Comments on: ‘No Child Left Behind’ Law Produces Few Gains

By: C

Mon, 11 May 2009 21:21:51 +0000

I’m a teacher and I find it funny to hear so many of you place all of the blame on the libtards. Need I remind you that nclb was not the fault of the dems soley. The fault Is on both parties. This whole testing thing gets on my nerves & I am one of those libtard teachers you all like to blame. Most of my collegues despise testing and wish we could get back to teaching. The problem with no child is that it was a good concept that got into the hands if politicians who do not listen to educational professionals who know what they are doing
My friend was one of the finalists for teacher of the year. Bush had fiftyfive of the best teachers this country has to offer gathered in Washington and all he did was shake their hands. Why not talk with them and see what they have to offer.

By: Ian Thorpe

Ian Thorpe — Sun, 10 May 2009 18:26:16 +0000

Unfortunately we have learned in Britain after twelve years of a Labour governments’ politically correct thinking that “no child left behind” quickly comes to mean “no child allowed to move forward.”

By: sheesh

sheesh — Sun, 10 May 2009 16:28:03 +0000

7. AnAverageAmerican:. . . Did I hear you right? . . . You spent $24K to send your kid to kindergarten? Is that right? And you call yourself An Average American?

Let me proffer something . . . the value of an education, private or public, is based more on what happens in the home than in the schoolroom. I see kids all the time who are bright, hardworking, over-achievers who went through public school. I know because we raised two of them. Private school is one of the fastest growing scams in America.

By: Pam C.

Pam C. — Sun, 10 May 2009 12:37:57 +0000

The scores are not really telling us if this helps or not. My grandson has been really helped in improving his reading and math by a lot of extra help and tutoring at school as well as at home due to NCLB. The tests are really vague – my daughter in FL were discussing the “test”, her son is the same age as his cousin. Between the two of us we have 10 years of college and could not answer the practice test questions. For example, they read a story about a family going to the grocery store with a narrative of the activity. The question had nothing to do with the story! It was totally off the wall as to why they went to the store. The 2 children and us concluded it was to buy groceries. WRONG! Problem is they just need a straight up test of knowledge not a convoluted test of the subconscious reason they went to the store which is not addressed in the story. It is a great help to the kids, they just need someone with common sense to design the test. There would be little need to “prepare for the test” if the test was not so stupid.

By: mshatto

mshatto — Sun, 10 May 2009 05:44:34 +0000

NCLB has worked. I began teaching in 2001 and the quality of teachers since has increased dramatically. Teachers are held to higher standards and required to teach common content that was simply not required before. Where NCLB has failed is that the tests mean nothing to the students. They mean absolutely nothing. The tests are not used to decide who passes or stays behind, the tests are not used as finals, they mean absolutely nothing to the students, a bit more to the parents, slightly more to the teachers, and an awful lot to administrators and school boards. Teachers are not graded on scores, maybe we receive a little pressure from the administration but in the face of union contracts there is little they can do. Merit pay is largely an unworkable pipe dream at this point but worth researching. Administrators are usually ex-teachers and some can be manipulative and vindictive as any union boss. We place an awful lot of responsibility in their hands but really don’t provide much education or training for them. Most have zero managagerial background and even less business experience and placing these decisions in there hands is simply a non-starter at this point. Administrators have more responsibilities that the typical corporate leader and walk a legal mind field on a daily basis yet they are not required to take business courses or those on management. In addition the lawyers have really tied their hands and the public schools are required to deal with these kids and their parents even when it is obvious that the students deserve no better than juvenile hall. My daughter goes to private school and the only difference between her class and the public school down the street is her administrators can get rid of undesirable students while the public school is stuck with them. I sent my daughter to Catholic school not because of the superior teachers but because of the superior peer group.
If we really want school improvement make the tests worth something to all stakeholders. Require students to pass the test before they can move to another grade and then grade teachers, administrators, and school board members on their pass rates, taking into account the type of class and the school setting they’re willing to take on, and require parents to take an active and positive role in their child’s life. This will require more money though, possibly more government involvement in our personal lives, and most Americans are simply not willing to face that fact. School districts have huge bureaucracies but only a small percentage finds its way into teacher salaries or the classrooms and I don’t see NCLB minimizing that. Pay those teachers more who are willing to work longer hours, in difficult settings or hostile environments and who truly make a difference. Let the slackers get by on minimum pay or find another job and overall require students and their families to pass a test that has some meaning. Otherwise we’re stuck with the same old, same old.

By: Confused in Virginia

Confused in Virginia — Sun, 10 May 2009 03:32:28 +0000

IMO, the worst part about NCLB and its proponents is that they cannot, and will not, admit that one of the most important indicators of whether or not a child will do well in school is something that cannot be legislated, and that is parental involvement.

It doesn’t matter how much money is thrown at this problem. The one thing that funding for public schools can’t buy is parental involvement.

By: mej

mej — Sun, 10 May 2009 01:49:38 +0000

The only thing that is going to break the strangle-hold on failing education is to break the unions. Period, no ifs, no, ands and no buts. Offer incentives directly to the teachers, cash in the account when the students demonstrate knowledge and competency above expectations. Then, and only then will you see improvements. The Union will have no hold over teachers trying to earn an extra $10-20 thousand dollar bonus. Good teachers are rewarded, solid union lackeys will not……..guess what happens. However, as long as Democrats remain in power so will unions and so too will our public school children continue to fall behind.

By: drjohn

drjohn — Sun, 10 May 2009 00:25:25 +0000

I know! In Democrat land let’s give all children C’s no matter how much effort they make. After all , it’s fairness we’re after. Then at grade 12 let’s run a standardized test and see how they do against Republican kids who had to work for grades.

By: AnAverageAmerican

AnAverageAmerican — Sat, 09 May 2009 23:56:38 +0000

dennis,

Parents who actively require their children to perform tend to send them to private school. We did. We tried public school in a community that spends somewhere around $15k per student per year. We were so underwhelmed by our public schools in terms of discipline, educational content, administrative apathy (”these children will be your son’s classmates all the way through high school”) and lack of concern about whether the children were learning anything, that we pulled him out after a couple of months and put him in private school … a pretty severe economic sacrifice at the time (about $24k for kindergarten for a family making around $80k per year).

That was in 1996. I now have two privately educated boys who are attending an all scholarship high school, admission to which, as you can imagine, is highly competitive.

So for parents willing to make the sacrifice, and those for whom it is no sacrifice, there are alternatives to the, “let’s make happy citizens (I mean sheeple)”, public indoctrination centers that our public schools have become.

It’s all the more critical to support programs like the, now not accepting new applicants, DC school voucher program. These are not a panacea, but for involved parents who could not otherwise afford private schools, it is a godsend.

An educated youth is America’s best hope for the future, unfortunately our public school system is not doing a very good job of educating our young people, or holding schools and teachers accountable for doing their job.

By: Wacky Hermit

Wacky Hermit — Sat, 09 May 2009 20:36:24 +0000

My favorite is a graph I saw on the official NCLB website when it was first passed. To explain why NCLB was needed, they presented a graph showing flatlined reading scores superimposed over exponentially-growing funding amounts. Evidently they thought this was proof that we needed to keep funding growing exponentially. To me it was proof that we needed to quit growing funding because we could get the exact same result for half the price.

I quit voting for more public school funds when I noticed that every year I did, the schools spent more money on boondoggles like having a computer for every 2 children and redecorating new-ish facilities, but didn’t do a thing to decrease class size or raise teacher pay. My husband had a “friend” like that once– bought himself an expensive video game, then a few days later asked us for an equivalent amount of money to pay his electric bill. When this happens, everyone knows you DON’T lend him the money, because he’s going to blow it all on crap and ask his other “good friend” to lend him the money for his electric bill. And that’s exactly what our schools have been doing with all that exponentially-increasing money we’ve been giving them. Until they show me that they can quit buying duplicate class sets of graphing calculators and spend the money on getting a math teacher instead, they can kiss my fat white Portuguese butt.