On Joanne's blog - and on Jewish World Review - you can read more about the No Child Left Behind Act, Joanne's comment on the law, and the Education Gadfly's comments. EG also provides a link to the Slate article: "Flunking Out: Bush's Pet Education Bill Is In Serious Trouble."
EG's summary is quite good (the road rubber and Canadian geese metaphors are particularly descriptive), and the meat of the article is his clearly-defined separation of the real problems from the meaningless honking. Bureaucracies are hard to change, even from above, and the American public is ambivalent enough about this that poll results can easily show support for or opposition to NCLB. Some parts are managed too closely; others, not closely enough. Fine-tuning is definitely needed. Finally, the EG comes to the same conclusion about NCLB that I have made about many of the standardized testing errors that have come to light:
...much of the current squawking has to do with start-up difficulties and confusion, the friction of changing familiar practices and the pain of stretching long-idle tendons. Another year of experience will see some difficulties resolving themselves, states and districts (and schools and educators) beginning to grow accustomed to doing things differently and, perhaps, more imagination in resolving implementation problems. Mainly, though, it's important for everyone to recognize that a new day has dawned in American education and that it simply won't do to go back to sleep.
Much of the current squawking about errors in standardized tests is, I believe, due to startup issues that would be present in any endeavor - but also because there are still those out there that wish the whole testing business would "go back to sleep." That isn't going to happen.
Update: A Friendly Neighborhood Psychometrician sent an email my way because one paragraph in the Slate article seemed particularly full of "illogical statements and non-sequiturs":
NCLB was supposed to improve schools by holding them to higher academic standards and letting students transfer out of failing schools. Instead, over the past few months especially, this massive education law has generated little more than bad news, indifference, and increasing resistance. The hard-to-imagine numbers of failing schools in California and elsewhere have worn down the public's confidence in the law. Low-income and minority parents have failed to show strong interest in the transfer option that was supposed to help them escape dysfunctional schools. Congressional Democrats and some of the nation's largest education groups have already begun working to stop it in its tracks. The law seems to have few friends and many enemies.
As the FNP puts it,
Isn't the bad news and resistance exactly the result of identifying and holding schools to higher standards? If it was expected that most of the news would be good, there would have been little reason to enact the law. And who is it that finds the number of failing schools unimaginably large (other than administrators and teacher's unions, who are the main source of resistance)? The bill, and the standards weren't intended to make friends. Why doesn't the author instead look into the motivations of those resisting?
Posted by kswygert at September 8, 2003 02:45 PM