What Is Left Behind Video

Now available at YouTube.

Text available here.

Attracting and Keeping Qualified Teachers

Rather than Teach for America's revolving door solution based on a never-ending stream of unprepared Ivy League temps, Dan Brown has some different ideas. From Huffington Post:

How can any education plan succeed when so many teachers - the lifeblood of schools - are brand new to the job? New drafts of No Child Left Behind could contain the best ideas in education history, but they won't work in the long run unless we address the biggest crisis in our schools today: recruiting and keeping quality teachers in high-needs urban schools.

A recent New York City Council study determined that 18 percent of New York City teachers leave after one year, and 25 percent are gone after two; that's nearly double the national average. A brain drain is dragging down our city schools, where 50 percent of new teachers leave within five years. In rural and suburban districts, the rate is around 10 percent.

The urban teacher "dropout" problem is fixable. Through better mentoring and in-school support for new teachers, smaller class sizes, and more competitive pay, the revolving door can be stopped.

As a rookie fourth-grade teacher in the Bronx, I was subject to an unofficial but common trial-by-fire, in which the administration loaded my class with problem-reputation children. In the first week of school, one disturbed child jumped on a desk during a 9/11 moment of silence, wildly screaming a string of expletives. My "dumping ground" room was a disaster zone from the first day and it took an incredible amount of time and effort to turn the year into a positive experience.

The combination of extremely high-needs students and my naive, rookie mistakes led to student fights and fractured lessons. At 22, I started losing my hair because of the stress. And many of my struggling students, lumped together all day in my room, were denied the individualized support and expertise they deserve.

Throughout my brutal initiation, I felt no satisfaction with the knowledge that I could possibly earn an easier set-up the next year, while the next newbie would have to twist in the wind the way I did. New teachers need protection from this ugly, unwritten practice. As things stand, it's no surprise that over a third of city teachers reported in a citywide 2007 Department of Education survey that they do not trust their principals.

Rookies require a lot of help to manage the taxing and seemingly endless list of tasks that running a classroom requires. Green teachers should be paired with quality veterans in "team-teaching" environments to experience good practices in action.

New teachers should also work with smaller classes, so that they - and the children - aren't overwhelmed. My classes had 25 to 28 students on average; the middle school classes I currently work with have no fewer than 30. A better number would be 20. And teachers aren't the only ones pleading for more intimate spaces; lower class size is the No. 1 recommendation among parents in the NYC Department of Education survey.

Smaller classes will keep teachers' workloads under control and allow for many more critical opportunities for individual and small-group attention. Strong personal relationships are an invaluable part of education, and giant classes make it difficult to foster these relationships with every student.

The top recommendation in the City Council report for attracting and retaining teachers is: "Increase salaries to more competitive levels." Coupling higher salaries with broader student loan forgiveness would draw many more talented teachers to the field.

This year, a first-year New York City teacher with a bachelor's degree will earn $43,362. Most rookie teachers around the country earn far less. There are some bonuses available for high-needs subject math and science teachers, but the majority of new teachers make do with pay in the low 40s and no help with New York City's hardest-hitting expense - housing. Recently, the United Federation of Teachers struck a deal to build 234 affordable housing units in the South Bronx for educators. This is a start, but it will help to stem the teacher attrition crisis only if it spreads much further than 234 apartments.

An uncountable number of excellent would-be teachers choose higher-earning jobs because they are saddled with student loan debt, or because earning a rookie teacher salary is financially prohibitive. Public servants deserve better.

New teachers must be supported in their professional environments and their pocketbooks. The prospect of walking away from teaching - a job that many enter for altruistic, good-hearted reasons - will be a lot less likely when it is solidified as a nurturing, competitive-salaried profession.

Supporting teachers has a price tag, but it can be partially offset by reducing New York Ciity's $115 million annual turnover expenses. Nationally, the annual turnover expense is in the billions. Let's spend our money on offense, not defense.

Parents and students deserve continuity and excellence from schools. Unless we make more of a front-end investment in teachers, we will continue to hemorrhage good people, and scramble every year to replace them with well-meaning but under-prepared rookies.

Dan Brown is the author of the memoir, "The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle." He currently teaches at a middle school in East Harlem.

A version of this essay originally appeared in the New York Post.

Education Policy and Disaster Capitalism

From Raw Story:

Author Naomi Klein sits down with Bill Maher to discuss her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

The Shock Doctrine shares a sentiment that, while corporations are engineered to profit off of situations, planned or otherwise, the United States under President Bush has corporations opportunistically poised to collect taxpayer-funded payouts from disasters such as 9/11, Katrina and the Iraq occupation.

Calling it the "mission statement of the Bush administration," Klein says that politicians are seeing themselves as facilitators between disasters and their friends in the private sector. Each time there's a disaster, says Klein, politicians use the "shock" felt by the citizenry to "push through a further privatization agenda" with little opposition.

"In New Orleans," continues Klein, "it's the privatization of the school system, the public housing. After September 11th, it was the launching of a new economy in privatized homeland security, and in Iraq it's the Blackwater economy--The worse things get in Iraq, the more privatized--and profitable--this war becomes.

So it's not about the corporations taking advantage; we expect corporations to do that. It's about the politicians who think the government should be an ATM machine and just transfer wealth to their friends in exchange for a deposit in the form of campaign contributions."

"But you're talking about our government and corporations as if they're two different things," quips Maher. "Now, we all know that communism is when the government takes over private business. But, when corporations take over the government, that is what has been defined as fascism.

Do you think that's where we're at?"

Klein agrees, adding: "You could call it crony capitalism, you could call it corporatism; but it certainly not the free market."

"And, the irony is," she continues, "it's the free market ideology that gets used to propel this vision forward which has absolutely nothing to do with--it's not free for anybody but the contractors..."

Governments have historically colluded with business to manipulate the public after traumatic events, says Klein; The Shock Doctrine, she says, aims to prepare the public for the next disaster, as to not remain vulnerable to big business and big government.

Darling-Hammond on NCLB

From the SF Chronicle:

One of the central lessons of No Child Left Behind is that if school sanctions are tied to test scores, the testing tail can wag the schooling dog. And a key problem for the United States is that most of our tests aren't measuring the kinds of 21st century skills we need students to acquire and that are at the core of curriculum and assessment in high-achieving countries.

While a debate rages about whether our tests should be created at the national or state level, this argument is focused on the wrong issue.

We need to focus on the quality of our standards and assessments rather than fighting over who administers them. Unless we change the way we think about learning and testing, it won't matter who makes the tests. They will still be a major part of the problem of American education, rather than the solution.

The plain truth is that the United States is falling far behind other nations on every measure of educational achievement. In the latest international assessments, the United States ranked 28th out of 40 countries in math - on par with Latvia - 20th in science, and 19th in reading, even further behind than a few years ago. In addition, these other countries surpass us in graduation rates and, over the last decade, in higher education participation as well.

Although 60 percent of our high school graduates go off to college, only half of these are well-enough prepared to graduate with a degree - far too few for the knowledge economy we now operate. So, while our own youth are often unprepared for modern employment, Silicon Valley lobbies for more H-1B visas to bring in skilled workers to fill high-tech jobs.

Among the highest-achieving countries, some - including Japan and Singapore - have national standards and tests. Others - such as China (where Hong Kong and Macao score well), Australia and Canada - have state-level standards and tests. Top-scoring Finland focuses primarily on local assessment. While these countries manage their systems differently, they have in common a curriculum focused on critical thinking, problem solving and examinations that require students to solve complex real-world problems and defend their ideas orally and in writing.

In most cases, their assessment systems combine centralized (state or national) assessments that use mostly open-ended and essay questions with local assessments given by teachers, which are factored into the final examination scores. These local assessments - which include research projects, science investigations, mathematical and computer models and other products - are mapped to the syllabus and the standards for the subject and are selected because they represent critical skills, topics and concepts. They are generally designed, administered and scored locally.

By contrast, our multiple-choice tests - which focus the curriculum on low-level skills - are helping us to fall further and further behind. Another part of the problem is that the standards used to guide teaching in many states are a mile wide and an inch deep: Most high-achieving countries teach (and test) fewer topics each year and teach them more thoroughly so students build a stronger foundation for their learning.

Whereas students in most parts of the United States are typically asked simply to recognize a single fact they have memorized from a list of answers, students in high-achieving countries are asked to apply their knowledge in the ways that writers, mathematicians, historians and scientists do.

In the United States, a typical item on the 12th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress, for example, asks students which two elements from a multiple choice list are found in the Earth's atmosphere. An item from the Victoria, Australia, high school biology test (which resembles those in Hong Kong and Singapore) describes how a particular virus works, asks students to design a drug to kill the virus and explain how the drug operates (complete with diagrams), and then to design and describe an experiment to test the drug - asking students to think and act like scientists.

Locally, students in other countries also complete required assessments like lab experiments and research papers that help evaluate student learning in the classroom. These assessments, which together count at least half the total examination score, allow the testing of complex skills that cannot be measured in a two-hour test on a single day. They ensure that students receive stronger learning opportunities. And they give teachers timely information they need to help students improve - something that standardized tests that produce scores several months later cannot do.

These assessments in other nations are not used to rank or punish schools, or to deny promotion or graduation to students. (In fact, several countries have explicit proscriptions against such practices.) They are used to evaluate curricula and guide professional learning - in short, to help schools improve.

By asking students to show what they know through real-world applications of knowledge, these other nations' assessment systems promote serious intellectual work that is discouraged in U.S. schools by the tests many states have adopted under No Child Left Behind. Although some states, such as high-scoring Connecticut, Maine, Vermont and Nebraska, have created assessments that resemble those in other countries, the requirements and costs of No Child have led an increasing number of states to abandon their challenging performance assessments for more simplistic machine-scored tests.

A growing body of research has shown that as more stakes become attached to such tests, teachers feel pressured to teach a multiple-choice curriculum that does not produce skills as they are used in the real world. Fully 85 percent of teachers in a recent poll said they feel the tests encourage them to teach in ways that are counterproductive.

As one teacher put it: "I have seen more students who can pass the (state test) but cannot apply those skills to anything if it's not in the test format.

I have students who can do the test but can't look up words in a dictionary and understand the different meanings. ... As for higher-quality teaching, I'm not sure I would call it that. Because of the pressure for passing scores, more and more time is spent practicing the test and putting everything in test format."

Studies confirm that as teaching looks more like testing, U.S. students are doing less writing, less science, less history, reading fewer books, and even using computers less in states that will not allow their use on standardized tests.

Indeed, as state test scores have gone up under No Child Left Behind, scores on other tests measuring broader skills have not. Data on the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that the rate of improvement in math achievement has slowed considerably since No Child was passed in 2002, and reading achievement has completely stalled, with declines at the eighth-grade level. This is likely because a test prep curriculum in the early grades does not provide the foundation that students need to do higher-level work later on.

We need to encourage our schools to teach and evaluate the higher-order thinking and performance skills that leading nations emphasize in their systems, and this requires major changes in No Child Left Behind.

The draft House bill for reauthorizing No Child, under the leadership of the chairman, Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, would begin to rectify this situation by permitting states to use a broader set of assessments and encouraging the development and use of performance assessments, like those used abroad.

These changes, though not yet as far-reaching as they ultimately need to be, are a necessary step in the direction needed to create a globally competitive curriculum in U.S. schools.

As the House bill is revised and the Senate bill is drafted in the coming weeks, creating the incentives for a 21st century education system - rather than one pointed at the factory model of the past - should be a leading priority.

Linda Darling-Hammond is the Charles E. Ducommun professor of education at Stanford University, where she has created the Stanford Educational Leadership Institute and the School Redesign Network. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.

Louisiana Racism and Tightening the Noose on Mychal Bell--Again

When racism is ensconced as a core principle, it is hard to give it up. From WaPo:

JENA, La. -- A teenager at the center of a civil rights controversy was back in jail Thursday after a judge decided the fight that put him in the national spotlight violated terms of his probation for a previous conviction, his attorney said.

Mychal Bell, who along with five other black teenagers is accused of beating a white classmate, had gone to juvenile court Thursday expecting another routine hearing, said Carol Powell Lexing, one of Bell's attorneys.

Instead, after a six-hour hearing, state District Judge J.P. Mauffrey Jr. sentenced him to 18 months in jail on two counts of simple battery and two counts of criminal destruction of property, Lexing said.

He had been hit with those charges before the Dec. 4 attack on classmate Justin Barker. Details on the previous charges, which were handled in juvenile court, were unclear.

"He's locked up again," Marcus Jones said of his 17-year-old son. "No bail has been set or nothing. He's a young man who's been thrown in jail again and again, and he just has to take it."

After the attack on Barker, Bell was originally charged with attempted murder, but the charges were reduced and he was convicted of battery. An appeals court threw that conviction out, saying Bell should not have been tried as an adult on that charge. . . .

After Six Years, Conservatives Discover What They Always Knew

Bush's original version of NCLB that he presented to Congress early in 2001 mandated school vouchers for students in schools failing to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) for three years running. So from the day that Bush's brain trust came up with his test and punish plan, there was a perverse built-in need to demonstrate public school failure in order to achieve the conservative agenda of using tax dollars to fund private and religious schools.

NCLB would provide the leverage, then, to bring about school privatization, without anyone being asked to vote on the matter. All the folks at the sludge tanks knew this, including Finn, Ravitch, Jay Greene, Hess, et al. After all, school privatization had been the conservative centerpiece for their education policy agenda since Ronald Reagan, and in 2001, it looked to insiders as if the replacement of the "public school monopoly" was about to become reality.

Bush's voucher component, however, did not survive negotiations when Congress took up the bill in the Spring of 2001, and even though Repubicans in the House introduced voucher amendments two more times that Spring prior to House and Senate approval of their respective versions, both times vouchers were voted down. Privatizers did win, however, the private tutoring provision, which was promoted among angry and disappointed conservatives as "the foot in the door" for vouchers.

By the time Congress reconvened after the 2001 Summer recess, Spellings (LaMontagne), Kress, and and handful of sludge tank insiders had become advisors to the joint conference committee, which was working to neutralize differences between the Senate and House versions. In the meantime, statisticians had run the numbers on what would happen as a result of the demand in the legislation for 100% proficiency in math and reading by 2014. As Patrick McGuinn drily notes:

It had also become clear that the "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) language contained in the bill approved by the House set unobtainable expectations for improving student test scores. Research by committee staffers had indicatied that no state in the country would be able to meet the standard as it was written at that point. The accountability language in the Senate bill, meanwhile, was regarded as too complex to be workable (McGuinn, 2006, p. 176)

It was at this critical juncture, when the underlying premise of NCLB's guaranteed failure had just been exposed, that we came to September 11, 2001. The reaction by the Congress following the terrorist attack, which would prove to be a truly bipartisan capitulation of responsibility for the future health of America's schoolchildren, was to choose the impossible over the unworkable. Both chambers would come together to approve some kind of domestic legislation before the onset of war, even though all the insiders knew the NCLB legislation was based on unachievable goals. And thus we came to inherit federal legislation that preserved the conservative cause of school privatization as an alternative to the soon-to-fail public system, even if charter schools would come to stand in for the more obvious, and odious, voucher solution.

So it is with some wee bit of consternation that I now see Finn's and Hess's Fordham Institute revisionist version of the facts surrounding NCLB's passage. Hess and Finn now pretend that the 100% guaranteed failure proficiency target was the result of naïve liberals blinded by their civil rights do-gooderism. They go so far as to proclaim that "today's NCLB amounts to a civil rights manifesto dressed up as an accountability system." In fact, the opposite is true: what NCLB has always represented is a phony accountability system dressed up as a civil rights manifesto, one originally proposed by the Party that regularly garners less than 10% of the African-American vote in national elections. Hmm.

Why am I not surprised to see Checker and Rick get it exactly backwards? And why am I not at all surprised to see Finn and Hess now feverishly working to disspell the melting myth of 100% proficency that they worked so assiduously to put in place just 6 years ago?

From Checker's and Rick's Desks:

Leave no (none, zero, nada) child behind?

Passed by Congress in late 2001 and signed by President George W. Bush one year after his inauguration, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is the most ambitious federal education statute ever. After five years of experience with a statute that aims to produce "universal proficiency" (in math and reading, mainly in grades 3-8) by 2014, and with reauthorization looming, it's time to draw some conclusions about how NCLB has unfolded on the ground--and how it ought to be changed. Much has been written about NCLB's particular testing regimen. Far less has been written about the law's remedies, whereby a Title I school that fails to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) is subject to a parade of stiffening interventions designed to change it and give new options to its students. . . . . But as Congress sets about reauthorizing the law, diving into its innards to tweak this and that, it will pay insufficient heed to NCLB's main problem, which is not concerned with tests or remedies but with philosophy. The law began with the noble yet naïve promise that every U.S. schoolchild will attain "proficiency" in reading and math by 2014. While there is no doubt that the number of "proficient" students can and should increase dramatically from today's 30-ish percent (using the National Assessment definition of proficiency), and while the achievement of children below the proficient level also can and should rise closer to proficiency, no educator in America believes that universal proficiency will, in fact, be attained by 2014, not, at least, by any reasonabled definition of proficiency. Only politicians promise such things. The inevitable result is cynicism and frustration among educators and a "compliance" mentality among state and local officials. . . . At its heart, today's NCLB amounts to a civil rights manifesto dressed up as an accountability system. This provides an untenable basis for serious reform, as if Congress declared that every last molecule of water or air pollution would vanish by 2014, or that all American cities would be crime-free by that date. There is evidence from states such as Florida and California that the act is causing them to restructure reasonably good schools, to confound their own pre-existing (and sometimes superior) accountability regimens, and to fracture coherent school improvement strategies. NCLB is also pushing states to move aggressively in too many schools at once, ensuring that capacity won't be up to the challenges at hand. Whatever the political value of promising to "leave no child behind," the results thus far threaten to undermine two decades of hard-won gains on educational accountability. NCLB's dogmatic aspirations and cobbled-together design are producing a compliance-driven regimen that recreates the very pathologies it was intended to solve. It's time to relearn the lessons of the Great Society, when ambitious programs designed to promote justice and opportunity were undone by utopian formulations, unworkable implementation structures, and a stubborn unwillingness to acknowledge the limits of federal action in the American system. In the end, Washington is not well-positioned to effect radical change in a sphere that depends primarily on state and local action, or successfully to require states and districts to adopt measures whose efficacy hinges on gusto and creativity rather than compliance. No matter how finely the legislative craftsmen tune NCLB 2.0, powerful cultural and political forces will continue to impede school improvement. A sense of urgency and outsized aspirations is commendable, but there's a world of difference between determination and delusion. We have spent forty years since the LBJ era learning how hard school reform actually is. Yet too many otherwise serious people, such as the members of the Aspen-based NCLB Commission, sustain that pretense, indeed worsen it by suggesting that sixty-plus technocratic changes and considerably more federal control will cure what ails the law. . . .

Linda Perlstein Commentary

From WaPo:

By Linda Perlstein
Thursday, October 11, 2007; A19

While at an elementary school doing research for a book about the impact of standards and testing on American education, I spent a lot of time watching a girl I called Whitney. Among other disabilities, Whitney had mild mental retardation. Although she was in fourth grade, she could sound out words only on the level of a first-grader, and her ability to comprehend what she read and heard seemed no more advanced.

I once saw a teacher spend 15 minutes, as the rest of the class worked independently, trying to explain to Whitney that when you sell something you get money for it, a concept crucial to understanding the story at hand. Teaching homonyms was exhausting, if not futile, because at least one word of every pair (dew, grate) was something Whitney had never heard before and could not grasp once she did. When a special education teacher told Whitney that synonyms have the same meaning, she asked, inexplicably, "Like a science experiment? Like a dinosaur?"

As Congress considers revisions to the No Child Left Behind Act, I hope lawmakers think about children such as Whitney. While many elements of the landmark education law are up in the air, one provision almost certain to be included is the "growth model": assessing the "adequate yearly progress" of schools not by calculating how many fourth-graders passed a test compared with the previous year but by measuring the progress made by each child. This is a welcome change and if executed properly may yield far more useful information.

But a large problem remains: Under the versions of the law under discussion, Whitney will still be given the fifth-grade test in fifth grade, the sixth-grade test in sixth grade and so on. She will probably fail these tests -- no surprise to her teachers -- and whatever progress she makes, unless it is so miraculous as to wipe away her deficiencies altogether, will go uncredited. Worse, her time and her teachers' time will be badly misused.

Under the law, a small minority of disabled students are allowed to take a test of more basic skills. Whitney's problems aren't severe enough for her to qualify. Like other special education students, she is entitled to "accommodations" during testing. For many students, these services -- extra time, a quiet room away from the distraction of classmates, a teacher who reads the exam aloud -- level the playing field enough for them to succeed. For others, accommodations can't come close to making the difference between passing and failing.

It's not just that Whitney's progress can't be properly measured by a test that's way above her head. It's that by taking to heart the law's mandate of every student in a grade working toward the same target, administrators are making bad instructional decisions that permeate classrooms nationwide. Teachers follow pacing guides that tell them what to teach each day, no matter where their students are. Students take benchmark exams each quarter and unit tests each week that correspond to how much time has passed, not what those particular children need to learn. Watching a new immigrant I called Mateo struggle with a quiz that asked whether colonization meant an armed invasion, peaceful revolution, settling of new land or control of goods -- English terms he had never heard before -- simply because that was the quiz fifth-graders were taking that day in preparation for their state test, I felt like I was witness to nothing more than a waste of precious time.

That students such as Whitney and Mateo are getting more individual attention is easily the best outcome of the law so far; that this attention is directed toward the wrong goals is negligence. Educators talk about the importance of teaching children as individuals, and they are right. In the classroom, though, they're not following through. You can blame No Child Left Behind, the climate it's induced or the questionable choices people make in its name. Whichever way, as long as students are judged only on grade-level tests, no matter their needs, and as long as the education they get the rest of the year hews to that goal, they will lose out.

Politicians say that anything less than holding fourth-graders accountable for fourth-grade work amounts to leaving children behind, and challenging that notion has become taboo. "For the vast majority of students, grade-level learning is not too much to ask," Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said last month. The only time I saw Whitney make progress was the hour she spent each day with a specialist who guided her in blending letters to make sounds -- hardly a skill in the fourth-grade curriculum. Is it too much to ask that children such as Whitney be taught what they need to learn in order to make their own adequate yearly progress?

Linda Perlstein, who covered education for The Post from 1998 to 2004, is the author of "Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade."

New Research on Stress in Children

Note there are ways to combat some of the stress. From The Guardian:

School tests, global warming, terror all contribute to anxiety says review

Polly Curtis, education editor
Friday October 12, 2007

National tests for seven and 11-year-olds are putting children under stress and feeding into a "pervasive anxiety" about their lives and the world they are growing up in, according to an intimate portrait of primary school life published today.

Primary-aged children worry daily about global warming and terrorism as well as their friendships and passing the next exam, according to a report based on 700 in-depth interviews with children, their teachers and parents, which will feed into the biggest independent review of primary education in 40 years.

The findings echo a report from Unicef which this year placed Britain at the bottom of a league table charting the well-being of children across the developed world. This week a survey by the Howard League for Penal Reform revealed that 95% of 10 to 15-year-olds in the country have experienced crime at least once.

Today's Cambridge University report, Community Soundings, says national tests leave most children stressed and some middle class parents paying for a "parallel" education system employing tutors to get children through their exams even before the age of 11.

Some pupils said the tests were "scary" and made them nervous.

"These findings do build up to a sense that important changes are needed within the primary sector," said Robin Alexander, a fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, and a former professor of education at Leeds and Warwick, who is heading the Primary Review. Today's research will feed into the review, which reports in a year's time and is expected to have a significant influence on education policy.

He said: "The surprise is that although we made considerable efforts to tap a wide range of opinions inside and outside of schools ... there was a large degree of consensus on what are the big issues."

Many adults questioned for the study voiced concerns over the influence of the media on children and pressures of consumerism while more suggested that they believed that there is a break down in family life and community.

"The responses reveal a pervasive anxiety about the current educational and social contexts ... and a deeper pessimism about the world in which today's children are growing up," the report says.

Pupils feared the world outside their school gate - those in urban areas were particularly worried about violent crime although parents' biggest fear for their children was traffic accidents.

Researchers found that pupils in schools which tackled the problems they worried about, such as those with eco-clubs and recycling schemes to teach children about environmental problems, were happier.

"Where schools had started engaging children with global and local realities as aspects of their education they were noticeably more upbeat. In several schools children were involved in environmental projects and the sense that 'we can do something about it' seemed to make all the difference," they write.

School staff told the researchers that some parents were not involved enough, while others were too "pushy" and demanding of their children academically. The General Teaching Council for England opposes national tests for seven, 11 and 14-year-olds, the results of which are published in league tables and scrutinised by parents when choosing a school. Wales has scrapped them. Ministers in England are adamant that they will remain.

Prof Alexander said the tests would be addressed in the review: "After what we've heard it would be perverse if we didn't do something on them," he said.

But he added: "Although there is a strong vein of concern that childhood used to be better it's important not to indulge in nostalgia for childhood, it has always been under stress in one way or the other and poverty was much more prevalent in the 1950s. Every generation has its nightmares and problems to contend with."

Bill Richardson Today on NCLB : SCRAP IT

Part of a big speech by Bill Richardson today outlining his education agenda. Read the rest here:

Thank you so much for being here today.

As we stand here today, our schools have again been stricken by tragedy. Our prayers go out to the students and parents of Cleveland, Ohio. Each senseless act of violence lessens us all. Every American loses a piece of his or her heart. Every American must again grieve. Every American feels a little less safe.

We must do everything possible to ensure that schools become safe havens.

I will and we must insist that national attention is given to preparedness for school safety at the K-12 level and in higher education as well. I will require all schools to develop safety protocols and policies to be used in an emergency.

And I renew my call for national instant background checks on all gun sales, including at gun shows. We must keep guns out of the hands of the irresponsible -- criminals and the mentally ill.

I want to talk to you about how we can fix our education system ... because the fact is, it's broken. It's broken from top to bottom.

Too many kids lack access to pre-K ... not enough graduate high school.

Too many of our young people are unprepared for college ... not enough can afford to go.

Too many of our workers are falling behind the rest of the world ... not enough are getting the training they need to compete.

There have been too many promises ... and not enough leadership.

George Bush promised to be the education President. You know how far that promise got? About as far as his promise on inauguration day to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. About as far as his promise to take real action on global warming. About as far as his promise to be fiscally responsible.

Far from leaving no child behind, the Bush Administration seems to have left reality behind.

The President talks about an ownership society, then cuts funding for workforce training.

He talks about freedom, but his actions have left young college graduates shackled by debt.

The President talks about an America we can all believe in; then he delivers policies that benefit only a few.

Enough is enough.

The past seven years have been a dark period in our nation's history.

It's time we turn on the lights.

Education is the spark that lights minds. As we ignite schools across the country, we can kindle a great fire of learning that will light the way to the future.

We must begin with educating our young people, but we cannot stop there. Learning should not end at eighteen. And every American must have a part in the basic promise of our nation -- that we can make every tomorrow better than today.

That starts with building the best public school system in the world. Compromises will not do. We must skip the caution. Skip the half measures. What we need is bold change.

My Democratic opponents have been cautious in confronting George Bush on this issue. Just as they trusted George Bush on the Iraq war and the Patriot Act, they trusted him on No Child Left Behind. The result has been a travesty for our children.

Some say fix it, others say tweak it. Senator Hillary Clinton says reform it.

I also have two words for No Child Left Behind: Scrap It.

As a Governor I have seen first-hand the impact of this failed policy on our children. And although Senator Clinton and some of my other opponents voted for it, they should admit their error, and join my call for real change.

The key to a good education is not narrow tests or Washington wisdom. The key is a good teacher in every classroom.

We need to attract and retain the best and brightest for our nation's schools. We need to start treating teachers with the professional respect that they have earned.

When I am President, teachers will have a national average starting salary of $40,000. We will improve and expand teacher training ... and strengthen standards and accountability. We will increase the number of nationally-certified teachers.

I will provide bonuses and create a loan forgiveness program for teachers who choose to work in under-performing and high-poverty areas.

I also commit to you that I will hire 100,000 new math and science teachers. It's a simple equation -- talented math and science teachers lead to inspired and successful math and science students. High-quality math and science education is not optional. It is essential to holding our position as the world's leader of progress and hope. And I will set a national goal of making America number one in the world in math and science within fifteen years.

I will convene a national summit on Educational Standards and Accountability. We need to develop national Gold Standards that the states can adopt.

We should move from a pass/fail model to a more comprehensive system of measurement. Narrow tests will only create narrow people.

In general, we need to end the policy of punishment that Bush gave us with No Child Left Behind. If a school fails, we shouldn't punish that school, we should help it.

I also promise that I will strongly and steadfastly oppose school vouchers. . . .

D. C. Vouchers, or the Opportunity (to Steal) Scholarship Hoax

If conservatives at ED were truly concerned about poor kids in D. C. getting a choice for a better education, it seems there would be some way of checking up on what those $7,500 vouchers, er, "opportunity scholarships" are buying.

Oh, I forgot--oversight gets in the way of that invisible hand of the market, which we should know will surely take care of any shoddy educational workmanship in these entrepeneurial education enterprises that are offering these D. C. children so many quality choices.

Well, apparently the invisible hand has taken a vacation or just has more important omnipotences to get done (have you heard it clapping in Iraq?), because a yet-to-be-released GAO Report says that poor D. C. parents have once again been sold a bill without much goods to go with it--and no one seems to be concerned. In fact, the Washington Scholarship Fund, the contractor chosen by ED to run the voucher program, appears to to believe that faked supervisory visits, self-certification. and self-oversight are the best ways to insure quality schools for these kids.

Gymasiums in closed strip mall pizza joint schools? Sure, they have those right back there next to the storage room. Just like they have certified teachers and accreditation. From WaPo:

A voucher program designed to send low-income children in the District to better-performing private schools has allowed some students to take classes in unsuitable learning environments and from teachers without bachelor's degrees, according to a government report.

The shortcomings are detailed in a draft prepared by the Government Accountability Office about the $12.9 million D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. The GAO said the program lacks financial controls and has failed to check whether the participating schools were accredited.

The report, obtained by The Washington Post, assesses how the D.C. government, federal education officials and the nonprofit Washington Scholarship Fund have handled the voucher program, which is in its fourth year with 1,900 students and 58 participating private schools.

The findings are likely to stoke debate about the merits of the country's first federally funded K-12 scholarship program and widen the political divide over vouchers, which Republicans favor as a form of school choice. The GAO undertook the study at the request of three Democrats, Sens. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.) and Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.) and District Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton.

The controversial voucher program was passed by Congress in 2004 to give low-income families the option of using $7,500 toward private school tuition. The average D.C. applicant is a single parent who makes $17,000 a year and has four children.

Students in Ohio and Wisconsin are also taking part in similar programs. But in the District, the report says, instead of giving poor children access to better learning environments, program officials put children at risk by failing to certify whether all of the participating schools had the required operating permits.

In a random sample of 18 schools reviewed by the GAO, two lacked occupancy permits, and four lacked permits needed for buildings used for educational purposes. At least seven of the 18 schools were certified as child development centers but not as private schools. In one case, a school was operating in a space designed for a retail store, the report says.

The schools were largely allowed to self-report that they were in compliance with city regulations, the report says, increasing the possibility that students were being ill-served without proper oversight.

"Self-certification without review to verify that the certifications are factual increases the risk that federal funds intended to allow children from low-income families to attend private schools will result in some students attending schools that are not in compliance with the District law," the report says.

The Washington Scholarship Fund, which operates the program under a contract with the U.S. Department of Education, told GAO investigators that it conducted site visits at 42 schools, but the GAO could confirm a visit to only one school.

Some schools told fund officials that they had certain amenities, such as a gymnasium or an auditorium; the report says they did not. Parents might have been misled when they reviewed the list of participating schools and their programs, the report says.

Gregory M. Cork, president and chief executive of the fund, said it has no capacity to enforce whether private schools comply with D.C. laws.

"We're not a government oversight agency," Cork said. "We report the characteristics of schools as they report them to us. Occasionally, a school might fill in the wrong blank. What we do take seriously is to match our families with the schools they choose and the learning environments that are best for their children." . . . .