The Coming Fight Over No Child Left Behind
The New York Times reports today that states are gearing up for a fight over the renewal of the No Child Left Behind Act. The law, which tries to introduce accountability into schools through federally-mandated testing, has sparked opposition from those who oppose a federal role in education and those who think NCLB creates too much testing. What’s most interesting about this coming battle is that the positions the parties have taken are a great example of the kind of thinking that represented the late 20th century – and that kind of thinking isn’t good enough for the 21st century.
On the one hand are those liberals who think too much testing is bad. The broader philosophy underlying testing is the need for accountability – some metric to use to measure the success or failure of programs. As the Times story reports, teachers unions don’t like NCLB, and this might be because they’re afraid of legitimizing the principle of accountability in education. Accountability and evaluation could lead to differential pay for better and worse teachers or even to removing teacher tenure – and the unions fear both. The trouble with this position is that measuring performance is necessary. Everyone wants better public education, but the only way to know what works and what doesn’t is to evaluate; and one way to spark change is to hold people accountable for their actions.
On the other hand are the conservatives who think education should be controlled by the states and local government. The broader philosophy underlying this approach is a desire for a limited federal government and for local control over most issues. Communities are different, they argue, and localities know best what is needed to educate their children. Perhaps this argument was convincing in the 18th century when America was a nation of small farmers, or even in the 19th century, when most Americans never traveled too far. But in the 20th century America became the world’s most powerful nation. And since then, globalization has transformed the economy, the way we think about national security, and, yes, what we need from education. In this new global world, the federal government may need to take more of a role in education – jobs and threats require citizens who have greater knowledge and specific skills, and local communities might not be as good at identifying those trends.
So it sounds like NCLB could be the answer; after all, it is motivated by these sentiments:
Still, in an interview, Mr. Miller expressed impatience with lawmakers who, he said, failed to understand the law’s strategic importance to the nation’s future.
“You can get into a lot of petty politics, but there’s a mandate coming from across the country for us to improve this law,” Mr. Miller said. “There’s no other way for Congress to go. The C.E.O.s, the venture capitalists, all of them have commented on the need for America to improve its educational system. It’d be a major shock if we reneged on our federal leadership.”
But the problem is not that NCLB embodies the old conservative or the old liberal approach, but rather that it embodies a third approach – a distinctly minimalistic approach, something like what the third way ended up becoming. Instead of actually tackling a huge and complicated problem and developing a transformative solution, NCLB finds something that’s not too hard to think up, doesn’t require that much change, and is achievable without too much trouble. Of course, the consequence is that it probably won’t help too much.
Testing and withholding funds isn’t innovative enough to make American kids the best educated in the world. And NCLB doesn’t begin to address the bigger – often structural and social – factors that are hindering the education system. The problems with our education system transcend a solution of this narrow scope.
The fight ahead will, of course, be interesting and is, of course, important, but extensive debates over minimalistic education policies are not actually going to improve American education. What is needed is visionary thinking – a grand strategy for American education. Perhaps something similar to NCLB could be one component of that strategy. But it’s certainly not enough to fix American education. And we should remember that as this debate begins.
Excellent blog!
The problem with NCLB is it ignores the reality that all children are not equal in ability, desire, goals or aspirations.
Other nations put students on vocational tracks very early -- like age 12-13. It's an acknowledgement that every student is not going to be able to work calculus equations, and sending them down that road is wasted time and energy.
You can still make a good living in this country without a college degree -- if you're properly trained. For example, auto plants need skilled workers who can operate their high-tech robotic equipment, and they pay as much as 50K to start these jobs. You don't need a college degree for this work. Who wouldn't want to come right out of high school and jump into a job like this? You'd be up 200K over your college-bound friends in 4 years. Transportation and aviation sectors are so desperate for trained drivers, logistics experts, and pilots they're offering big signing bonuses.
Putting young students into a vocational track to enter one of these industries early is a win-win for the student and their employer who doesn't care what they score on a test. They want a skilled worker -- not Isaac Newton.
April 8, 2007 11:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
Nonsense.
NCLB is NOT achievable without too much trouble, certainly not in the places where it is most needed. Is punishing those educators in those places helping or hurting?
Let's say the target is 70% proficiency in something, whatever that means. Is a school that raised the score from 30% to 68% evidence of a failing school that needs to be shut down or one that is making great progress? Is its administration performing worse than a school whose score falls from 80% to 72%?
One problem with NCLB is that its yardsticks are too simple-minded.
Which brings us to this:
Why are we on TPM Cafe reading recycled Republican talking-point drivel? Always, Republicans blame the teachers. And even if some teachers ARE acting out of selfish motives, can't it also be true that the games that NCLB fosters, "teaching to the tests" and even cheating by administrators are real problems that must be addressed?
Why are the teachers' motives always fair game, but not the politicians?
Sure there are bad teachers, but if we are going to question their motivation, how about questioning the motives of our politicians and our business elites? Could it be that these elites have decided that society functions better if only a small slice of society is well-educated and that failing schools in certain areas are considered a desirable outcome? Seems to me that this possibility has to be seriously considered, since that is the direction we have actually moving in for many years.
April 8, 2007 11:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm somewhat sympathetic to this, were it not for the fact that these are the jobs that are being most frantically offshored to places where they don't have to pay 50K per year.
I would like to see greater acceptance of vocational outcomes - but we will never get it as long as we have an unashamedly selfish corporate elite running everything toward ever-expanding inequality. Proper valuation of vocational skills presupposes an egalitarianism in society that we are moving ever further away from.
April 8, 2007 11:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Could it be that these elites have decided that society functions better if only a small slice of society is well-educated"
Really, Tivo, this is Men In Black conspiracy-theory. I don't know anyone from any political POV who believes less educated students are good for the future of this country.
NCLB has poured millions into poor districts, and has actually been a boom cycle for teachers (and retired teachers) who have been paid a lot of extra money to tutor students.
Friendly advice -- you might want to edit that post, before too many people read it.
April 8, 2007 11:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
Again.
Beware of people pushing metrics as a solution. Accountability sounds good, and may even be good, but if metrics are chosen on the basis of the ease of data acquisition, there is a strong possibility that the easily collected data don't measure the important things. To measure the important things you have to know what they are and you won't find this out if the people closest to the problems, whose input could be valuable, are eliminated from the discussion on the basis of their supposed self-interested bias.
April 8, 2007 11:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't know of anyone from any political POV who would ADMIT that less educated students are good for the future of the country, but that doesn't rule out the possibility that that is in fact what they think.
What has been the fate of efforts to equalize funding among school districts as opposed to property tax funding, which insures the continued domination of current elites?
Don't all the elixirs of the Republican right lean in this direction? Charter schools may improve educational opportunity for a select few in certain areas but at the cost of leaving the public schools with the least educable and making the job of educating them that much more difficult. Closing poorly performing schools has frequently led to increased educational difficulties in the schools to which these students are forced to transfer. How does that help?
You chafe at being accused of bad faith. Okay, but why then do you accept the right-wing narrative of the last 30 or so years that routinely ascribes bad faith to teachers, many of whom entered the field out of altruistic motives?
Let's just put it this way: if the goal of our current educational policies WAS to produce a sliver of well-educated people and a mass of poorly-educated people, it could not have been better designed for that job.
April 8, 2007 12:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
I dunno. I have to say that this passage to me reads like a dishonest and really cheap shot. It also reads like a blatant misrepresentation and simplification of complicated issues.
"there are those those Liberals"? That seems like a dodge. It's easy enough to assign a view to an undefined segment. For instance, I could as easily say that "there are those Conservatives who believe pedophilia should be legal..."
Feels a lot like a cheap shot, despite the qualifier that 'too much' is bad.
I don't know about that. Having been a teacher myself, I can tell you that students learn different things at different rates.
Testing is a fundamental of just about any principle or theory of modern education. At the end of the day, there has to be means of assessing performance.
The debate is not whether testing is good or bad. I think, unquestionably, everyone agrees that testing is good and necessary.
The debate is not whether 'too much' testing is bad. Obviously, 'too much' testing is by definition, bad. That doesn't deal with the issue of how we define 'too much.'
Rather, the principal debate is over what sorts of testing are most appropriate. How do we accurately measure whether children as a whole, or children on an individual basis are learnign. How do we measure what they're learning. And how do we use this information to improve education for individual students and the body as a whole.
In that respect, standardized testing can be superficially attractive. But what is it actually measuring? And in particular, how useful is standardized testing when applied to cultural issues, to social issues. Does it really help us identify and remedy problem areas for individual students?
These are real issues. For instance, its extremely well documented now that part of the differences between urban dwellers and rural dwellers, blacks and whites, in IQ tests for generations were inbuilt cultural biases. In its bluntest terms, there were many IQ questions that simply related to white culture not black culture, so whites did better.
By nature, standardized testing involves a potential series of inbuilt biases against some groups, and demonstrably has been biased against blacks, hispanics, immigrants, etc. Is it possible to craft a standardized test so generic it has no measurable cultural bias? Would such a product do anything useful?
My father had a grade three education. In part, this was because the education system of his day was designed to flush people out. Standardized tests used back then had a very good record for winnowing people out and disposing of them.
In my youth, less than 70% of students actually finished high school. Is this a good thing. Can we as a society properly afford to, or justify simply 'giving up' on large segments of the population? Or do we commit ourselves to find better ways to teach them, and teach them to the best of their ability to learn.
It would be nice to simply write off people. But does that work? If a kid drops out of high school, is he human garbage, or is it the educational system that has failed him.
Again, I had a very viscerally negative reaction to this, because it seemed to claim that teachers were sacrificing students for their own creature comforts.
Of course, note the weasel wording "might be because" and "could lead to". It strikes me that this is cover your ass language, the same as 'too much'.
These are words and phrases that the readers eye skips over in absorbing the gist, but it leaves the writer an 'out' to claim 'well, I never actually said that, if you read what I wrote carefully...' then in fact, it is not offensive, in part for saying nothing much. But the innuendo remains, a poisonous sting for which the author takes no responsibility.
I dunno, is the writer actually being dishonest, or is it simply a matter of a punctilious style alternately cautious and inflammatory. I make no judgement, but I would caution readers to watch out for this kind of thing.
But again, I feel forced to respond to the innuendo of the passage. In part, the innuendo is so strong because no other alternatives are suggested. The 'might' and 'could be' do not really temper the clause because only the single option is presented.
There's no suggestion that it is even possible that teachers might have principled objections, or that the chain of cause and effect might not be justified.
For instance, I have a friend, one of the most decent and compassionate people I know. He's intelligent and thoughtful, he's got a Masters degree from England. He's a published novelist. He is an exemplary teacher and an exemplary human being.
And he teaches in an inner city New York school which is filled with disaffected immigrant youth whose parents are working. Compare his results as a teacher to some inept jerk who is teaching at an upper class private school... And how do you think the two of them will stack up?
So what is suggested? Pay on the basis of performance results without attention to the endless intervening factors? Well, I imagine that upper and middle class schools and school teachers will rake in the bucks... And schools and teachers in working class or poor districts, regardless of innate talent or skill, will get shafted. Keep that up for a while, and you'll turn large parts of the public school system into a hellhole.
There are potentially real policy consequences and real issues to these policies, how they might be implemented, how they might be misused. None of this is alluded to. Rather its all about 'some liberals' sacrificing kids for entitlements.
In fact, despite the 'might' and 'could be', its clear that the author presents no alternatives because, despite his waffling, this is what he seems to believe. Consider his concluding statement of the passage:
It's hard to read that as anything but an endorsement of the view that teachers are lazy fops working to avoid accountability and holding on to their perks.
In which case, I suppose I'm free to take offense.
I suppose I should disclose that I've taught school myself. I've also in my prior and subsequent careers reported on school issues, and represented both teachers and school boards. So perhaps this is why I take such offence at reasonable views so cavalierly misrepresented.
I think that the No Child Left Behind Act is a classic case of unfunded mandates and the wholesale destruction they wreak. Were the act to be funded properly, the situation would not be nearly so bad. Worse, while the principles found in the act were laudatory, there was ample potential for misuse and misapplication in the policies that followed therefrom, and that potential was inevitably realized.
I agree with Ganesh Sitaraman that education is a major topic whose problems are greater than a narrow scope. But it strikes me that Sitaraman's perspective itself is narrow.
April 8, 2007 12:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Like Valdron, I thought the post was basically dishonest. You can see it coming with the start about 20th-century thinking. Can we eradicate that cliche from journalism? It's not as if the dawn of the millenium had rendered obsolete either political principles, such as justice, or the familiar facts on the ground, such as failing inner city schools, racism, and inequality. It's not as if there's been a sea change in politics or philosophy. That's just a cliche used to discount liberalism and cover the DLC's butt or Bush's, as with "everything's changed after 9/11."
Next come the mysterious liberals opposed to testing, another bogus bit of rhetoric, the "those who" style. Valdron's discussed that (and I sure took enough tests as a kid, and thankfully did ok). After that come the conservatives favoring state and local initiatives, but that's just a cover line for real conservatives who just don't like social spending, period, and are convinced that testing is going to lead to free-market solutions. And we already know the problems with imposing free markets on public schools.
Forget it. There is no magic teaching strategy that competition will find. There is no point in withholding funding from schools that are failing because they're underfunded. There is no point in telling parents which public schools stink, because they know, and the white middle class knows enough to have given up on them and rigged the funding system against them.
Try reading real liberal critiques like Kozol's. And then try to find real solutions, even if they take money and social change. I'd respect a poster more if it did involved more than political cliches instead.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
April 8, 2007 12:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
I dunno. I don't know how American school systems do it. But up here in Canada, we generally enforce a uniform curriculum in elementary levels intended to provide for a basic standard of education. A relatively uniform curriculum is employed in junior high school.
Only in high school, ages 14 to 17, does the curriculum begin to differentiate between academic tracks and different forms of vocational tracks. Even there, the first year of high school is pretty uniform, with the increasing diversity and choices aimed at helping students find and to some extent choose their areas of aptitude.
However, I don't necessarily believe that schools should be separating children out at ages as early as 12 or 13. That's pretty young to start making decisions about someone's life, particularly when their own abilities and levels of committment have not matured. The fast starter who peters out, the late bloomer, both are very well known. Motivation seems to be one of the predictors of performance and motivation can come along or fade out at any point.
Flowing students into separate tracks is a risky propositon. Yes, many students will never get the hang of calculus, some will not find an interest in English literature. Some will not have either the ability nor the interest to pursue different forms of higher education.
But it strikes me that the risk is class selection. Ever notice how the rich and upper classes children seldom wind up being auto-mechanics or roofers? Ever notice how large numbers of capable, even brilliant, poor or working class kids get shunted out of the system, or get streamed into being menials?
All children are not equal in ability, desires, goals or aspirations. Fine.
But I think that the system is obliged to offer each of them the best chance at mazimizing those abilities, desires, goals and aspirations... instead of simply shuffling kids off based on what we think is best for them.
April 8, 2007 12:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
April 8, 2007 12:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Too bad elitists like you weren't put in the vocational track when there was still time.
April 8, 2007 12:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
NCLB tests measure a student's proficency in various subjects. They do not measure the competency or incompetency of his teacher. If their purpose, therefore, is to test the teacher, they're not only useless but what they actually indicate will never be dealt with.
It has been suggested that the purpose behind NCLB is the drive to take education out of the public sector and hand it to the private sector. Think vouchers which have been a cause celebre of the right-wing for years which has never recovered from school desegregation and which holds that public school teachers are all indoctrinators of left-wing principles. (The magic surrounding this thinking is unexplainable.)
So, low test scores indicate bad teachers indicate a failed public school system indicate privatize it and all will be well. Were it that simple.
April 8, 2007 12:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
NCLB has been a proven failure. Time to pull the plug. Why did it fail?
(1) The feds aren't the real source of education funding, so their big stick is a twig.
(2) The whole business of education testing is misconstrued. Closed ended tests are a poor design for the type of skills students need to learn, while it is essentially impossible to get reliable scoring of open ended tests. Timing is a device for the convenience of the test giver, not for determining what the respondent knows or can do.
(3) Even so, the Bush administration has been evading its own requirements.
April 8, 2007 12:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
So your personal friend is without fault and should be given a pass even though he can’t manage to teach his students to read and those teaching in upper class private schools are “inept jerks”.
Sounds like the language of a bigot to me and points to the need for objective standards
April 8, 2007 12:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Like Valderon said, I take offense at the suggestion that teachers are irresponsible flops. I am incensed that the administration which feels indignant at teh very notion of accountability, should seek accountability from honorable professionals such as teachers from across the nation.
Valderon's post was from a teacher's perspective. Mine is from the parents perspective. I noted in my earlier posting regarding my daughter's school. 5 years ago, this school was almost written off. But parents, local community reps brought it back together. Our school is a success story denied to millions of schools across the country. Because parents decided that a failed policy doenst have to shut our school down! If it was upto the NCLB our school would be closed now and that despite the parents' "choice" of having that school. So really, the NCLB is a slap to teachers, school administrators and parents alike, but to teh students it is really injustice.
April 8, 2007 1:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
I only found the phrase "inept jerks" in your post. Perhaps you are the bigot.
April 8, 2007 1:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Compare his results as a teacher to some inept jerk who is teaching at an upper class private school... And how do you think the two of them will stack up?
April 8, 2007 1:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Phelicity -
You have a good point there - Look at
No Bush Left Behind"
for those still under the impression that millions have poured into poor districts. This it the first time I am linking another website - in case it doesnt work - here it is: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_42/b4005059.htm
April 8, 2007 1:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
So far you have demonstrated that you don't know how to quote. As I wasn't interested in reading the whole of that post I used a search device to look for your quote, it wasn't there.
It has also been demonstrated in various studies that *value added* comes higher at colleges that admit students who NEED an education, not those who are already halfway through with AP credits. I imagine that this is true of high schools as well. Consequently, your first argument seems a little weak.
April 8, 2007 1:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Good post, Valdron.
And by the way, I agree even though I am not now and never have been a teacher, so even if they question your bona fides, they can't question mine. Teachers' unions are not the only opponents of over-application of standardized testing.
What gets my goat in Mr. Sitaraman's post is that he calls his warmed over and poorly-thought out prescriptions as some kind of "new thinking" even though they implicitly accept without thought one of the Republicans' most prevalent talking points - the culpability of teachers' unions for all the problems of American education.
April 8, 2007 1:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
The purpose of NCLB was to get rid of the teacher's unions. It's that simple. Goals were established which have no bearing on actual conditions and then when they aren't met the schools and the teachers get blamed for the failure.
The issue of whether measures should be set at the federal, state or local level is just a distraction. NY has had state-wide requirements (the Regents exams) for decades, this hasn't had any effect on resolving the problems of inner city and immigrant students.
Schools can't fix the problems of society. What we are seeing is yet another attempt to run the country from the top down by autocrats. It is part of same mindset which has given us the GWOT, infringements of civil liberties, torture, secret prisons and government sponsored (religiously inspired) morality.
If you want a better educated populace put the money into schools and poverty abatement instead of militarism.
--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape
April 8, 2007 1:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Here is his link. Well, I thought I was going to post it but my browser isn't showing the post link button... If you use the link he included in the text, you have to remove the blank space.
Anyway, this is the well known story of Neil Bush's crappy education program that he uses to enrich himself on NCLB money.
April 8, 2007 1:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
You really owe it to others to read their posts before commenting on them, even if they are long and boring.
April 8, 2007 1:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're being intentionally obtuse.
His point was obviously that a measuring stick that attempts to measure results from a teacher in an underfunded inner-city school against those from a wealthy suburban schools are comparing apples to oranges. And that even an "inept jerk" teaching in the latter might outpoint a good teacher in the former.
And if you're truly didn't understand that that was his point, you are an inept jerk.
April 8, 2007 1:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
I was commenting on your post, which I did read.
April 8, 2007 1:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
But you refered to the parent which you had not read and I busted you. Just be more careful in the future and all is forgiven.
April 8, 2007 1:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Good 4 America:
While I am more in agreement with you than with Brook Datsaki on educational issues, and think that his other replies to me prove that he's in fact, a self-important twit, I'm not sure what your post adds to the discussion.
I think the decline of egalitarianism in America to the point where a vocational job is no longer considered an honorable profession is a big problem. Sure, most people would like to be, or at least have their children be, in the elite, but it's by definition impossible.
As I indicated in my reply - we will never get to the point where these professions are given their due respect as long as the elites are growing wealthy from shoveling the jobs out of the country.
April 8, 2007 1:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Valderon was giving an example of the way NCLB is ineffective - not asking for a pass or fail for his friend or the "inept jerks" who crowd the upper class private schools, but rather to make a point by comparison using his personal knowledge.
This by no means suggests that he is a bigot!
April 8, 2007 1:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
indianleftie:
Your link was good enough. It almost worked.
Which brings up a question for the WebMaster: what happened to easy-format mode or whatever it was called that enabled much easier blockquoting and link insertion than is available now? Has the easy-format mode been removed from TPMCafe comments? I found it to be useful and work pretty well.
April 8, 2007 1:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Here is another one from CorpWatch showing corporate lobbying at its best!
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11543
NCLB has never been about the kids or the teachers - it is about sales and making money.
Incidentally, my daughter uses the Open Court materials the CorpWatch talks about - she is at a much higher reading level than what the Open Court uses. Fortunately, the school only uses it to test whether the students are at par with the Iowa testing and dont spend too much time on it.
April 8, 2007 1:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think the choice of language by Valdron leaves little doubt of his bigotry.
That said, any testing methodology would of course not measure absolutes, but would be designed to measure relative performance based on the raw material that a school/teacher had do work with. All but the most obtuse understand this.
April 8, 2007 1:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
If I referred to some "black welfare mother" in the inner city, you would call me a bigot. By the same rules, I get to call someone who refers to “inept jerks” in private schools a bigot.
April 8, 2007 1:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
I seem to remember one of the Republican mantras not so long ago, a babble about "unfunded mandates" when the Dems held Congress. Now after 6 years of Bush and a Repug Congress the states are screaming No Child Left Behind is an UNFUNDED MANDATE! (underfunded)
April 8, 2007 1:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
But I did, specifically, search the parent for your quote, which wasn't there. That is because your quote included a nonexistent "s" in "jerks." So, you didn't really bust me. I waive my claim that you qualify as the bigot, it does seem the parent is at fault. Nevertheless, there are reasons for grammatical rules, however obscure.
April 8, 2007 1:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sorry, but you are ill-informed.
I even know a teacher in a Chicago high school that has many special programs for children with learning disabilities, and therefore attracts many such students. No allowance for this is made in assessing this school's performance on standardized tests, so the school is behind the eight-ball right from the start.
You see, according to Republican educational theory, "allowing for" differences in the "raw material" a school/teacher has to work with is the "liberal bigotry of low expectations", something NCLB was deliberately designed to avoid.
And no, I see no bigotry in Valdron's remarks. He was saying that even an "inept jerk" teaching in the wealthy areas might rate above a good teacher in the "inner city" using these yardsticks. He was not calling all teaches in the wealthy suburbs "inept jerks". That might be a form of bigotry, but that's not what he said.
April 8, 2007 1:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
You have busted me, in part. I am just put out by people who consider themselves innately elite and who find it easy to put OTHER people into the THOSE WHO MUST BE LED category. Such people BELONG in the those-who-must-be-led category, because they do not have the appropriate values to lead, no matter how smart they are.
April 8, 2007 2:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Clearly, you have no idea what bigotry is.
April 8, 2007 2:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
In all fairness to Sitaram, he only suggests having NCLB as part of the education reform and is aware that NCLB isnt a panacea.
However his unquestioned NYTimes paraphrasing of teachers being lazy lumps would offend any teacher or parent whose kids attend the public school. I guess it would have helped if he had analyzed his post a bit more and done some research into it. For example, public education has never been about education, it has always been about money. And to write about this topic and never mention the economics of it tells me he hasnt researched enough or thought about it enough to be posting.
April 8, 2007 2:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sure I do. From dictionary.com:
big·ot
n. One who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.
Valderon made reference to an inept jerk teaching in a private school. I could refer to a welfare mother of kids in the inner city. I know I would be called a bigot. Why isn’t Valdeon a bigot?
April 8, 2007 2:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
In what way do you think Valderon was a bigot when he compared his friend to "an" inept jerk teaching in a private school?
April 8, 2007 2:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
I know Sitaraman wasn't advancing NCLB as a panacea.
My objection was precisely the same as yours - the teacher-bashing, that he appears to accept as a self-evident truth.
Go read his bio:
God help us if a "research group working to reestablish a Democratic vision for America" takes stale Republican talking point cliches as its starting point.
April 8, 2007 2:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think at least 3/4 of the leaving behind happpens between ages 0-6. Kids show up at kindergarten who don't know their colors, numbers or alphabet. This is approximately 0% the school's fault, but NCLB doesn't contain any innovative solutions to hold parents accountable. NCLB is like a tax increase on parents whose four year olds can't count to 10.
April 8, 2007 2:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Valderon didnt say all teachers who teach at private schools are inept jerks. He compared his friend to a hypothetical teacher at a private school who would pass the NCLB requirements even though he is a complete jerk. He makes no mention of teachers who teach at private schools to be inept jerks.
In the same token, if you say all mothers in the inner city on welfare are blacks or all black females are inner city mothers with kids on welfare that would be bigotry. Just referencing someone without context is not bigotry. In what way do you think Valderon was being "one who is strongly partial to one's one group, religion or race...." when all he did was to measure his friend against "a" hypothetical inept jerk teaching at a private school.
Again you are missing hte point Valderon makes - teachers at a private school, whether or not they are inept jerks, are more likely to get away because of NCLB, whereas, a teacher highly competent but teaching at an inner city will not. How is that being a bigot?
April 8, 2007 2:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Why, it's simple, Robert.
If you simply "referred" to a "welfare mother of kids in the inner city", you wouldn't be guilty of bigotry. If you said rather that "welfare mother were all good for nothing louts who probably had their babies to increase their welfare check" you'd be a legitimate target for this charge. It all depends what you say about the welfare mothers in question.
Similarly, Valdron was saying that even an "inept jerk" who taught in a wealthy suburban school might be rated above a good teacher in an inner-city school by poorly designed standardized tests. Please show me where he made the bigoted statement that all teachers in wealthy suburban schools are inept jerks.
April 8, 2007 2:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
And when the parents can't count to 10? These problems run deep. Testing is the wrong approach. Memorization is a great trick for 4-8 years old, after that it is NOT education.
April 8, 2007 2:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
The suggestion that an “inept jerk” would be teaching in a private school signaled an intolerance of those who teach in private schools just as my referring to a “welfare mother” being the problem with inner city schools would signal my intolerance for those living in the inner city. If I am a bigot, he is a bigot.
April 8, 2007 2:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
April 8, 2007 2:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
Logically you are right.
But, you know that if I were to mention that welfare mother(s) might be a contributing factor in the failure of inner city schools, most people would jump to a conclusion about my opinion about all welfare mothers. Likewise, I don’t think it is much of a leap to infer Valdron’s opinion of those who teach in private schools or private schools in general by his choice of language.
April 8, 2007 2:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
With every statement you make, my estimation of your intelligence declines a notch.
Are you seriously suggesting that no inept jerk has even been hired at an expensive private school? If not, then what is your point.
Here, I'll paraphrase Valdron's point so that you can understand it.
"Assume an inept jerk is teaching at an exclusive private school. A poorly designed standardized test such as those used by NCLB might well rate this jerk as a better teacher than an excellent teacher working in an inner city school simply because the students in the private school were better prepared to start with."
This is my last comment to you if you persist in defending this idiotic definition of bigotry.
And no one has called you a bigot here, by the way.
April 8, 2007 2:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm somewhat sympathetic to this, were it not for the fact that these are the jobs that are being most frantically offshored to places where they don't have to pay 50K per year.
It might actually be a good thing that we're getting rid of these jobs!
if you've seen the movie "Who Killed The Car, you may remember that electric cars don't require many parts... so all the factories and labor that were needed in the past become surplus.
Here is Honda's production prototype: Honda FCX.
April 8, 2007 2:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
He didnt suggest that "an" inept jerk would be teaching in a private school. He said his friend would be worse off compared to "an" inept jerk teaching at a private school. World of difference!
First one suggests that pick any teacher from a private school, chances are you'd find an inept jerk, which signals irrational intolerance. Second one suggests, even if you pick an inept jerk from a private school, that teacher would pass NCLB whereas his highly competent inner city teacher friend would not, which is a hypothetical. He doesnt say that all private school teachrs are inept jerks at all!
Same with your welfare mom analogy.
April 8, 2007 2:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
I dunno. I don't know how American school systems do it. But up here in Canada, we generally enforce a uniform curriculum in elementary levels intended to provide for a basic standard of education.
Right, that's how it is here.
While I think NCLB will be a bit difficult at first, I ultimately hope that, as a society, we get away from the "one curriculum for all" model because, by nature, it lacks diversity.
In general, I tend to favor highly interactive, unstructured curriculums so I'd prefer hiring teachers as contracters and get there help only when I need it.
At this point, I will not force myself to crunch through traditional lecture based teaching methods since I know that, if it was video based, I could rewind and rewatch the video tapes at will.
The beauty of NCLB is that testing can be used to decide if different choices do indeed lead to identical outcomes.
If they do, then the "free market" can be regulated through a testing regime.
It isn't necessarily perfect, but for people like myself who want alternative ways to study, it might be a big blessing...
April 8, 2007 2:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
Nope. That's not what I said at all. I did not say my friend was without fault. I did not say that he can't manage to teach is students to read.
What I did say is that he was an exemplary teacher and an exemplary human being.
Nor did I say that *all* those teaching in upper class private schools are "inept jerks."
Indeed, it stands to reason that private schools are able to use their wealth and social standing to cherry pick teachers. This is only one of the endless advantages that they possess, including low class sizes and an advantaged student body.
It strikes me that you are deliberately misunderstanding and misstating my words in order to take offence. Indeed, with respect to my friend, you seem to have rewritten what I said to make it more outrageous in order to be upset with me.
This is the childish tactic of a schoolyard bully. It is not rational argument from a grown up.
What I meant, and which was clear to just about everyone else, is that the end result performance as between my gifted friend at a poverty school and a hypothetical inept jerk at a wealthy school, will tend to favour the jerk. The difference between them does not mean that the jerk is a better teacher, but only that he has such a built in advantage in his elite, educated, heavily resourced students and school.
As I said, that was obvious to everyone else.
Well, that doesn't make a single lick of sense.
You realize that you forgot a period? Was the sentence unfinished? Did you have something more to the thought? Or is that what you intended?
In any event, I'm not going to debate you. Others have done that satisfactorily.
April 8, 2007 2:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is where the NCLB's political genius shines. Did you see teh amount of lobbying that has gone to provide these raw materials? McGraw-HIll, Houghton-Mifflin, and oh yes, jump on Mr. Niel Bush while you can!
Overtly, NCLB wants to help kids, actually what they want to do is to line lobbyists pockets. Their emphasis on "standardized" testing makes it clear! Standardized according to what? NCLB doenst say that - but that's when the big publishing companies jump in - "standardized" according to the publishing companies!
I dont consider myself a conspiracy buff but how else do you explain the obvious connection?
April 8, 2007 2:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
The problem with NCLB is it ignores the reality that all children are not equal in ability, desire, goals or aspirations.
I think that the NCLB law will actually address the problem of diversity since, once testing is implemented and accepted as a valid quality assessment, students can then choose, for themselves, how they learn and then validate that path through testing...
Until choice is implemented, students will be forced to put up with the teachers and programs that their school district has for them, and I don't call that "catering to diversity."
April 8, 2007 2:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
I assume that all sorts of persons could be teaching in a private school. That would include the possibility of an 'inept jerk.'
I think that it's ridiculous to assume that no private school could ever hire an 'inept jerk'. That seems to me to be wholly unrealistic notion of meritocracy at work.
I am, of course, not damning all private schools or their teachers, but merely making a hypothetical case comparison.
Well if a single "welfare mother" was the problem with all or most inner city schools, I'd say we need to find this lady pdq!
Actually though, your analogy falls apart. A hypothetical welfare mother wouldn't be the problem of schools. At worst, she'd be an example of a part of othe problem.
Secondly, you're referring to 'the problem with inner city schools'. I wasn't referring to 'the problem with upper class private schools.'
You're making misleading apples and oranges comparisons. And by the way, I certainly hope that these are not your views of inner city schools or welfare mothers.
Uhm, once again, that doesn't actually make logical sense.
You certainly seemed to want to jump to bigoted conclusions with your automatic assumption that my friend could not teach inner city immigrant hispanic children to read.
Most people would view that as either a denunciation of my friend, unsupported based on my assertion that he is an exemplary teacher...
Or its an automatic assumption on your part that his students are unteachable because they are inner city immigrant youth. Using your own rhetorical flourishes, some people might justifiably call you a bigot for that.
I dunno. It strikes me that you are hanging onto calling me a bigot, while being indifferent to or accepting being called one. It occurs to me that in such a case, if you're willing to be called a bigot... ie, you are accepting that you are actually a bigot.... what's the opinion of a bigot worth? Very little I should think.
Inept jerks can be found in all walks of life, even posting on the internet. ;)
April 8, 2007 2:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
So the inherent failures and flaws in the NCLB Act are transient. All we have to do is implement it harder, and then problems will magically be solved?
Well, its an argument. Of sorts.
April 8, 2007 3:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Robert, you are not making any sense! If you were to "mention" that welfare mother(s) might be a contributing factor in the failure of inner city schools, without any further reference, you would be a bigot. If that were a statistical record and you mentioned it as such, then there would be no ambiguity. But out of context, what you said is bigotry. Same cannot be said of Valderon's statement! You are taking what Valderon said out of context and are arguing for the sake of arguing! I used to be a teacher for five years (plus I am a mom of a 8 year old, I guess that explains my patience with you) and I used to teach logic and what you are saying aint it! (and yes I am aware I am not being grammatically correct - I am trying to make a point).
April 8, 2007 3:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Tivo, i'm sure you're aware that many of these elites you speak of are enthusiastic liberals. A big bank account does not pre-determine political ideology.
As for shoved jobs, ask yourself why Hundai, Nissan, and Toyota are announcing new plant openings in America about every 6 months now. Toyota just announced another one in Tupelo to be constructed. Meanwhile American auto companies shut down jobs, and you blame the government. Your argument seems a bit weak.
I've been in computer programming for years, and most of what I studied in high school and college has proven to be useless. Had I started an aggressive programming education in the 9th grade, i would have known just as much as when i graduated college -- 4 YEARS EARLIER. At that point, any further school would resemble a master's program in today's universities. You could learn everything you need to know about repairing computers with a high school degree -- if you were allowed to choose that track for yourself, yet still get a good liberal arts exposure. This is, i think, a much more sensible approach.
April 8, 2007 3:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
You see, according to Republican educational theory...
I think the republican educational theory is excellent: work hard, do your work and you'll learn a lot.
The problem with NCLB is that the good intentions are corrupted by those who want to make money off it.
April 8, 2007 3:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Speaking of bigotry, remember the flap last summer when George Allen's Jewish ancestry was revealed in the media? It didn't take long for him to accuse those talking about this of making "antisemitic remarks". In its own way, this revealed more about him than about those he was accusing.
He hadn't thought it through.
If A calls B a Jew, that's not an antisemitic remark. That's just a statement.
If A calls B a "dirty Jew", that's an antisemitic remark.
If C can't tell the difference between the two remarks, what does that make him? Do the math.
April 8, 2007 3:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
But the whole point of NCLB is to eliminate diversity in favour of standardised tests, which imply standardised subject matter, and standardised teaching methods.
I would have assumed, if you were in favour of exploration, analysis, comparison and evaluation to discover the best arsenals of teaching methods, that you would favour the local approach, in which every school is a laboratory for educational theories.
April 8, 2007 3:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're talking about "republican educational theory" whereas I was talking about "Republican educational theory." There is a difference. Specifically, the latter assumes that unionized teachers are the most important reason why Johnny can't read. The former doesn't.
April 8, 2007 3:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
exactly, mcs. Why should you waste the gas to drive to a biology lecture, when you could punch it up on your computer these days and watch it? I think the lecture-based university system is being rendered obsolete. There are certainly certain disciplines that require classroom training, but a lot of your first year of college could be completed online.
April 8, 2007 3:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
They do not measure the competency or incompetency of his teacher.
the test scores are used to help see the overall learning patterns of students and, therefore, a school district can, before giving a particular teacher tenure, determine if he/she is a good hire or not.
Specifically, a teacher told me that this already happens...
April 8, 2007 3:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
And who didn't see that coming?
The NCLB was designed to be corrupted by those who intended to make money off it.
Surely the uniform history of the Bush administration removes all doubt whatsoever.
The 'good intentions' was merely the sales pitch to lure in or pacify the gullible, which in this case included Senator Ted Kennedy.
April 8, 2007 3:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
This would be a classic situation of decision making, not with the tools you need, but the tools you have.
It's certainly not a recommendation for the NCLB that standardized test results are employed in this way.
April 8, 2007 3:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't think it's a failure just yet. I think that NYC is starting to incent parents and students to do better on tests. After that happens, I think we'll see improvement.
I've talked to teachers about "incenting parents and students" but they seem to dislike that idea because, if scores actually improved, they wouldn't be the solution... that's my opinion because my "supervising teacher," during my student teaching experience, seemed to dislike home schoolers for that reason.
However, giving a student a bonus, if he/she is becoming an economically relavent citizen, seems like a good cause-- especially if he/she is financiall struggling.
April 8, 2007 3:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Lets assume that you are correct. In the arts how exactly is that tested? Additionally, a lot of the effort to browbeat teachers is to avoid dicussing the role of parents in their children's education. Schools cannot make up for every shortcoming.
However, how will you create any standard for schools, if not for teachers, without some form of testing?
Daniel A. Greenbaum
April 8, 2007 3:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
RE: NCLB Testing Preparation.
In reality, my child spends much more time with testing preparation than just the testing itself. My tax dollars and my child's valuable class time are spent drilling for the tests, complete with our county's reverse 911 system being utilized to remind parents to get their children to bed early the night before.
It all takes on the atmosphere of the recently concluded "March Madness", and I question what educational value my child is getting out of it.
RE: Teachers, Unions and the reluctance to open competition.
If teacher pay grades were on the scale of doctors and lawyers, maybe the Union wouldn't be so nervous about negotiating away one of the few good cards they hold. You get skilled work when you pay for it, and that holds for any profession.
Teacher pay grades are abysmal, on par with nurses, who do THEIR job out of love and commitment to their field rather than the pay. Ask any nurse how they feel about THEIR salary.
As it is now, teachers are making peanuts, which is what lousy teachers are worth paying, while the good teachers are doing it because they love the work. The only thing they have going for them is sticking it out and hoping they don't burn out, because the system doesn't reward creativity.
April 8, 2007 3:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
1. It's "sTiVo", not "TiVo".
2. "American auto companies shut down jobs and you blame the government".
Show me where I said that.
I was criticizing the elites who personally profit from offshoring, and pointing out that nobody wants to be tracked into jobs that are known to be dead-end. Parents don't know WHAT to want for their kids anymore, because nobody is giving any assurances or even hints about what might be stable careers. In that environment, vocational ed. could be a cruel hoax.
And yet, I used to have some sympathy for your position. I worked in the skilled trades before all the jobs were moved out, and I used to wonder why these jobs weren't appreciated more.
Since then, I too have been in computer programming for years. I picked it all up on my own. Lucky I had an aptitude for it, I guess. And yet I find the same elites who want to shovel the blue-collar skills out of the country want to do the same with the computer professions. It's really hard to stay employed in this profession at my age.
Which is why I make the point that until we can get back to an egalitarian approach in our society, where you don't have to worm your way into an elite position, where the elites aren't all scheming how to get their three year olds into Harvard, we will continue to adopt insane approaches to education.
Until we stop elevating those who profit by disemploying their fellow citizens, we're stuck in this mess.
April 8, 2007 3:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
The purpose of NCLB was to get rid of the teacher's unions. It's that simple.
I think it's much broader than that.
I do think that teaching unions will be the losers in the next generation of technology based instruction.
In general, I think that students, mostly in k-12, will have 24/7 access to a tutor after the rigid boundries of today's system are relaxed.
I recently read an article about some parents who hired tutors from India-- they very impressed with the low cost as well as the results.
Even if we don't outsource, I think that many retired people would love to do lowcost, online tutoring and I think they'll do a better job since we're going to have many highly educated retired to choose from.
April 8, 2007 3:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
Your revelation about your computer background is more revealing than you think.
I have had experience with various curricula, through my own education, the education I offer as a professor, and the education of may family members, one of whom went through a typical computer oriented education.
Frankly, you are right about the quality of college based education in computers. What my family member kept telling me (in real time) was shocking to me, especially as he was at one of the most elite schools in the country. There was more focus on maintaining the ego of the faculty than on educating the students, who were perceived as an inconvenient necessity.
There are far too many of these forms of colleges, and I, for one, would be more than happy to see them die off.
However, this is not what college education is typically about. Even for this family member, there was a lot of value that could not be obtained by "punch[ing] it up on your computer." My guess is that the vast majority of this value was obtained in the first years of college, not as this member moved toward the end.
For non-educators to apply extraordinarily minimalistic standards for education, then to design tests that reinforce extraordinarily minimalistic learning, then call this an improvement is so offensive. For teachers to then find that the only way to promotion or even retention is to teach to the test, which test is not even the Ciff Notes version of education, is a crime.
When you are ready to have me tell you how to develop your computers, software, etc., let me know. Until then, perhaps you should offer a little more respect to educators.
April 8, 2007 3:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
"standards" is a early 20th century notion developed out of factories. You are asking, in effect, how can we get factory results if we don't use factory processes (QC)?
Frankly, I think it offensive to consider education to be a factory.
April 8, 2007 3:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
you might have seen the recent articles in california.
the governor was saying that "the education problem isn't a problem that can be fixed with money" and "it's a systematic problem."
I tend to agree since I've learn more on my own, through technology based education and blogs like this one, than I've ever learned going through a teacher based lecture.
As I've noted in other posts, I'm teaching myself piano and that's because 1) I can scan pieces into my computer; and 2) have my computer play those on my keyboard-- so I can hear what they sounds like.
In the past, I would have had to hire a piano teacher to play the pieces that I was struggling with.
A computer flies the space shuttle, not humans.
April 8, 2007 3:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think at least 3/4 of the leaving behind happpens between ages 0-6.
this isn't what the research shows...
I think that everyone agrees that US test scores are very high, internationally, until students enter middle school-- then they shut down.
April 8, 2007 3:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not arguing for no testing.
What I am arguing against is the "easily gathered metric" and the implicit assumption that, because it is data, numbers, it must measure something important.
I see this at work every day. I work for a large corporation, in software programming. Upper management is on a kick to have more data at its fingertips that it can look at in two seconds and decide who is doing well and who is doing poorly. They have now repurposed our defect tracking system - which should be a tool for honest discussion and efficient resolution of problems - into one whose primary purpose is to count defects, to serve as a metric by which they think they'll be able to intelligently decide whom to reward and punish.
They don't realize it won't work. The changes necessary to accomplish this will distort the whole process of defect logging. They make it harder, not easier to log defects. This will reduce quality in the long run.
Any sort of metric or testing program must be intelligently designed. If it's "quick and easy", someone is selling you some snake oil.
Back to education, we need to agree on goals. NCLB makes a number of assumptions that are wrong. Most important is the idea that teachers have a vested interest and so nothing they say can be trusted. This overlooks the vested interests of everyone else in the room. And it's just stupid. Teachers probably have more valuable input than most others less directly involved. They need to be listened to, not demonized.
April 8, 2007 3:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
If you are talking about Bloomberg's new behavioral mod program, this is dehumanizing and should be examined under the UN charter guidelines on human rights.
I personally think it would be a good idea to make a parallel program for the rich. We would do it this way...
Tax everyone with an income above $200 k an extra $35 k. Then, offer them the SAME incentives as the Bloomberg behavioral mod program out of their own $35 k.
This, do as I say program is the worst possible form of do-gooder-ism.
April 8, 2007 3:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
Anyone who knows anything about statistical testing should realize that the measure of a group mean and spread is a measure of the GROUP, not of any of the individuals within that group. Consequently, the ONLY legitimate use of it is to compare that GROUP with other GROUPS.
Assuming, probably falsely, that the members of the group started on par with another group, the test measures the TREATMENT that the group received between starting time and the test time.
Consequently, the ONLY legitimate use of these tests is to compare teachers, curricula, schools, etc.
However, the false assumption in my second paragraph invalidates the entire practice.
April 8, 2007 3:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
If teacher pay grades were on the scale of doctors and lawyers, maybe the Union wouldn't be so nervous about negotiating away one of the few good cards they hold.
My father was a teacher and he felt that he was paid as much as anyone else. If he gets a pension for 30 years, that's a benefit worth over a million.
The retiring teacher in Minnesota, I think, makes $75,000-- that's not peanuts and it takes a while to get there.
I can assure you: the more teachers make, the more someone else will try to get that salary; and, both teachers and nurses work in a labor intensive field and, thus, there are cost versus access issues.
In the US, because labor costs are high, manufacturers decided to automate production; In countries with "low cost labor," products can be made by hand.
April 8, 2007 3:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
"must be intelligently designed"
Have you gone fundie on us?
April 8, 2007 3:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
I wasn't insinuating more money was needed, rather, I was referring to Republican hypocrisy regarding mandates and paying for them.
April 8, 2007 3:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
Education always seems to become a forum on unions, and rampant antiunionism is a big part of the problem. Union truck drivers earn a housing wage and non-union truck drivers don't. It would be awfully convenient for MBA's, who are out to break all unions, to blame the teachers' union for failing to turn more truck drivers into MBA's like them! However, one shouldn't need an MBA to afford one's own apartment, and this should be the guiding economic principle for every Democrat.
April 8, 2007 3:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Not talking about THAT guy. :-)
April 8, 2007 3:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
But the fact remains that there is an overwhelming offshoring of jobs - starting with manufacturing, to technical to service related. And when you have an economy such as ours, if a person is vocationally trained, once that job is offshored, that person s jobless. If he or she went to college, chances are he/she might have a better chance of getting other kinds of job!
April 8, 2007 4:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
NCLB is not about college education. It is about primary education. Elementary schools! You cant click your way out of elementary education and improve on math and reading by passing certain minimalistic tests desiged by a corporation.
April 8, 2007 4:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
It really can't be stressed enough that much of the motivation for NCLB is the belief that teachers (in public education) are left-wing loonies. (I send my kid off to college with a back-pack full of good conservative beliefs and he comes home for Xmas vacation with a back-pack full of liberal garbage.) This sentiment has leaked down to cover teachers in the lower grades resulting in NCLB as a way to control teachers and/or privatize the whole bloody system. Then of course there are those who have tried to get 'religion' in the front door of education without success. Privatize the system and the front door is open.
April 8, 2007 4:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
We are not in disagreement here. I use college in response to the parent post.
April 8, 2007 4:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
once testing is implemented and accepted as a valid quality assessment
By what standards?
What is NCLB testing? Reading and Math! History, Social studies, Civics, Music are all getting hit! Again, the assumption is that testing will improve students, but testing against what? And what are we testing?
April 8, 2007 4:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sorry, my post was as response to teh parent post - I inadvertantly posted it as a response to yours.
April 8, 2007 4:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, the object of a test is to measure *something*. To the extent it successfully measures *something* that is a good thing.
The problem arises when your test which measures *something* is used to make decisions about *another thing.*
Here's the dice. A test successfully measures *something* by controlling for all other variables except the item tested. In this case, student performance aggregates on a standardized test.
That tells you a lot about how students perform on an aggregate standardized test.
The more you generalize that result to other issues, the more problematic your situation becomes. That's because you are now making generalizations about subjects for which variables were not controlled.
Suppose you apply aggregate student performance results to assess which teachers are good, which teachers are bad.
Well, in principal, if students are doing well, that's a sign of a good teacher, and vice versa.
On the other hand, it tells us nothing about the individual teacher or the particular group of students. Was there a sudden influx of immigrants into the class? Did one of the students commit suicide? Are drugs or gangs a problem in the area, have they become a problem? Did the class size shift dramatically from one year to the next? Did the major source of employment in the town close down? Or was there a sudden boom? Was the teacher asked or obliged to teach outside his area of specialty? Was the teacher saddled with more classes than usual?
Now, if you're using these test results to compare teachers *and* schools *and* curricula, and all you've got are a set of results on a standardized score...
Well, that's just not a very good tool.
If its the only tool you've got, you end up using it. Does it give you good information for what you need... Maybe, maybe not.
It might be better than studying chicken entrails. On the other hand, that's a tried and true tested method that the Romans used successfully for centuries, so I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand.
April 8, 2007 4:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
deleted
April 8, 2007 4:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Valdron,
I am pretty sure what you have said amounts to a very long winded version of my last sentence: "However, the false assumption in my second paragraph invalidates the entire practice."
April 8, 2007 4:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hmmmm.
You're absolutely right.
Points to you.
April 8, 2007 4:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think this stereotype is reinforced by a lot of people associating teachers with teachers unions, whose leaders can sound like left wing loonies at times.
April 8, 2007 5:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
mcs
I am from India and can personally attest to the quality of education I received there. Here is my assessment of it. Primary schooling in India is even more problematical than it is here for a variety of reasons - starting from language barriers to caste barriers to class barriers. It has a standardized testing requirement which has spawned its own category of private educational institutions (aka tutors) that has demoralized the teaching profession. Almost every child goes to school, comes back home and goes to private tutor for each subject. Children study from the point of view of passing the tests without understanding any of the concepts. Competition is so thick you can actually slice it with a butter knife. Children there are basically taught, if you dont pass the standardized test and get a huge grade then you are a failure.
I grew up in that environment and I can tell you it messes you up in the long run- and from my recent visit, I am convinced that it is now even worse than it was when I was a student there. Some schools were better than most but standard was the same - dependence on a tutor more than your teacher.
The NCLB is basically doing that! Standardizing the tests, telling the students, you gotta do better in these tests because that is the only way you will know whether you have made it. If the Indian education system with standardized testing is any indication, it will eventually lead to deprofessionalising the teachers which is an enormous waste of resources!
I dont think tutoring is the complete solution. It is one solution for a child who is developmentally behind the rest of his/her class. But understanding the concepts is key. If these kids study just to pass the standardized testing w/o understanding key concepts, then they are going to suffer in the long run and consequently we will too.
April 8, 2007 5:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
A computer flies the space shuttle, not humans.
And humans make the computers that flies the space shuttle.
April 8, 2007 5:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
You might be right. I notice that there are those Republicans who can sound a lot like pedophiles at times.
;)
April 8, 2007 5:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think you are confusing rightwing lunatic rhetoric with what union leaders actually sound like.
When people assert that the government or the teachers or the unions or whatever are "against us" or "the lunatic fringe" or :leftwing loonies" or what have you, they don't seem to have any evidence other than the assertion of some rightwing authority they like to listen to.
So far you don't seem to have much meaningful to contribute.
April 8, 2007 5:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
But on the other hand, he's not keeping his cards hidden, what with wandering around mumbling darkly about 'loony left' and 'welfare mothers' and taking imaginary offense in order to strike righteous poses.
Give him credit for honesty, if not integrity or intelligence.
April 8, 2007 5:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
The teachers union in my area recently joined the jihad against Wal-mart for instance by advising children not to purchase their school supplied from Wal-mart. Now, I don’t think that is necessarily “loony”, but I think many people associate that with a left wing stand, mistakenly associate all teachers with it and subsequently wonder what else is being pushed in the classroom.
April 8, 2007 6:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
I do agree that some right wing commentators go overboard in demonizing teachers unions. It is fair to note, however that teachers unions are more labor union than professional organization and as such their highest priority is the well-being of their members, not the quality of public education.
April 8, 2007 6:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
As it should be. Teachers likely need the same sorts of professional societies that professors have, independent of their labor organization. Unions have a job to do. You don't expect management to pursue matters not on the management agenda, do you?
April 8, 2007 6:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
I am not sure I understand you correctly, but I get the impression that you do not believe teacher pay is an issue.
The question of teachers' salaries is too often thought of as simply an increase in pay to existing teachers. The question becomes, why give them more money when our children can barely read?
Two points missed by this:
First, higher income would attract better people to the career. For many talented young people, teaching is out of the question because they hope to own a home some day. (Check teachers' salaries and the cost of homes in southern California, for example.)
It isn't a question of what the work is "worth" in some subjective sense, but rather what will it take to get more and more skilled people to commit to this profession?
Second, the low pay means that good people leave. What would our police forces be like if the average officer left after five years?
April 8, 2007 6:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Of course not, and that is my point. When teachers unions use their political power to influence education policy, they are first interested in benefiting teachers. I believe that most teachers truly care about the quality of the education system, but that is not the charter of the unions.
April 8, 2007 6:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
i solved that problem by working for myself. i'm sure you discovered very quickly as a programmer that the "managers" who didn't know a damn thing only wanted to spend their days going to meetings with VP's. I didn't care, because i knew they were paying me more to actually do the work than they made. That is a fair trade. I have little use for the corporate world which is filled with an astonishing number of both useful and useless idiots.
I'm actually doing a lot of work for some Japanese companies that need websites built here in English, so offshoring cuts both ways.
April 8, 2007 6:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
yeah, consider that the state of Alabama has more colleges/universities numerically than the entire country of Japan. That is an astonishing statistic.
April 8, 2007 6:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
no, there are entire K-12 internet curriculum being designed right now for home school kids, which is a popular trend. No one knows exactly how the Inet will impact education, but it will have an impact.
Every now and again, Good 4 comes up with a good point, and he did point out that education is not all academic knowledge. The social component is huge -- in fact the social component in college is why fraternities are so popular. They are in many ways a ticket to a good job through the connections you make.
April 8, 2007 6:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
rd, you manage to work Guantanamo Bay into every topic. It's like a Kevin Bacon game.
April 8, 2007 6:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
I looked through the list available at http://u101.com/colleges/Alabama/ . I noticed 4 I recognized. I don't have the time to check rankings. The US offers a lot of so called colleges that I would be VERY careful about sending anyone I cared about to.
April 8, 2007 6:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
An interesting way to turn the tables on politicians is for the teachers unions and the NEA to demand standardized testing for all national elected officials. I'm absolutely certain we've got some in my state that would score below 50% on the most basic questions about government. When the Chairmen of the Intelligence committee doesn't know that Hezbollah is a Shiite Muslim organization -- that's the equivalent of a high school grad who can't read a bus schedule.
April 8, 2007 6:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
An interesting way to turn the tables on politicians is for the teachers unions and the NEA to demand standardized testing for all national elected officials. I'm absolutely certain we've got some in my state that would score below 50% on the most basic questions about government. When the Chairmen of the Intelligence committee doesn't know that Hezbollah is a Shiite Muslim organization -- that's the equivalent of a high school grad who can't read a bus schedule.
April 8, 2007 6:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
Frankly, although I don't always agree with them, I think it is gutsy for the teachers' unions to address these policy issues. They are dealing with an underlying problem of anti-public employee rhetoric that is one of the favorite red herrings of the right wing.
Many of the right wing's policy proposals are merely lightly disguised attacks ON public employees. I consider such attacks to be morally reprehensible. It would be appropriate for the entire society to banish such blatant prejudice the way it has banished bigotry against blacks, women, Jews, etc.
Since the public likes to pick on people who are unable to defend themselves, the right is always finding some group to bash in order to pander to the bloodlust of the crowd. When the NEA and the AFT stand up to them, they object to unions speaking about policy, but policy was never at hand in the first place. Bloodlust was at hand.
I am perfectly happy to see right wingers have their ass handed to them.
April 8, 2007 6:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
What dood is there in teaching our children the false partisan nonesense of creationism, and Thanksgiving, and hilarious fiction that America won the Viet Nam war, and that Clinton was impeached, and that Bush speaks to god in the WH and is a valiant christian warrior fighting evildoers. The testing is not nearly as evil and the cirriculum.
The problem with the No Child Left Behind Act, (besides funneling huge fortunes into Neal Bush's test printing oligarchs) is that we are testing our children on patently FALSE and insipidly USELESS information.
Real education is focused on allowing our children to LEARN (forget about testing and messure learning) the basics of math, language, history, science and the arts. America is woefully lacking in the first world education arena, because we test our children and teach them a bunch of fundamentalist christian nonesense and fascist republican LIES, and discourage them from creative free thinking, and examination of and education into the facts and the realities that define our terrible past, and even more unholy unknown unknown future.
"Deliver us from evil!"
April 8, 2007 7:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm a lousy student and an equally poor teacher, so I'm rather self-educated, but I know how hard teaching is and honor it automatically.
I have a conservative business partner that once claimed he had correlated decline in city schools with unionization. Ludicrous on its face, since teachers' associations have been around since the 19th century, I do wonder if there is any single factor that could be blamed, and if there is in fact a decline.
I've seen arguments that average student performance in city schools fell after more students were kept in school (that might have dropped out), thus diluting the scores of better-performing students. Maybe, but I don't get the impression this is consensus.
I think back to civil rights court cases that required mixing of student populations. The issue was used to elect many conservative politicians tasked with pushing back against New Deal liberalism. Whites in suburbs weren't too concerned about city schools until their chldren ended up in those schools.
So maybe there was simply increased scrutiny of said schools. But another factor shows up in the second half of the 20th century--television. At first it is only watched as a special activity, but it evolves to be constant and ubuquitous. Does it correlate? I don't know, but suspect so.
Finally, I'll mention an anecdote told by Nobel winner Richard Feynman. He was teaching physics in Brazil to students that only wanted test answers directly, he discovered. He rightly considered this loony.
April 8, 2007 7:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
It is militant rhetoric like this coming from teachers unions (they are never this bad) that makes people concerned about what is going on it the classroom. The public education system is supposed to be a public good for ALL citizens, half of which do not agree with you.
It is not at all hateful to point out that the public schools are monopolies, only very indirectly accountable to parents and that the major political influence in education policy is by definition not primarily interested in education quality.
April 8, 2007 7:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
Many of the right wing's policy proposals are merely lightly disguised attacks ON public employees. I consider such attacks to be morally reprehensible. It would be appropriate for the entire society to banish such blatant prejudice the way it has banished bigotry against blacks, women, Jews, etc.
So you want to ban criticism of public employees? Doesn’t sound very democratic to me. Since public institutions are not subject to market forces, how else are they to be held to account except by pubic criticism?
April 8, 2007 7:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
I meant to say what "good" is there in teaching our children the false partisan nonesense of creationism, "intelligent design", and Thanksgiving, and the hilarious fiction that America won the Viet Nam war, and that Clinton was impeached, and that Bush speaks to god in the WH and is a valiant christian warrior fighting evildoers?
April 8, 2007 7:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
Still struggling to take offense, I see.
I dunno. Yes, the public education system is supposed to be for the good of ALL citizens, SOME of whom do not agree. But frankly, I'm not inclined to take creationists, school prayer nuts, and people who object to sex ed classes or who are scandalized by the sex in 1984 seriously. Go figure.
I look at it this way. The public health system is supposed to be for the good of ALL citizens, some of whom do not agree. But be that as it may, the question of whether I need surgery or whether there is an influenza outbreak, these are questions for people who actually have some professional expertise. I'm not inclined to choose a surgeon based on his Republican or Fundamentalist Christian bona fides. Call me elitist, but there you go.
It's not hateful to point out that public schools are monopolies. It's just not true. People have the option of home schooling, they have the option of private schooling, and they have the option (and frequently exercise this option) of shopping for public school districts.
Nor are public schools unaccountable to parents. I dunno, I suppose some wack job creationist might feel that way. But in the real world there are these things called school boards, school boards have these things called elections, its representative democracy all the way. There are at least a few times a year when there are parent teacher nights, so that the parents can meet, interrogate, question and otherwise discuss their children. If that's not enough, I know of no school where an angry parent can't call up, demand to see the principal or vice principal or teacher, and not get a meeting to air their concerns.
As for whether a teachers union is a radical anti-education organization... well, it is made up of teachers, and teachers do have the interests of students in mind in particular, and education in general. Teachers are also the ones on the front line, so I imagine that they've got some views on micromanaging armchair generals. I assume that teachers take their views to their unions.
It strikes me that good ol' Robert Brown's view here is 'damned if they do, damned if they don't.' If the union stays out of education issues and focuses on teachers employment issues, then he accuses them of undermining education. If they get involved with education issues, then he accuses them of being an unelected, monopolistic, unaccountable body dedicated to re-arranging the education system to suit their members needs. I don't think, short of disbanding, that there's anything a teachers union could do to please our good pal.
April 8, 2007 7:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
After McCarthyism, Cartism, Reganism and, National Performance Reviewism, and Bushism, I think it is reasonable to conclude these people are just hate mongers, not legitimate critics. 75 years of empirical studies (and I HAVE seen them) demonstrate almost no distinction between the performance of public and private organizations despite the hate filed rhetoric of the right.
That doesn't mean that public organizations never fail, they are a much larger portion of the productivity portion of our economy and of the difficult task part of or economy than they are of the financial part of our economy, they will fail, as do private organizations. Specific targeted criticisms aimed at improvement is not hate.
But the shit you hear from right wing folk is repulsive.
April 8, 2007 8:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
One man's hate is another man's criticism...deal with it.
April 8, 2007 8:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
That is a coward's answer. You seem to be running afoul the bigot word a lot today.
April 8, 2007 8:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
Politicians test results must also be clearly stated in all political TV ads during the last 60 days before an election.
April 8, 2007 8:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
The NEA as 'a 'terrorist' organization, from the administration that brought you NCLB:
February 23, 2004
WASHINGTON – Education Secretary Rod Paige called the nation's largest teachers union a "terrorist organization" Monday, taking on the 2.7-million-member National Education Association early in the presidential election year...
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20040223-1538-paige-teachersunion.html
Blackcommentator.com commented on Bush and education on Feb. 26, 2004:
"...It is no wonder that Paige has lost his mental balance, and imagines that the National Education Association’s 2.7 million members are under the sway of (Al-Gebra) terrorists. Paige’s Department of Education has become an Alice In Wonderland lie-ocracy where not a word of truth is spoken; where arch racists claim to be civil rights activists, government divests itself of public schools to improve them, and higher standards of teaching require the abolition of teacher standards. Paige’s brain has been left behind in the rush to privatize the nation’s schools.
The entire edifice of Bush education policy – every printed page and verbal utterance – is double-speak propaganda designed to mangle the public perception and actual workings of public education. It was inevitable that Paige, the dim bulb at the top of the bureaucratic stairs, would one day tumble from the hyperbolic (vouchers equal “reform”) to the ridiculous (vouchers equal “emancipation”) to the maniacal (the NEA is “terrorist”). People get disoriented when they spend every waking hour turning truth on its head....The Bush gang is engaged in a massive fraud – a deliberate campaign to plunge the public schools into chaos and disrepute in order to create a larger “market” for education privateers..."
April 8, 2007 8:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
I dunno. Yes, the public education system is supposed to be for the good of ALL citizens, SOME of whom do not agree. But frankly, I'm not inclined to take creationists, school prayer nuts, and people who object to sex ed classes or who are scandalized by the sex in 1984 seriously. Go figure.
Those that dare to point out that the teachers unions are more interested in the welfare of their member, not students are not the nuts you are railing against. You have a very unbecoming habit of stereotyping, although I understand why you do it.
these are questions for people who actually have some professional expertise. I'm not inclined to choose a surgeon based on his Republican or Fundamentalist Christian bona fides.
As I pointed out before the teachers unions are primarily labor unions, not professional associations.
It's not hateful to point out that public schools are monopolies. It's just not true. People have the option of home schooling, they have the option of private schooling, and they have the option (and frequently exercise this option) of shopping for public school districts.
This is so disingenuous as to be embarrassing. Everyone must pay for the public schools whether they use them of not. If you had to pay Microsoft for Windows even though you use Apple would you not consider Windows a monopoly?
The teachers unions adamantly apposed charter schools in the beginning, by the way.
But in the real world there are these things called school boards, school boards have these things called elections, its representative democracy all the way.
Like I say, only indirectly accountably. I must organize a political fight to effect change or fight the education establishment. If I am lucky they will be responsive, if not, I am screwed.
April 8, 2007 8:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
You are the one who introduced the hate motive into the dicussion, not me.
April 8, 2007 8:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Simple enough, don't require it... Just do it.. Report results and failure to respond. Trouble will be that the responses will be written by the staff....
April 8, 2007 8:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
75 years of empirical studies (and I HAVE seen them) demonstrate almost no distinction between the performance of public and private organizations despite the hate filed rhetoric of the right.
By this reasoning, communist economic systems should work as well as capitalist systems.
April 8, 2007 8:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, on that subject, who exactly is supposed to be concerned about the welfare of teachers? In an education system composed of schools, school boards, students, parents, parents associations, education and curriculum authorities and designers, texbook publishers, politicians and taxpayers, who exactly should teachers be looking to to represent their specific concerns and issues.
Mmm hmm. Pot calling the kettle black? It strikes me that you've gone out of your way on this thread to be offended. You've misrepresented and distorted what people said, so that you can be offended. You want to stoke up your anger at the 'loony left' so you can be all righteous with us.
There's nothing unusual or particularly interesting about your emotional gamesmanship, it's sort of cliched actually. But hey, you're looking to be offended, and being the polite soul that I am, I'm just trying to oblige you.
Now who is being disengenuous?
Do you feel its an imposition to have to pay for the army when you can't use them yourself? You're sick of the Dominicans, they screwed you over on the exchange rate, and yet, you can't pick up a phone and order an air strike on the Presidential Palace? What an outrage!
And it doesn't stop there! Your tax dollars have gone into roads that you'll never ever drive on. Those bastards! And what about National Parks that you never visit! Why should you have to help pay for Fema or the CDC? Yep, I can see your point. Should you really have to pay for municipal water and sewer if you're drinking bottled water exclusively? Or what about police, unless you're mugged and actually need one, those lazy bastards are just scarfing donuts on your dime!
The other side of the coin is that conceivably, we could regard schools, good schools as a public investment. The better educated a population, the less crime, the less social assistance and welfare. That's a good thing, wouldn't you agree? It's worth it to warehouse thousands of horny and potentially violent teenagers somewhere, instead of letting them run loose to get into trouble. And the better educated, the more entrepreneurs, the more skilled labourers, the better standards of wages and income. Good for employers, good for the country. How long do you figure America would last with Afghan levels of literacy? And how does American democracy thrive without educating each generation of youth. Sounds to me that you'd agree that crime reduction, reduction of social assistance, inculcating basic life skills like literacy, math, a bit of history, sports, etc. is a good thing, that the payoff works for everyone... It's just having to pay for it that bothers you? Well, when you find the country that serves something for nothing, let me know.
I dunno, representative democracy works pretty good for the rest of us. You have to organize a political fight to effect change on anything, thats just life.
So climb down off the cross, stop whining about how hard done by you are, roll up your sleeves and do it if that's what you believe. Self pity is not going to change the world for the better or at all.
If you have a real point, step into the marketplace of ideas, make real criticisms rather than paranoid muttering, make real proposals, be prepared to argue reasonably with people who disagree reasonably, and do your best to persuade. There's no free lunch and no one owes you anything.
If you have good ideas, they'll go somewhere. If you don't, they may still go somewhere, because people are always trying stuff. If they're stupid ideas, they'll die.
Like I said, that's just life.
I'd say 'don't go away mad', but I suspect that's what you want.
April 8, 2007 9:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is total madness. Every five years or so someone begins a new initiative in education. All of our energy is thrown into that new idea to save education. We take two steps backward to go one step forward. The state legislatures, the courts, and every politician on the block is saving education. The result: somehow the children learn but I think it is in spite of the system not because of it. It is because there still is in every one of us the natural curiosity and love of learning that we started this life with. However, after thirty five years of teaching, I found that our institutions may be doing more to damper that natural desire to learn than they are in nurturing it. Just yesterday I agreed with my granddaughters' other grandfather that home schooling would be better for her than going to public school.
April 9, 2007 12:43 AM | Reply | Permalink