The federal approach to No Child Left Behind is what you might expect from an administration whose response to a failing strategy in Iraq is to throw good bodies after maimed ones.
This article is supposed to be about the battle in Fairfax County between it's superintendent and the government over the issue of testing. It's a fair argument, one that desperately needs to be addressed because there realistically cannot be one standard applied to each and every child in the country. Non-English speaking children deserve better than to be pressured into learning English just to take a test.
I think this columnist really misses the point of NCLB, though. It's not really based on a "mirage" or designed so that every single child will go to college. It's designed to bring more attention to the inequality in education. In our county alone, one of the wealthiest in MD and one of the best educational systems, we have managed to bring the lower, less visible schools up to the standard required by the government. Instead of us continually watching monies being poured year after year into non-needy "Blue Ribbon" schools, we have seen the playing field evened out. More federal funds have been used to accomplish this equality and I think the students and their families are much better served by this change. Where would those schools have remained had NCLB never been enacted?
We have a long way to go in measuring successes of children, schools, teachers and administrators. I give the current administration kudos for sticking to their guns with this policy. At the same time, I applaud school administrators who stand up for their students against the government to point out some glaring inconsistencies with a program that is supposed to leave no child behind but instead reduces them to unsuccessful, unhappy failures. It's time for the system to bend, time for changes, but it will never happen with below the belt comments. Just MHO!
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