AP: Spellings says No Child law near perfect

[Bleacher Creature]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060831/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/no_child_law_3

By BEN FELLER, AP Education Writer
Thu Aug 31, 1:27 PM ET

WASHINGTON - Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said Wednesday the No Child Left Behind Act is close to perfect and needs little change as its first major update draws near.

"I talk about No Child Left Behind like Ivory soap: It's 99.9 percent pure or something," Spellings told reporters. "There's not much needed in the way of change."

Spellings' comments signal what amounts to the Bush administration's starting position as the law comes up for renewal. That is scheduled to happen as soon as next year.

<SNIP>

These people should start giving classes on how to be completed disassociated from reality.

[MichiganVote]

1. Perfectly flawed

[SharonAnn]

15. And not sufficiently funded

[MichiganVote]

16. Not even close. But its the "new" jello of education!

And it will prove just as slippery as every other educational initiative.

[CrispyQ]

2. I wonder

how these people function with their heads stuck so far up their asses.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

3. These are the people...

who call public school teachers "terrorists."

So when they call NCLB "near perfect" that says a lot about just how fucked up it is.

[UpInArms]

4. 99.9% pure shit

:nuke:

[gaspee]

5. I thought this was a joke.

[AnneD]

6. Her only connection ..

with educating kids is that she sold text books. She was one of the chief architects of the no child left alive bill.

[Name removed]

7. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[truthisfreedom]

9. so you don't want us to hear about it? censorship is better?

some rules are made to be bent... they're that flexible.

[truthisfreedom]

8. "No Child" is a perfect description for this law.

the Democratic Party should introduce a new bill titled "All Children..." and rub the thugs noses in it by always calling their version "No Child."

[TheDebbieDee]

10. The Ed Sec's name is Margaret BUSH Spellings.............

She's Chimpy's cousin, don't you know!

[Demeter]

12. That Explains A LOT

I didn't know that, thanks for posting!

[zreosumgame]

11. yes, it will produce 'perfect' little test takers

but only the NCLB test, and since none of them will qualify for anything beyond some trade school at best, why there will be no need for public schools at all! How perfect to make sure there is an un-educated populace. perfect to keep them selecting repukocratcs over and over...

[Demeter]

13. They will master the art of cheating

an important skill set in the modern US economy and business community. Not to mention politics!

[Ready4Change]

14. Clearly has never talked with a teacher.

But then, what do you expect from a major official under this administration? A Secretary of Defense who doesn't listen to his military brass, a Secretary of State who doesn't listen to experts, or even her own past experience, a Secretary of Homeland Security who apparantly wasn't listening to weather reports during Katrina, and on, and on...

[LostInAnomie]

17. It will perfectly end public education...

... and create a two tiered version. In one, rich kids go to good schools with the latest technology, and go to good colleges. In the other, your kids go to a shitty school with hardly any funding, have obsolete technology, and can't get into the good schools.

How perfect... for the Bush social class.

[Metta]

18. "Even if they have pictures, lie." Lenny Bruce.

... one way to weasel past one's responsibility.

[liberal N proud]

19. She obviously suffers from the Donald Rummsfeld disillusionment

These people are just fucking nuts.
They propel so much shit that they actually believe themselves.

[Charlie Brown]

20. I haven't met a single educator with anything positive to say about NCLB

and I live in a solid red state in the middle of the Bible Belt.

[hotforteacher]

21. Okay, I work at a public school and we just got the results

of our A.Y.P. (average yearly performance)status. We didn't make A.Y.P. in either math or reading. The penalties? Our school has to foot the bill for children to bus to other schools in the district, and if you hit year three of not making A.Y.P., it is mandated that you must provide tutorial services from an outside provider (generally some kind of Sylvan Learning Center type shit.

Now, A.Y.P. is kind of a joke in the Twin Cities because it isn't based upon percentages per se, but rather a very complex series of goals referred to as "strands". A school needs to meet all of these strand goals in order to make A.Y.P.

Notably, and generally, the groups of students who pull down a school's scores are poor children that come from homes that do not speak English as their primary language, and children that come from poor, African-American families...and the gist of those children are boys (who also have the largest portion of documented behavioral infractions). Our school did not make A.Y.P. because of the testing scores of our African-American students. Understand that this is raw data, but completely understood to be the problem endemic in our schooling systems up here.

When yuppie asshats like Spelling start spouting off about how it is 99.9% perfect, I want to hurl her into the world of one of my students and see how well she performs. I want her to eat fucking Cheetos and drink bubbly water with high fructose corn syrup for breakfast and lunch, not have active parenting due to socio-economic issues that drive poverty, have the douche-rocket cleave to her neighborhood when gang activity rises and shootings become the summer fare for entertainment and propel that side of town into chaos just as the doors open for school to begin. Yeah kid, perform under stress. It is 99.9% perfect because they will continue to propagate an underclass.

I want her to explain to me, in language that I can understand, that the primal stress these children are living in is 99.9% perfect so I can spit in her botox-addled face and tell her to go play hide and go fuck herself at a table at Le Cirque.

Yes, it has been proven over and over again that dumping money into schools such as mine that struggle year-after-year DOES NOT create better testing scores, but subtracting money that we have to fight for from that system also creates additional issues. Our American schools are doing more than battling illiteracy and substandard teaching, we are battling family and economic systems that are spiraling out of control. It's like putting a band-aid on a wound that needs a tourniquet.

And then the military recruiters come in and scoop them up to be F.O.s for Bush's army. His own axis of evil created by his terrorist regime.

:banghead:

[mdelaguna2000]

28. well put, and I was wondering...

just curious... you're saying the students do no better when bused to other schools or given tutors? I wonder what could be done (if anything) to help these kids more - within the school system? Of course, tackling poverty is the big answer, but in the meantime?

[ChairmanAgnostic]

22. leave no child's behind

a failed program so destructive, so sneaky, so self-defeating, that describing it accurately would involve words not permitted in a family newspaper.

[WhiteTara]

23. More catastrophic success

This is just what they want...Neil needs to sell his education courses somewhere. Since they aren't up to standard, only thing to do is lower the standard. SAT scores were down nationwide, just what the BFEE wants.

[DinahMoeHum]

24. Well, well. Another nominee for the Top 10 Conservative Idiots.

n/t

[Ilsa]

25. Yeah, perfect except for parents, taxpayers, children, teachers,

etc. I think it is just a way to find an excuse to stop funding public schools.

[LuckyLib]

26. And given the collective wisdom from decades of research

on teaching and learning, NCLB couldn't have been more perfectly designed to trash it. Schools are giving up recess (that's really smart), the arts, and foreign languages, and expanding language arts and math to ridiculous proportions of a school day. The resulting testing culture is counterproductive, obscene, and does not help children. A perfect definition of the * administration.

[deadparrot]

27. Yeah, I believe it.

Just ask the teachers. They're thrilled with it. :eyes:

But hey, really. What do teachers know? They're only, you know, doing the teaching.