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 profs, “they’re being dragged along or held back.”
According to Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff,
Decades of research at Temple University and elsewhere on successful education and child-development suggest five fundamental principles that define good education. No Child Left Behind runs counter to all of them.
Bottom line? A cookie-cutter education that doesn’t look at the whole child isn’t going to give us ”productive, free-thinking, creative individuals” who can compete globally.
This entry was posted on August 27, 2007 at 2:03 pm and is filed under nclb 101, reauthorization. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.
One Comment on “Five for Fighting”
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August 31, 2007 at 4:41 pm
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff have hit the nail on the head. As a teacher in a high achieving school in Virginia, I wholeheartedly agree with the principles underlying NCLB: all children can learn and all teachers must teach. The problem with the bill is not that it holds teachers accountable. The problem is that the measures used to hold teachers accountable are unfair to our children and do not foster the creation of lifelong learners.
NCLB’s focus on standardized tests is a mistake that is robbing our children of the education they deserve. Teachers are being forced to drill students for standardized tests, rather than teaching their students the skills they need to think critically, Each day, I worry that we are creating a generation of Americans who will be able to choose between A,B, C, and D on a test answer sheet, but who will be unable to ask questions or problem solve.
Additionally, the emphasis on standardized testing is stressing out our students. My 8th graders are scared to pick the wrong answer. They are worried that they won’t pass the tests. They look at the tests as a measure of their intelligence. It is hardly fair to judge the academic standing of a student by looking at one test taken on one day. What if the student has test anxiety? What if he or she is having a bad day? What if the student is an English as a Second Language Learner who has trouble reading the test?
It is time for our nation’s lawmakers to get it right. Let’s change NCLB to deliver on its promise. After all, the students in today’s schools won’t have a second chance to get a quality education. We owe it to them to fix the law and fast.