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

Sunday, February 01, 2009

Duncan Will Alleviate NCLB Quagmire With "Good Tests"

According to the new Secretary, the solution to teachers teaching to the tests is to have good tests for them to teach to. So that when the children are spending their school days bubbling in answer sheets, which the new President railed against during the Campaign, they will be bubbling in answer sheets to tests that are harder and better, rather than easier ones they can't pass now. With almost a third of public schools on the NCLB failure list already, and no one with a brain believing the current proficiency targets are achievable by 2014 or 3014, Duncan wants harder tests.

He also wants to gather the data on his bold Chicago program to pay poor students for test scores, and if the program is producing higher test scores (we might assume for those "good tests"), then he will move to take it national. With no jobs in the urban areas for these students' parents, the kids, then, just might be the new breadwinners if they cram enough "good" factoids into their good little heads long enough to cough them up onto the bubble sheets.

And what about the future of NCLB? Duncan plans a phony hear-the-public PR adventure for the Summer before initiating plans for jamming through NCLB 2.0. I am hoping there will be millions of students, parents, and teachers who will disrupt the Chief Disrupter's Plans for the final destruction of public education.

Here he is in his best pandering to the Business Roundtable monotone, avoiding the questions put to him by Campbell Brown:

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous9:27 AM

    Thank you for the insightful blog and post. As a teacher of 28 inner-city special education students at a Program Improvement Year Three school, I am discouraged by this man's top-down, status quo approach. What is this new test? Will my learning-disabled, autistic, and ADHD kids get paid to take it? Will the kids who are three years behind their grade level get more than the kids who are behind by just two? Will they all get more than the kids in Beverly Hills? Will we continue to trust the businessmen who trashed our economy to run our schools? Right now, it's not looking good.

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  2. Anonymous1:55 PM

    this article was worth reading... as a teacher i got to know some basic ideas of teaching

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  3. Anonymous10:49 PM

    As Greg Palast said, Arne Duncan only got this job because he can sink a 20 foot jump shot.

    The man is clueless about what works.

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