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It is encouraging to see that testing is thought of as a good idea. It seems strange that in this one area which affects peoples' lives that somehow, we can go on doing the same thing, and not particularly care about the impact on the students we teach.
I have had personal contact with school administrators in a large urban school system, and their view prior to NCLB was that they did the best they could, but the students weren't good enough so they failed and so what? The result was literally multiple generations of students who came out of the public school system unequipped and disadvantaged, and a system that didn't care.
After NCLB, for the first time, the same administrators started to look at what they were doing and matching against seeing progress in the students. It seemed to me, an outside observer, that NCLB forced educators to become accountable for the product they were delivering - and the students benefited.
I am not a fan of NCLB. I do not believe it is the federal government's place to influence or direct the schooling of our children. Under different circumstances, the federal government's involvement in education could prove extremely detrimental to our democracy.
In the perfect world, school systems would be accountable in very real terms to their local and state school boards. The ability to maintain a leadership or teaching position in a public school setting should be no different than in a corporate setting - if you can't produce, you can't keep the job. In a corporate environment, a leader may lose a few dollars, in a school system we are losing lives.
Posted by wirelessfiber on February 15, 2008 - 08:33 AM
My only concern, and to me the real crux of all measurement, is whether what we are measuring is really the result we are after. Soes NCLB really measuring the preparation of students to compete in the real world after they leave school, or just the ability of an educational system to "teach to the test"? Watching the changes in my local education system, and listening to my childrens' teachers, I fear we are just teaching to the test. So whoever sets the test shapes the next generation of our society, devoid of those things not tested, like maybe ethics. Even at the undergraduate level limiting the exposure of students, instead of increasing the breadth of what they are exposed to, is being practiced. My son took a freshman English composition course last semester and was limited to using only the assigned reading as sources in his writing. He was thus forced to parrot the liberal bent of all the writers, and forbidden to refute or even question bad statistics or unsupported propositions in the readings. Thus we create a generation of lemmings, not a generation of thinkers.
Posted by Common Sense on February 15, 2008 - 10:12 AM
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