What are the major gripes with "no child left behind"? Thanks

[chester2003]

[K-W]

1. It isnt funded.

The requirements for schools are unreasonable and will lead to even good schools failing and potentially being shut down because it demands sustained growth in test scores. It is punititive, rather than fixing schools it's solution is to punish bad schools, which of course will only make them worse, leading to them being shut down. It is designed to kill public education.

[NJCher]

2. it advocates testing over thinking

Just one reason. Another is that it forces a standard on the schools but doesn't provide funding to enact the means to reach the test goals.

I'm sure others can add more to this--I'm in education but not at the second education level.


Cher

[DODI]

3. Testing, testing, testing, testing, testing

My kinder watched a movie today because the teacher had to do individual testing -- no subs were given to them. My 4th grader had to go to summer school (mandatory) because of the testing, when she was in third, she had to take practice tests.

[DenverDem]

4. Culturally biased testing

used as a means to justify the destruction of public education.

Rather than paying teachers a living wage NCLB puts the onus on the teachers to prove that their students can pass these tests engineered to be biased against the schools that need the most assistance. It's a self fulfilling prophecy.

This is propogandically used to justify voucher programs that siphon off public funds from public schools to right wing fundamentalist "christian" schools and other eliteist private education schools.

[papau]

5. Teach to test topics only - and $7 billion short to do that.- result is

you get "negative money" from Bush's increase in Federal Funding for education.

The extra $5 costs you $7, so you take ourt $2 from the activities you are currently doing.

End result is less school

But you get testing and a teach to the test world like Texas where the teach to the test has done nothing to makes more educated, kids that need extra help are punished because to stay afloat financially you must make them drop out

and the U of Texas says recent post test classes coming in are not as smart/trained/learned as past - requiring special courses to get them up "starting college" speed.

Other than that - NCLB is a great idea!

[Lars39]

6. Designed for schools to fail; no funding,screwed -up testing criteria.

If schools can't pull out of probation after so many years,the federal government will take them over. The end result will be privatization of schools, which will surely put a pretty profit into those that own stock in the *school* companies.

[mcar]

7. Set up to fail

Schools must always show improvement. So if your school gets an "A," where do you go from there? In a public school system, there will always be students who do not meet success rates. This is not accounted for.

The other problem, besides what other posters have indicated, is that it's just plain stupid. My school district will never be considered as "making adequate yearly progress" even though it's one of the better districts in the state.

Why? Because we have a separate school for middle/high school students who are discipline problems. The students are sent to this school for a 9-week grading period, or more if necessary, and get more intensive instruction and stricter discipline. It's been a wonderful addition to our schools -- these students are given the opportunity to improve at their own pace, and the regular schools have fewer discipline problems so classes are not disrupted.

What does this have to do with NCLB? Well, because this school is a temporary waystation for students, no one graduates from it. Therefore, under NCLB rules, it has a 0% graduation rate (even though its students graduate from their home high schools). That 0% affects every school in the district and makes it impossible for any high school to get a passing grade.

Like I said, stupid

[Rowdyboy]

8. What they said!

My partner is a long-time high school and he ridicules "NCLB" for each and every reason listed above.

[Az]

9. Teaching to the test, Manipulating results, and unfunded mandates

First it creates an environment where they are forced to teach to the test or lose their funding.

Second it is a known factor that when money is a factor people will bend things to get it. We have seen how the test results get fudged in various charter schools and programs in Texas. Kids mysteriously vanish from the school rolls without dropping out. Kids are pressured to opt out. All to keep the money flowing. Its a bad bad idea.

And third is the fact that the no child left behind is really a means to dismantle the public education system. Its the Bush Inc formula. Dress up as the champion of something. Strut around proposing programs. Get them put in place. And then do not fund them. This not only detroys the program but because the system you drop this one is struggling to make it work they defund all the other programs to keep it alive. Like George's shot at Nasa. You simply give them a white elephant they cannot take care of and then make sure they do not have the resources to keep it up. Its a win-win for the right. They dismantle the government and make it look like passing new programs is useless.

[DrWeird]

10. It doesn't work.

You end up with a nation full of idiots, as stupid as Bush. And then you get a lot more drive by posts.

[JackDragna]

11. Some specifics to chew on.

I'm an educator in training and have learned a bit about why NCLB is lunacy. The nuts and bolts of NCLB is that schools must have X percent of their student body pass all the standardized tests administered by the state every year. The percent increases every year up through 2011, when the act officially ends.

The problems:

- The percentage goes up gradually until about 2008-2009, when schools have to have close to 97% of their students receiving passing scores on standardized tests. By 2011, schools must have 100% of their students passing the tests. That's right, 100%. If the schools don't have 100% passing, they're subject to disciplinary action by the state and federal government, up to and including firing teachers and administrators. I don't know about the rest of you, but I consider the expectation all students will pass standardized tests to be about as reasonable as expecting a cow to jump over the moon.

- As if 100% passing wasn't bad enough, the act forces schools to include all their students to be included in standardized test scores. That means all the students with learning disabilites, emotional disabilities, physical impairments and so on must take the tests and their scores must count toward the school's overall score. Even worse, the NCLB act recognizes eight different "minority" subgroups of which a student can be a part, ranging from ethnic minorities to those with the disabilites mentioned above. Any of these groups are considered to exist in a school if the school has ten or more members of that group. Any one student can be a member of more than one group, so, theoretically, a black student with dyslexia would qualify as a member of two groups. Here's the kicker: if any one minority group in a school doesn't pass the exams, then the whole school is considered to be failing, even if the overall percentage of students passing is higher than that required by NCLB. One now sees how the practice of having students exist in multiple groups is utterly devastating towards a school's chances of passing. If the black, dyslexic child mentioned above does poorly, then that child's scores help submarine the average in two minority groups. The only explanation for such a backwards way of doing things is because the Bush administration wants to submarine public schools. Not only will public schools (particularly schools in poor areas) not meet the overall standards, any school with a lot of "problem" kids will never pass because their minority groups will tend to fail.

- Perhaps the most damning critique of NCLB, however, has nothing to do with its simplistic, asinine mechanics. Many state school standards around the country were actually getting away from using only standardized tests as a judge of a student's performance. Schools were considering grades, portfolios and more evaluative measures of a student's performance to determine whether the student was learning. The ONLY component of NCLB, on the other hand, is performance on standardized test scores. Making test scores the sole criterion of judgement forces teachers to "dumb down" the curriculum in a way that's a million times worse than any conservative ever complained about occurring in a public school. Student's aren't dumb: if you emphasize processing skills only and don't encourage them to think critically, you'll get a bunch of robots who only care about the "right answers" to things. Creativity and critical thinking are stifled. We preach about needing wizened, tech-savvy kids to fulfill tomorrow's jobs, but all we do is pander to a culture who thinks constant testing equals education. This is the true disaster of NCLB.

[Iverson]

12. 1. It's a scam.

2. Its goal is to defund public education.
3. It is internally inconsistent.

edited apostrophe

[wellst0nev0ter]

13. One More

Military recruiters will have unrestricted and uncontested access to schools participating in the No Child Left Behind Act, which means all the well off kids attending private schools don't have to put up with fliers or an accelerated draft notice.

[procopia]

14. more appropriately called "Helter Skelter"

Here is a great website with several articles dealing with NCLB.

http://www.nochildleft.com/

From "The Cheapening of America:"

I. Flooding the Workplace with Dropouts

Given the huge number of students who never graduated from their Texas high schools during the past decade (see "A Lost Generation? A Million Left Behind?"), it is likely that NCLB, (which is based on many of the same mistaken strategies) will provide a supply of cheap labor for the next decade as school dropouts and pushouts pour out of classrooms before their time, taking up their spots in the fast food restaurants and low paid service jobs of this nation.

As Wal-Mart and other low-paying retailers battle it out to lower prices, cheap labor and poor wages with minimal benefits are prime weapons in the competition for shoppers.


Pushing Students onto the Streets and Behind the Counters Early

Combining high stakes testing with punishment and public humiliation is a sure fire way to fail our children, leaving millions behind so they can be "nickel and dimed" - condemned to fill the burgeoning ranks of the marginally employed. In her exposé, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich describes this marginal minimum wage existence in graphic terms.

[Postman]

15. Unfunded mandate

You would think he would have the decency to provide the funding if you're going to propose these great (sarcasm) ideas.