No Child LEFT BEHIND: notional novel about Bush's apocalyptic educational policy
Ryland whipped up this cover for a notional -- and badly needed -- book: "No Child LEFT BEHIND, a novel of education's last days," in multilayered critical parody of the Bush administration's educational policies and the freaky Left Behind loony rapture novels.
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As a gifted child in the USA, School has never been "fun" but when No Child Left Behind was put into place, I nearly went insane. How could "educators" be dumbing things down and expect to be taken seriously?! Almost everything was taught "because it's on the standardized tests".
This past summer I took classes that included a lot of gifted High School students, and the general consensus was that NCLB should have been named "The Ignore Gifted Kids and Beat the Stupid Ones Into Submission So Everyone Feels Smart Act.
If government really wants to make education better, add competition.
Since December of last year, I've been enrolled in the PA Cyber Charter School and it's exponentially better than my local high school*. Apparently, there are about 45 other students from my district enrolled in Cyber Schools, and the Administrators are starting to notice. Instead of trying to better the school as a whole, the district is now lobbying to have public funding of cyber schools shut off, thus closing them.
If you want a link to sum it all up, here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfRUMmTs0ZA
-JimXugle
* Quite often, Cyber School students refer to their local school as their Local Hell.
The Children's Defense Fund used the logo "Leave No Child Behind."
The Bush administration took it over, but altered it, and I believe it is no accident that it was transformed into "Left Behind." The series sold 50 million books.
Journalists have noted the "code" Bush used to send messages to Christians who interpret the Bible literally. The choice of words would not register to Washington reporters, but supporters would hear them.
I can't imagine this group would not hear the "left behind" in this law. SO, what would that code signify to them? That Bush was eager to promote a Christian agenda, prayer, or at least vouchers so the public would subsidize religious schools? It seems likely. Can we judge from the way the law was designed? Well, the law seems to have been constructed in such a way that almost any non-elite school would fail in at least one category, which is sufficient for the school to be judged overall as "failing." all the parents would then be informed that their school is failing. That could be used as leverage against democrats and teacher unions to advance an anti-public school agenda.
No child left behind ... unless they aren't able to meet standards ... then they get kicked to the curb.
I saw an interesting bumper sticker in traffic today. I was (obviously) a reference to the Iraq war, and trillions of dollars in deficit spending:
"NO CHILD LEFT A DIME"
"No Child Gets Ahead".
The whole thing reminds me an awful lot of Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
Off topic and beside the point, Fred Clark's chapter by chapter critique of Left Behind is absolutely riveting. Check it out
Honestly, the idea of NCLB isn't a bad one. It is just badly managed at the local levels. Too many states have no clue how to use assessments such as the ones needed by this program and go for a baseline as opposed to using the baseline as the starting point.
Sadly, he way things are done now, until the baselines are established uniformly, there will be a race to the bottom. I completely agree with JimXugle on this -- it negatively impacts gifted students (and generally pretty badly). Slowly, the bottom end -- students coming from learning disabilities or otherwise -- is getting better as the locals are get rid of the One Size Fits All motif. These students are much easier to assess.
Dealing with gifted students are a harder challenge and require vastly different solutions and this will take longer.
I am no fan of the Bush Administration, but this is one area that I think may be a positive legacy -- again, if it isn't screwed up at the local end.
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(Way too early in the morning to think and can't sleep, so hopefully there is an edit button so that I can change the obvious errors once I see them later in the day :-) ).
Surely the bubble should read 'Millions of childrens sold out in schools'. Or does George apostrophise it for no good reason?
Facetious comment, maybe, but with the education and now the healthcare stuff, I just don't know where to start!
@Dillenger69: No, that is so not how it works. The basic idea of the law is: No matter what you score on tests, you deserve to graduate from school to get a job.
While it sounds like a great idea, it really fails in the most spectacular way. If every single child is forced (yes, forced. Federal law) to go to school, then you get kids who are just there to be there. They don't want to learn, but yet they HAVE to be given every chance that every other kid is given.
Also, if there are no 'dumb' kids, then how are we supposed to know when we have smart kids? If everybody passes, how are we supposed to know who is brilliant? The kids who score the highest on tests? Bzzt--wrong. Tests are standardized. They are made so that everybody has the same chance to pass as everybody else. Meaning, the kid who never showed up to class at all and never turned anything in has the same chance as every other kid to pass that test. And next year, when kids don't pass--they make the questions easier and easier, until everybody can pass.
And as a kid who had a 'learning disability' I can tell you: It's a crock.
My 'learning disability' was my complete and utter lack of any sort of writing skills. I just coulden't make the shapes on the paper. And when I finally learned the shapes, they would start out okay, but then they would rapidly disentigrate into illegable squiggles. My mind was working faster than the pencil could keep up. I recognized it early, and I wanted to use my Atari 1200xl to do all my homework on.
To this very day, I would rather type out things than write them down. It takes me forever to write something on paper, whereas I can type this whole article in about 5min. I know that most of the people on the internet would say the same, but I have been typing this fast since I was in the 4th grade. Back when Apple IIe were in schools, I had a Compaq Luggable (Suitcase PC) that my father got as a donation from his work. I wrote all of my 4th grade assignments on it. It was my 'best' year in terms of grades and how I acted in school.
But with this NCLB... It's a whole other ballgame. Kids who have serious issues with school--fighting, stealing, selling drugs, skipping class, and just plan-old dumb kids--are given every, single, possible chance they can give them (which is, forever) to pass. Over, and over again until they finally do.
I had it explained to me by my HS Consellor: So long as you show up, they have to give you as much attention as you need to pass. So the kid who is just never going to get Algebra, but has to have it in order to pass--gets the most attention. So the smart kids have to learn on their own, and wait until Biff gets it.
Meanwhile, the next Nicola Tesla or Alexander Graham Bell is sitting somewhere, reading ahead in the book and learning ON HIS OWN because the teacher is struggling with Biff. The kid who set fire to the bathroom last week. Again.
The rest of the world has nothing like NCLB in place. Hell, for most of the world you have to EARN the right to BE in school, or else you are just a guy working in a factory where you push a button, put a piece on another piece, and then push the button again.
Not the most glamorous job, but someone has got to make every single little part that goes into everyday devices. A job is a job. If they wanted something more, they should have buckled down and worked at it.
Oh, wait... We farm those jobs out to other countries. Wonder why that is...
Maybe because we don't have anybody who wants to do those jobs, because they have been told all their life that they will be given something if they just show up and that is good enough for school and it must apply to the rest world because school is supposed to be training you for the real world?
I don't know about you, but I can't just 'show up' to work, and they give me a paycheck. I can't just show up to a meeting, and spin around in my chair, and when it is all over ask one of my co-workers what the meeting was about and can I copy your notes from it. I can't just use other people to get my work done, and still be considered a valuable member of the company.
And I bet you that every single last person reading this knows at least ONE of those people. Why do we let them ruin our workforce? Because we are taught from an early age that showing up is good enough.
The next time you have a day off (if you can get the idiot to stop handing you his job to do) go and watch a kids sporting-event. Little kids. Like, under 8. Baseball, soccer, football--doesn't matter. Any game will do. Watch how they play.
Some of you have kids, and you know this. Some of you don't and need to be told. They don't keep score. It's just, 'Go out there and do whatever'. And it makes me sick.
I'm not saying you should make winning more important than having fun. But they have to know that not everybody gets an equal chance. They are not all equal--but that applies to ALL of life. Just as Billy will be better at football than Randy, Randy will eventually end up going on to MIT and making the robot that will perform the brain surgery on Billy when he's 70. It all works out.
America is also the nation with the fewest engineers. We have no smart kids. How would we know a smart kid if everybody gets a "thanks for showing up" diploma? There is no competition. When there is no competition, you get stagnation and no innovation. Sure, we have people who are smart like that but look where we send everything to be made, tested, improved, or otherwise made smaller/better/faster/stronger.
This rant has gone on far enough, I feel.
As far as the idea of NCLB being "a bad one" or not, and even before you get to the myriad possible local implementations, any federal mandate that does not come with funds to implement same IS a bad idea.
I don't have specifics on the impact on local school districts but can tell you that every teacher and administrator I've ever discussed this with hates it -- they are forced to use precious class time to teach to the tests (although officially, they can't/shouldn't do that) AND they are also forced to use precious class time to administer the tests.
And, while I won't argue that gifted children are much more likely to be lost in the associated shuffle on this, it seems to me quite rare the instances where low-performing kids actually benefit (and rarer still the kids with disabilities who benefit.) Any (and ALL) success related to this program is due to individual teachers and their supportive administrators who have the brains, time, motivation, inspiration and will to improve their kid's lots.
At the risk of sounding like an NEA mouthpiece, I think the main problem is that, as a society, we don't truly value education and don't give it or the educators the respect (and compensation) they deserve. Until more people are motivated to become educators, the pool of inspired/inspiring individuals is just too small to go around and avoid quick burnout.
NCLB is nothing more (or became nothing more, I don't think the version that was passed does what it was originally conceived to do) than an attempt to dismantle public education. The logic, as explicated in the Stossel video linked above, is that people should be given a choice as to where their children go to school. That sounds really good, if you can afford to exercise that choice, but many people in America, possibly most people, can't afford to send their kids to another school district, much less to private school. But conservatives would rather dismantle the public education system under the banner of free markets than try to fix it. I don't know what the solution to fix our system of education is, but I don't think turning it over to private enterprise to be converted into the equivalent of HMOs is the answer.
Can you say NaNoWriMo novel?
JimXugle (1), educators dumbed things down because NCLB heavily penalized schools that didn't make their numbers on standardized exams. In order to avoid this, the schools had to "teach to the exam," which is indeed a dumber and less effective way to teach. Useful fact: the people who passed that law knew it would have that effect.
Here's what your school knew: teaching to the test is bad, but the penalties for not making their numbers would have been disastrous.
MacProf (2):
In years past, when the vast majority of religious schools were Catholic, the religious right would have screamed if anyone suggested public payment for private education. Now they're much cozier with the idea. The difference is that the right has taken a fancy to the idea of removing their kids from those wicked and dangerous secular schools. Shortly after that, it occurs to them that education is expensive.Thing is, I'm not sure that's enough to make the Bush administration undertake such a program. They'll talk a good line to the religious right if all the occasion calls for is talk, but they haven't done much for them.
The teachers' unions support the Democrats. That's not a mystery; teachers are intimately acquainted with social programs and social problems. They see what hurts and what helps. They were never going to be on the Bush Administration's side.Johnny Coelacanth (6):
Seconded. I don't know of a better long-running series of posts.Clif Marsiglio (7):
No. It was a terrible idea from the start, doomed to fail; and the mismanagement started at the top, not the bottom.DragonPhyre (9):
Since we have a bunch of other ways to assess that, I'll have to assume you don't know much about the subject.Yes. That's why we call them standardized tests. If everyone has the same chance, you can tell how well they did by looking at their test scores.No. The kid who missed out on all the instruction and didn't do any of the hands-on exercises is far less likely to do well on a test."Standardized" doesn't mean "everyone passes."As for "just show up for class every day and you'll pass," I'm surprised that as a kid with a learning disability, you didn't learn to decode that one. It means, "We don't expect you to learn anything, and we're not even going to try to teach you." It's one of the pathologies you see when students are sorted out early by apparent aptitude, and their learning isn't tested or measured. The kids who are harder to teach -- the disciplinary cases, the ones with learning disabilities who really do need extra help but if given it can learn, the kids who've fallen behind through no fault of their own (missing a lot of school due to illness or injury, having unrecognized vision or hearing problems, coming from families that are broken or disorderly or just going through hard times) and haven't been able to catch up -- all get dumped together into holding-tank classes where a bored teacher presents unconvincing lessons and doesn't even pretend to expect that readings and homework will get done.
I have a friend who went through a school system like that. His family was poor, brown, and spoke English as a second language. He was smart as a whip, but severely dyslexic -- and in his district, no one bothered to notice the dyslexia. This is where "Just come to class every day and you'll pass" came into it. No one tried to teach him anything. He got passed from class to class, year to year, because if they'd flunked him, they would have had to keep him around longer. Finally, in his junior year in high school, some sturdy old battleaxe of a teacher noticed two things: he was very intelligent, and he'd never been taught to read. She taught him. He took off running. He had to attend community college a couple of years, to make up for all the stuff his school had been supposed to teach him, but after that he went to college. He's doing fine, last I heard.
The point of education isn't to have winners and losers. It's to enable our citizens to work, and vote, and make lives for themselves. The other point is that educating our children literally makes us a richer country. Well-trained citizens are hugely more productive. Uneducated ones are troublesome and expensive. Education is as basic a part of the national infrastructure as building roads and stringing wires.
Teresa -- I think you are wrong on this.
It was a great idea. Standardized testing is greatly needed to equalize the lower end of education and bring everyone up to a minimum.
That is the idea that this was designed from. Beyond that, they told states they needed to come up with the plans themselves. Most states have vastly underfunded assessment and have only ever paid lipservice to it -- and this was a way to make them actually do something about it without the guys at the top demanding they do anything except CREATE THE STANDARD. I'm not a big fan of the 'right', but this was sticking with their belief in states rights. Personally, I would have preferred someone at the top tell everyone exactly what to do and how to do it -- but given the bumbling they do, I'm glad they put it out in the local levels.
States are FINALLY getting the idea of how to do this and funding it at the levels needed. It is no where near perfect, nor is it even at a middling level of acceptability, but the seeds are there. Eventually, when assessment is integrated and not looked at as a way to say kids are stupid (with no means of remediation) or bringing others down (face it, even before NCLB most 'gifted' programs were simply rich kids who got in there because their snotty parents who couldn't understand their average Johnny or Janie wasn't just the brightest kid in the world...NCLB has actually created some standards for the gifted programs) or to punish hard working educators.
I work in the high schools all the time, and I have to say there are a LOT of teacher that just shouldn't be allowed anywhere near kids. Sadly, the teacher's unions are as bad as the police unions -- they are there to protect the tenured and nothing else. Few educators will talk publicly, but almost every gifted educator I talk with HATES the unions. I understand why they are there and I can't argue they do protect teachers from political vendettas and parents looking to shift the blame, but NCLB is never going to work until we get rid of the unions (or reform them severely).
But no, it was never a bad idea. It is an idea in its infancy and there will be missteps.
John McNally, bookofralph.com, has already wrote the novel -- 'America's Report Card.' Excellent novel.