NO CHILD LEFT UNSPUN: FIVE YEARS LATER

THE NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND LAW is not only an enormous assault on the
sacred democratic principles of local control of the schools and the
Tenth Amendment, it isn't even working all that well.

Five years into to this scam invented by perhaps the dumbest president
ever to hold office, and never seriously questioned by either Democrats
or the media, there is no evidence the plan is doing what it set out to
accomplished.

The archaic media is too busy quoting experts and officials to actually
look at the numbers, but we checked out the record and found this:

No improvement in 8th grade reading scores
Less than a one percent improvement in 4th grade reading scores
A 5% improvement in 4th grade math scores
A 2% improvement in 8th grade math scores.

The math scores, while hardly worth throwing out democratic control of
the schools, seem at least some improvement, until, that is, you check
what they were doing before NCLB came into effect. For example, in the
ten years before NCLB, 4th grade math scores were also improving - at a
rate of 1.3 points a year as opposed to the 2.4 points in the past five
years. In 8th grade, the scores before NCLB were going up 1 point a
year; since NCLB they have gone up 1.1 point a year. This, of course,
assumes a perfection in standardized testing that we do not seem to have
achieved.

If it weren't for the Iraq disaster, NCLB would probably be the biggest
scandal of the Bush years. But as with Iraq, the Democrats bought into
the con early and can't for the life of themselves figure out how to get
out.

A FEW THINGS WRONG WITH NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND

[From a teacher petition]

1. Misdiagnoses the causes of poor educational development, blaming
teachers and students for problems over which they have no control.

2. Assumes that competition is the primary motivator of human behavior
and that market forces can cure all educational ills.

3. Mandates data driven instruction based on gamesmanship to undermine
public confidence in our schools.

4. Uses pseudo science and media manipulation to justify pro-corporate
policies and programs, including diverting taxes away from communities
and into corporate coffers.

5. Ignores the proven inadequacies, inefficiencies, and problems
associated with centralized, "top-down" control.

6. Places control of what is taught in corporate hands many times
removed from students, teachers, parents, local school boards, and
communities.

7. Requires the use of materials and procedures more likely to produce a
passive, compliant workforce than creative, resilient, inquiring,
critical, compassionate, engaged members of our democracy.

8. Reflects and perpetuates massive distrust of the skill and
professionalism of educators.

9. Allows life-changing, institution-shaping decisions to hinge on
single measures of performance.

10. Emphasizes minimum content standards rather than maximum development
of human potential.

11. Neglects the teaching of higher order thinking skills which cannot
be evaluated by machines.

12. Applies standards to discrete subjects rather than to larger goals
such as insightful children, vibrant communities, and a healthy
democracy.

13. Forces schools to adhere to a testing regime, with no provision for
innovating, adapting to social change, encouraging creativity, or
respecting student and community individuality, nuance, and difference.

14. Drives art, foreign language, career and technical education,
physical education, geography, history, civics and other non-tested
subjects, such as music, out of the curriculum, especially in low-income
neighborhoods.

15. Produces multiple, unintended consequences for students, teachers,
and communities, including undermining neighborhood schools and blurring
the line between church and state.

16. Rates and ranks public schools using procedures that will gradually
label them all "failures," so when they fail to make Adequate Yearly
Progress, as all schools eventually will, they can be "saved" by
vouchers, charters, or privatization.

COMMENTS BY PETITION SIGNERS
http://www.petitiononline.com/1teacher/petition.html

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A SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT EXPLAINS WHY NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND IS A FRAUD

HOWARD MAFFUCCI, ROCHESTER DEMOCRAT & CHRONICLE - The No Child Left
Behind law is a fraud. That may be strong language from a school
superintendent, but the law is a definite political, social, and
economic con.

First, the law's basic premise — that public schools are performing
poorly and need to be improved, or else something really bad is going to
happen to America — is political nonsense. Right-wing zealots have used
the phrase "failing public schools" so often that some think it's a
fact, when it isn't. . .

Gerald Bracey, an independent, highly regarded education researcher,
notes in an article for the Stanford University Alumni Association that
since the end of World War II, the proportion of high school graduates
among those 25 or older has grown from 34 percent to 74 percent, and the
percentage of college graduates has increased from 6 percent to 19
percent.

Bracey points out that according to a 2006 report published by a
Columbia University research center, public schools outperform private
schools when controlling for poverty. And, a 2004 U.S. Department of
Education report found that despite all the rhetoric about charter
schools, they're "less likely to meet state performance standards than
traditional public schools."

No Child Left Behind is deceptive in social and economic ways as well.
The law helps hide two of America's dirty little secrets:

- The first is the incredible amount of poverty in America. Timothy
Smeeding, professor of economics and public policy at Syracuse
University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, has found
that among the world's nine richest industrialized nations, America has
the second highest poverty rate in general, and the highest rate of
poverty among children. . .

- Probably the most troublesome and scheming aspect of NCLB is, as
Bracey states, that it depends on punishment for schools that don't meet
its standards. And its standards are rigged to make good schools look
bad. NCLB arbitrarily requires that all schools show "adequate yearly
progress" by subgroups, 37 or so of which are based on race/ethnicity,
special education, gender, etc. If a school misses the target in just
one of these subgroups, it could be deemed "failing," possibly
triggering sanctions. . .

The No Child Left Behind law doesn't need to be reformed. It needs to be
abolished.

http://www.nochildleft.com/2007/jan07fraud.html

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