Bush has done many great things for our country. One of them is the No Child Left Behind.
No Child Left Behind was a failure. I have
never heard anyone with a career in education agree with it. Firstly, it's wasting what little money schools have. States are spending $12 to $18 per student per year on testing alone (
http://www.stateline.org/live/details/story?contentId=272382). That's enough to buy every student a textbook, which some schools desperately need.
Secondly, it's warping the curricula. In Washington state, a school year is required to have 180 school days. Take out the two weeks for testing, you have 166 days. Take out another two weeks (a minimal value) for straight reviewing, practice tests, etc., you have 142 days. The tests basically take a month out of the school year for nothing. There is also the idea of "teaching to the test", which is what teachers are being forced to do to ensure that students pass, and, in turn, the school passes. Instead of teaching useful material, they must teach what will be on the test.
Thirdly, the system of consequences is completely wrong. Schools that don't meet requirements are given extra funds in an attempt to improve the scores, while schools that exceed requirements are given a yearly bonus. Also, students in schools that don't meet requirements are given the option to switch to a school that does. This system makes it financially better to either stay below the AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress), or try to improve scores as closely to the AYP as possible, so the funding lasts longer. Students in lower performing schools flock to higher performing schools, causing illegally high student counts (as in, too many students and not enough teachers).
Fourth, there is no such thing as a standardized student, so standardized testing doesn't exactly make sense. Some schools have more special ed than others, and special ed going both ways, gifted and challenged. Multiple choice tests are far from the best way of gauging a large body of students' growth.
Lastly, there's the war piece. No Child Left Behind requires ALL schools to supply military recruiters with the names, addresses, and home phone numbers of ALL students. How does this improve education? It doesn't. And here's the kicker:
We spend more money on our Middle Eastern "peacekeeping" oil party than we do on our own public education. Education has a federal budget of $68.6 billion per year (
http://www.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/index.html), while we spend about $100 billion per year on Iraq (
http://money.cnn.com/2008/01/10/news/economy/costofwar.fortune/index.htm). In 2007, we spent $4,988 on every Iraqi, 3 times their GDP. That's the equivalent of $121,000 per person here (
http://zfacts.com/p/447.html).Perhaps No Child Left Behind would be effective if it actually got some money, or if it had it's ideas of improvement in order... There's my argument.
Echo
