"A child's learning is the function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher." James Coleman, 1972

Monday, August 21, 2006

NCLB and Ideology of the Absurd


(Graphic from MTA sponsored study, Facing Reality.)

Here's a taste of Sunday's editorial from the Louisville Courier-Journal:

Even good ideas have limits, beyond which they turn absurd, destructive or both.

So it is with school accountability. The federal No Child Left Behind law has pushed a good idea -- setting ambitious standards and measuring schools' progress toward them -- well beyond its reasonable limits.

The result is that the nation is on the verge of becoming a Saturday Night Live version of Lake Wobegon: a place where, by official decree, all the schools are below average.

As the release last week of another round of bleak NCLB school ratings confirmed, even progress now counts as failure, and even good educators are deemed too bad to endure. . .


1 comment:

  1. Anonymous9:17 PM

    Well, you know what the problem is? Folks up in Massachusetts haven’t learned to set their standards low enough to begin with. Works for us in Texas. And if it doesn’t, were not adverse to a little cheating or pretending we just don’t have the information to evaluate things properly.

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