Researchers’ Assessment of NCLB Shows Need for Improvement
With the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act looming on the horizon this year, the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles (CRP/PDC) at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies recently completed a collection of essays containing several critiques of the law as well as proscriptions for change.
January 17th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
NCLB was designed to bring the quality of poor, minority schools up to par with the rest of the public schools across the country. Without the objective tests, instructor qualifications and institutional audits we would have no way of telling how schools are improving. Activists are outraged that minorities have lower test scores than Whites and Asians and that disparity is exactly what NCLB is focused on changing. At the end of the day, it’s the core knowledge that NCLB’s tests measure that determine success in college and in life. If activists can’t accept this reality then they are damning the groups to whom they pander to a continuous cycle of underachievement.
January 25th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
It is an illusion to think that by putting pressure on the teachers and the school system, the problems families bring to the society can be solved.
Second illusion is to think that everybody has the same potential for academic achievement whereas different talents and potential to excell in the area of athletics and arts are possible and applausable.
Bell curve is real, and it is unfair for a society to build its public education system around the lower tail when the cost is equally if not mostly sahred by the families who take educational responsibility more serious.
Voucher system may be the only solution to the eduaction crisis.
January 25th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
mimi,
I agree with you but we have been hearing for decades that the public school system needs to improve and NCLB is the first federal program that contained expectations, goals and penalties/rewards. The framework for success is there, the application needs some fine-tuning but as far as a federal program is concerned, it has acuatlly done pretty well.