Ah, fall.....that crispness in the air....the leaves about to turn....there really is no other season like it. It happens to be my favorite. Baseball playoffs, football season, and a strong sense of a new beginning.Perhaps this feeling of a new start has to do with the fact that this is the time of year when school is back in session. Minnesotans greeted the 2007-2008 school year with a full page spread in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune detailing how a full third of our schools are in jeopardy. That's right, folks. We here in the great North Woods are is deep trouble. No Child Left Behind trouble.
For those of you who don't know, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is the education program of our current president, George Bush, which he signed into law shortly after he took office in 2001. Before I give my own take on it, however, I feel that we really need to understand what No Child means and how it works. Since I don't want to bore you with a lot of "edu-speak," I thought that a sports analogy would facilitate a deeper understanding of what is expected of our students under the NCLB laws.
Imagine that American students are on football team......(cue blurry, dreamy lap dissolve and "doodle oodle oo" music)
1. All teams must make the state playoffs and all must win the championship. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable. If after two years they have not won the championship, their footballs and equipment will be taken away until they do win the championship.2. All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time even if they do not have the same conditions or opportunities to practice on their own. NO exceptions will be made for lack of interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities of themselves or their parents. All kids will play football at a proficient level!
3. Talented players will be asked to work out on their own, without instruction. This is necessary because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren't interested in football, have limited athletic abilities, or whose parents don't like football.
4. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept on the 4th, 8th, and 11th games.It will create a New Age of Sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimum goals. If no child gets ahead, then no child gets left behind. If parents do not like this new law, they are encouraged to vote for vouchers and support private schools that can screen out the non-athletes and prevent their children from having to go to school with bad football players.
No Child Left Behind is quite possibly the worst piece of legislation in the history of this country. It is ignorant, racist, and gives a big "Fuck You!" to people that are poor-something that has been quite common in the last six years.
It is ignorant because it assumes that the only way to measure assessment is to test children. Apparently people like President Bush and Margaret Spellings (our Secretary Of Education) have not picked up a book on learning styles in...oh, I don't know....25 years!
Everyone learns differently. Some learn in a more tactile way. Others learn in groups. Some learn by writing or research. Howard Gardner, a professor at Harvard University, identified, in 1983, eight multiple intelligences or ways people learn. They are: Linguistic intelligence, Logical-mathematical intelligence, Musical intelligence, Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, Spatial intelligence, Interpersonal intelligence, and Intrapersonal intelligence. Testing would fall under the "Logical-mathematical intelligence" umbrella. As we can see, NCLB ignores the other seven ways people learn and thus is an extremly ignorant way to gauge learning.
It is racist because it does not take into account recent research that suggests that different cultures learn differently. The work of Gardner can be applied here as well. Some people are inherently bad test takers because it is simply not a part of their cultural environment. Or they can't speak English, the only way the test is available incidentally. In the last ten years, we have undergone a massive influx of immigrants from all over the world and they are immediately expected to conform to standardized testing. What if the only way they have been tested in the past is oral exams?
It says "Fuck You" to poor people because of how the questions on the test are worded. It assumes knowledge and understanding where there might not be either . One question on the test included the words "fresh celery." Well, nearly everyone from poorer families and/or from a non white group got that question wrong because they had no idea what fresh celery was. They had never seen it before in their lives! Did people at the Department of Education actually THINK when they drew up these tests? Or did they just do their usual Bushie bullshit and try to ram a square peg into a round hole? LEARN, DAMMIT, THE WAY NORMAL PEOPLE DO!!!!Actually, I suppose it's prudent to mention that the one good thing that has come out of NCLB is the aggregate data that proves that people learn differently especially if they are from another culture. Ironically, NCLB invalidates itself by illustrating that a large segment of our student population doesn't do well on standardized tests.
As a result of poor test scores, they are punished by the slow removal of Title I money, which is basically what is happening with nearly a third of our schools in Minnesota. My children's school, replete with cultural diversity, is now on "warning" as they have failed to achieve NCLB standards in the 2006-07 school year. Students that failed to achieve the minimum requirements? ESL (English as a Second Language) and learning disabled kids...the ones who don't acquire intelligence through the "Logical-mathematical" arena.
If we really want our children to achieve basic knowledge sets, we need to start applying Gardner's theories on a national level. Everyone should be taught in a way that is most suitable to their comfort of learning. Grading should be based on a balance of testing, group work, hands on learning, classroom participation and oral exams. To simply focus on testing is so narrow minded and downright silly that we are really doing our children a great disservice
Because once the Title I money is taken away, schools usually get reconstituted, meaning class size increases in other schools in the district. This exacerbates the problem further and learning is even more diminished. Of all of the policies of President Bush, this one really is the worst, hands down. Y'know, people always ask me, when I go off about how incompetent Bush is, to give them a specific example of how Bush is destroying the future.
I always start with this one.
11 comments:
Nicely done, sir :)
Two things:
1) Bush's education program is a thinly veiled attempt to gut the public school system. Like almost everything in this administration (the response to Katrina, or children's health care) they don't want government to do a good job. They almost intentionally screw up to make people hate government.
Then they can turn around and say, "See? Government is the problem, not the solution."
2) Mark touched on this briefly in his football analogy, but the most important factor in the success of our schools is the performance and motivation of the students themselves (and the support and encouragement their parents give them).
You cannot hold teachers accountable if the kids and their parents just do not give a damn. At some point the people who are failing have to be held accountable for their own failures.
Yeah, I know this is a revolutionary idea for the Bush administration. A lot of smart, motivated kids go to bad schools and come out fine. A lot of dumb or unmotivated kids go to good schools and do poorly.
It is foolish to pretend that all kids are created equal. The trick is to find the marginal ones who have potential to succeed and make sure they get what they need.
Standardized tests will not make these kinds of judgments. They are worse than useless because they are boring and will never motivate kids to do anything. They are guarantees of mediocrity and failure.
But that's the intent of the whole Bush program, so it's working according to plan.
Children need to learn early on what the consequences of their choices are. They cannot be coddled and told they're all special. They need to understand that their own choices and effort will determine their success more than any other factor. It's a hard lesson to learn, and a lot of kids don't learn it until too late.
Completely agree with point #1, blk. Bush wants public education gone. He (and like minded people) don't want children to become critical thinkers, hence the standardized tests and one right answer to everything.
Students in schools today are being taught the less rose colored view of US History and folks like our Prez simply don't like that.
I'd like to add one to Howard Gardner's list of ways of learning: Sexo-visual. A friend coined it because when I had a Spanish sweetie, my Spanish got really good, really fast! Not just from lying in bed, but from all the time you spend with someone when you first start going out.
Love it!
Perhaps No Child would not have been enacted if teachers spent more time educating the basics as opposed to filling children's minds with anti-American leftist bullshit all day. Which is the real reason why scores are down.
Especially from long haired, hippy type high school Geography teachers. Remember that guy who got canned for his rant?
Maybe he should have just taught Geography instead of trying to change the world.
Education spending is just as much of a corrupt racket as anything else in this country.
...If I was a Republican looking to make a parody of left wing caterwauling, I have found a limitless supply of material...
I'm glad the test in in English only. Learn the language.
Remember, a country has two things, and two things only — a border and a culture, if you violate either, out you go. Already too many foreigners want to live in the USA and in Western Europe, obeying all the tenets of their previous culture that they hated enough to leave. If it was so bad that you left, why bring it along?
Now I'll just sit back and wait for the predictable charges of racism to start flying my way.
yawn
...If I were a Democrat looking to make a parody of right wing caterwauling, I have found a limitless supply of material...
I don't have a problem with people learning English but you can't expect them to learn immediately and then take a standardized test on it. It's not just about knowing the words...it's understanding their meaning.
To judge how a school is doing based on this warped parameter is just flat out bullshit.
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