Methinks a few educrats will wince at Jay Mathews' and Marcus Winters' description of pre-NCLB education as a "pigsty:"
The educational establishment hates the push for standards and accountability just as teenagers hate it when parents barge into their rooms. Both prefer to live in the pigsty unencumbered. Both resent being made to clean it up. No wonder. Change is never easy, and real change is often met with kicking and screaming. That's what we're seeing, just as the standards and accountability movement — embodied in No Child Left Behind — is producing results.Posted by kswygert at May 31, 2005 03:15 PMToday's high school graduates are more likely to be academically qualified to attend college than those of a decade ago, before the accountability movement took hold. And we can expect to see more progress if No Child Left Behind expands to high schools...
While the high school graduation rate has hardly budged...[since 1991]...the percentage of students who leave high school college-ready has increased by about 9 percentage points since 1991. Thus, schools are graduating about the same percentage of students, but those who graduate are more likely to have taken the courses required to go on to college.
Students are more college-ready because learning expectations and high school graduation requirements are rising. Responding to reformers' concerns, many states increased the difficulty of their curricula and began requiring students to demonstrate mastery of more difficult material before graduating.