Why Every Student Will NOT Succeed With the New Education Law

[Scuba]

Why the "most progressive President ever" would sign this shit sandwich into law is beyond me ...



http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/12/188460/why-every-student-will-not-succeed-new-education-law

The new law ends the NCLB requirement that states look almost exclusively at test scores to determine whether and how to reward or sanction schools, and also ends the Race To The Top requirement that states use tests that are linked to the Common Core State Standards in order to evaluate and reward or punish not only students and schools, but also teachers. This is good news, because the research clearly shows how an obsession with raising test scores leads to “teaching to the test,” narrowing and dumbing-down what we teach, especially for struggling students who are in most need of a richer and more rigorous curriculum. Assessment experts have long argued that using test scores for such decision making lacks validity and reliability, and we should stop doing so.

But we are not, and the bad news is that this new law still presumes that testing is the magic bullet. Students will continue to be tested annually in grades 3-8 and at least once in high school, and those test scores must figure prominently in how states evaluate school performance. Advocates of the new law celebrate the shifting of authority from the feds to the states to determine what the tests will consist of, how those scores will factor into the evaluations, and what rewards or sanctions will follow. But without a sound framework to guide this work, there is no evidence that the states will come up with strategies better than before.

...

First, vast amounts of funding will divert from neighborhood public schools to private, religious, and charter schools. States will be required to set aside funding to support students in private and religious schools, while the federal government will spend hundreds of millions annually to support charter school expansion. Thomas Jefferson put forth a vision and a hope that every child would be able to walk to his or her neighborhood school and receive the best education that our nation has to offer. The neighborhood schools are the ones serving the largest number of struggling and high-needs students, but because the new law does not increase the overall pot of money, this diversion of funds leaves a smaller pool to support them.

Second, schools with the highest needs will have more teachers with the least preparation. The new law requires that states open more pathways for individuals to become certified to teach in public schools without the level of education, training, and mentoring that comes with the more comprehensive university-based teacher preparation. The high-needs schools are disproportionately impacted by this provision, because teachers who come through these alternative and fast-track certification programs are overwhelming hired there. High-needs schools and students need the best teachers that our nation has to offer, and to get there, we should be creating pathways with more and better preparation, not less.

[clydefrand]

1. If every student 'succeeded', then

you would have one terrible education system.
You don't need to pass every student when some do so terrible, but then let us not 'hurt' their feelings, right?

[pnwmom]

2. The NCLB was the shit sandwich. It needed to go. nt

[HereSince1628]

3. Why? Because education is a devil's playground.

Which is to say that education is one of the perfect platforms for political, economic, social and ideological confrontation. It's something everyone has experienced in one of its various forms, through a process few have ever actually paused to contemplate, but upon which everyone has the correct opinion.

It's full of seemingly un-resolvable opposing dialectics from which 'solutions' are selected for the next round of educational reform, aka gear-grinding.

It can be seen as an enormously impersonal industrial operation structured to impose social will through a process expected to provide artisanal satisfaction of curiosity in a child by a knowledgeable caring adult, who is often characterized in fiction and personal anecdote as a person whose performance we could exceed, if we weren't too deeply engaged in more important, and rewarding, careers.

The notion of a 'one-size' fits all industrial approach to education is preposterous, the notion that teachers are shaping brains into a shared world view imposed by a distant, incompetent, oft immoral government draconian. Yet, the efficiency of scale. and the insertion of public funds, demands of application of 'best methods' of process control and accountability, including well defined training and licensure, common standards, effective quality control, and it seems ... freedom from imposed mandates yet imposition public flogging when things don't go well.

[MisterP]

4. because enough will just assume that since the Prez that most Dems and all Pubs they know

are calling socialist and lefty and progressive pushed the bill, they can just accept that the bill is, too

honestly, if President McCain had signed half the things Obama has downtown DC would have to be walled off; but if it's charismatic "he HAS to be progressive--he's Obama!" then we wonder what WE did wrong, whether our complaints may've cost us Capitol Hill, or that the laws CAN'T be all THAT bad, can they?

that's how politics works these days, by hiding policy