time

It’s AYP report card time in districts across the nation.  
The Cleveland Plain Dealer is covering Northeast Ohio’s results, with a good set of articles that goes beyond rankings and scores to explain in simple terms how the results are calculated and why striving to make AYP is an exercise in futility.

Ohio school report card puts pressure on districts [...]

Potty Talk

Props to Michael Swickard for the metaphor of the week, if not the entire reauthorization: NCLB as an overturned outhouse, trapping schools inside.
A stretch? Swickard makes the comparison like this: Outhouse tipping “was about control. Boys pushed outhouses over on the door side so the person inside was trapped until his or her shouts were answered.”
Likewise, “NCLB traps [...]

Graduation Rates and Unintended Consequences

Barring some significant overhaul, it’s not a stretch to think that including graduation rates in the next go-round will lead to the same lowering of standards we’re seeing in states to meet current NCLB requirements.
Ms. Cornelius at A Shrewdness of Apes contemplates the likely consequences given current high school completion rates.
Even before NCLB became law, many states attempted to [...]

Puh-leez.

Michael Petrilli (Fordham, Hoover, former Bush official) looked Obama in the eye recently, and took issue with the candidate’s promise to work with teachers on improving No Child Left Behind.
“I would not reauthorize No Child Left Behind until I got the teachers’ buy-in,” Obama told Petrilli.
This spurred Petrilli to think a bit, to mull, to [...]