Quote:
Originally Posted by *winter*
Yep...NCLB is a really, really poorly executed plan that has not helped many in the past ten years. Now states are spending thousands of dollars investigating cheating scandals over standardized testing. What is it all for...what it is all proving? That schools are failing? We already knew that.
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The decisions for how the plan would be implemented were up to the states. I always thought it was delusional to say that every kid could be on grade level by a certain date, but a lot of what NCLB is blamed for has to do with implementation and the response of local districts to being held accountable. They elected to game the system rather than focus on real instruction.
(I'm not saying that bad tests scores are an instructional failure or that that kids' homes and parental expectations don't matter. But when the districts decided the games they would play, those games weren't required by NCLB.)
Finally, the NAEP actually does show some progress from the years of NCLB particularly with subgroup performance. Sure, it's a standardized test, but when you talk about educational outcomes, we don't maintain a whole lot of other data to evaluate the entire country at once. If we have evidence that kids are reading better than before NCLB, for example, I'd say we might have actually improved real student achievement.
ETA: someone mentioned having doubt about NCLB because teachers didn't like it. Well most people would prefer to use their own measures than embrace being judged from the outside. I think that's a pretty natural response but it doesn't mean that much objectively.
The real risks to individual teachers from NCLB itself are pretty low unless your district or principal is crazy (in which case, again, NCLB itself isn't really the problem.)
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