From the get-go the concept of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was a bad idea. Dr. Jamie McKenzie has called this concept "The Tinkerbell Effect." Simply put, it is the New Science of Wishful Thinking. The Bush Administration has substituted sound analysis of policies and sound fact gathering for wishful thinking, The Tinkerbell Effect. That is, if you wish hard enough it will come true. We have seen this practiced in other events, i.e. Katrina Recovery, the War in Iraq, air quality. This is what I would call knee-jerk reaction government.
Does our President remind you of Alfred E. Newman saying, "What me worry?". Sadly heads have be buried in the sand through out this administration. The Bush Department of Education has steered school systems to reading programs of questionable result.
The idea that tests, tests, tests, create better readers and students is a facily. School Boards, Superintendents, Principals, Teachers, and Parents are speaking out in opposition to NCLB. Currently a petition is circulating to dismantle NCLB. The webstie www.educatorroundtable.org us the sponsor of this petition and there are sixteen points to the petition which I wil add below. NCLB is a serious flaw and it fails to see the real needs of education and students of our public schools.
THE NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT:
1. Misdiagnoses the causes of poor educational development, blaming teachers and students for problems over which they have no control.
2. Assumes that competition is the primary motivator of human behavior and that market forces can cure all educational ills.
3. Mandates data driven instruction based on gamesmanship to undermine public confidence in our schools.
4. Uses pseudo science and media manipulation to justify pro-corporate policies and programs, including diverting taxes away from communities and into corporate coffers.
5. Ignores the proven inadequacies, inefficiencies, and problems associated with centralized, "top-down" control.
6. Places control of what is taught in corporate hands many times removed from students, teachers, parents, local school boards, and communities.
7. Requires the use of materials and procedures more likely to produce a passive, compliant workforce than creative, resilient, inquiring, critical, compassionate, engaged members of our democracy.
8. Reflects and perpetuates massive distrust of the skill and professionalism of educators.
9. Allows life-changing, institution-shaping decisions to hinge on single measures of performance.
10. Emphasizes minimum content standards rather than maximum development of human potential.
11. Neglects the teaching of higher order thinking skills which cannot be evaluated by machines.
12. Applies standards to discrete subjects rather than to larger goals such as insightful children, vibrant communities, and a healthy democracy.
13. Forces schools to adhere to a testing regime, with no provision for innovating, adapting to social change, encouraging creativity, or respecting student and community individuality, nuance, and difference.
14. Drives art, music, foreign language, career and technical education, physical education, geography, history, civics and other non-tested subjects out of the curriculum, especially in low-income neighborhoods.
15. Produces multiple, unintended consequences for students, teachers, and communities, including undermining neighborhood schools and blurring the line between church and state.
16. Rates and ranks public schools using procedures that will gradually label them all "failures," so when they fail to make Adequate Yearly Progress, as all schools eventually will, they can be “saved” by vouchers, charters, or privatization.
While any one of these issues is serious enough to warrant discarding No Child Left Behind, the law suffers from all of them. The number of signatures on this petition should be a clear indicator to state and national policy makers that it is time to move beyond this harmful, highly restrictive law.
We can only hope that the Congress can be convinced to discontinue this administration's "Tinkerbell Effect" policies toward education.
We all need to follow the words of Adlai Stephens in one of the acceptance speaches.
"...this portal to the golden age, mocks the pretensions of individual acumen and ingenuity. For it is a citadel guarded by thick walls of ignorance and mistrust which do not fall before the trumpets' blast or the politicians' imprecations or even the generals' baton. They are, my friends, walls that must be directly stormed by the hosts of courage, morality, and of vision, standing shoulder to shoulder, unafraid of ugly truth, contemptuous of lies, half-truths, circuses, and demagoguery."
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