OBAMA’S RIGHT WING EDUCATION POLICY

President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently advocated rating teachers based on their students standardized test scores. This was also unstated approval of the terrible federal law, No Child Left Behind.
The federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, also known as the No Child Left Behind Act) has made things much worse for our public schools.
“This law sets teachers up for certain failure,” says Dr. James Popham UCLA professor emeritus and an expert on testing and student evaluation. “Improvement is set so high that it will be impossible to attain.”
George Mason University professor Gerald Bracey holds the same opinion. He agrees with Popham that the ESEA has “a number of impossible-to-meet provisions.”
All schools must test all children in grades 3 through 8 each year in reading and math and two years later in science. Schools must also show adequate yearly progress (AYP). After 12 years, all schools and all students will again be required to meet “proficient” levels.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has come up with a set of educational terms, such as basic, below basic, advanced, as well as “proficient.” NAEP achievement levels and their definitions have been, including such prestigious groups as UCLA, the Center for Research and Evaluation, Student Standards and the National Academy of Sciences.
Lyle Jones of the University of North Carolina points out that American fourth-graders ranked third in the world on TIMSS science tests, but only 12 percent ranked “proficient” on the NAEP Science Assessment.
The ESEA requires NAEP standards for all states. All states must participate in the NAEP reading and math test to confirm their own state results.
“Most states will never reach ‘proficiency’ levels on NAEP tests,” says Bracey. “When they don’t, districts will then be subjected to increasingly severe and unworkable sanctions. Teachers can be fired, kids sent to other districts, districts abolished.”
North Carolina and Texas have been singled out as having great improvement on test scores. But if the ESEA’s new provisions had been in place for a few years, 90 percent of schools in these two states would be labeled “failing.”
As Professor Bracey reports, conservative public school critic Denis Doyle has written, “No Child Left Behind (legislation) means that the U.S.A. is about to be inundated in a sea of bad news and tht (public) schools are going to get poleaxed.”
The school system has proven it as an ossified government monopoly that can’t reform itself,” chimed in public-school basher Chester Finn (former under-secretary of education) in the Wall Street Journal.
“When these preordained high failure rates occur,” says Bracey, vouchers and privatization will be touted as the only cure.”
Finn insists, “It is time to apply American business expertise to educaton,” just like Wall Street, no doubt.
Bracey, replies, “(As it did) with Enron, Tyco, Global Crossing, ImClone, and WorldCom?”
We can thank California congressman George Miller for the No Child Left Behind Act. He and Ted Kennedy were big backers of the bill. Miller advocated requiring tests of veteran teachers. I assume that he will be a big backer of the Obama plan to rate teachers based on their students standardized test scores. I had hoped that with the election of Obama that we would get a sane national education policy. It looks like we will have to wait a little longer for that dream to come true.