No Child Left Behind law uncertain
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Sun, 13 Jan 2008 23:35:48 GMT |
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WASHINGTON, Jan. 13 Six years after becoming U.S. law, the fate of No Child Left Behind is uncertain.
No Child Left Behind, the school accountability measure enthusiastically championed by President George Bush, is aimed at improving the nation's public school systems and bringing all U.S. students up to proficiency by 2014 in math, reading and writing, The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer reported Sunday.
"I think the chances for reauthorization in 2008 are slim and none," said Mike Petrilli, a former Bush administration education official now with the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. "The bases of both parties hate the law."
There is consensus that the law will be scrapped once Bush leaves office since the policy is so closely associated with the president.
"School people have lived with the law for six years -- they know the defects in it," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center for Education Policy, a Washington group that advocates for public education. "Unlike most laws, this law has not been amended for six years. The lid has been held tight, and that's caused resentment." Copyright 2008 by UPI
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No Child Left Behind Law Uncertain
By:
Yvonne Siu-Runyan, Professor Emerita ,
Mon, 14 Jan 2008 17:09:29 GMT
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The NCLB Act is a bad law.
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Posted on Earthtimes.org: No Child Left Behind Law Uncertain
By:
Yvonne Siu-Runyan, Professor Emerita ,
Mon, 14 Jan 2008 17:07:59 GMT
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The NCLB Act is a bad law. It does not promote learning or providing our young with an education, which empowers them as citizens. Instead the law was designed to control and punish, instilling fear in teachers and students alike. The high stakes tests used are flawed for their assumptions about reading and writing show limited understanding of the process of becoming literate, limits reading and writing to filling out worksheets and sounding out words. This is not literacy. Being literate involves analyzing from a critical perspective what is being said/written, who is saying or writing the message, what is the person(s) intent, and what is left out and why. These are what NCLB mandates cannot and will never be able to determine. I have surmised that NCLB and the flawed high stakes tests were meant to limit and curtail critical thought, reduce literacy to filling in worksheet, and sounding out words without thought to meaning, and thereby controlling the citizens. An uninformed citizenry is easy to control. Thus, in this current climate of control, fear, the bullies in government intimidate, voices muffled, and another peg is hammered into the chipping away of Our Constitutional rights. The NCLB Act needs to be "canned." It cannot be fixed. We need courageous people who have the courage to take a stand for democracy, our youth, and our educators, "Enough already."
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NCLB hasn't worked
By:
Stephen Krashen ,
Mon, 14 Jan 2008 06:19:32 GMT
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Unmentioned in most of the discussion of NCLB is the fact that there is no evidence it has worked. In fact, it appears to be harmful for reading instruction.
President Bush claims national reading test scores are at an all-time high, but nearly all of the improvement took place before NCLB was implemented.
American fourth graders showed no improvement (in fact, a two-point loss) between 2001 and 2006 on an international reading test (PIRLS).
Analysis of the Center for Education Policy report on state testing revealed an increase of rate of improvement of only 1/3 of one percent after NCLB was implemented.
These results do not mean NCLB is just as good as previous approaches. It means it is worse. The Center for Education Policy report tells us that the reading component of NCLB, Reading First, takes up an extra 100 minutes per week. If there is no difference in how well children read, the extra 100 minutes was a waste of time and a waste of money.
Stephen Krashen
Professor Emeritus
University of Southern California
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