is 'No Child Left Behind' a psychological program to create more right wing

[sam sarrha]

extremists...

I was contemplating the phenomena of the 'Circle of violence' relative to children's experiences at home with abusive parents... when i clicked onto the irrationality of the NCLB program.

i was a biological research scientist and do this stuff all the time, i will see something like NCLB that is really really strange and obviously an inappropriate and ineffective and oblique approach to education. this immediately sets the subconscious reflective thought process.. which can take years, but just pops up when done.

21% of males are rigid bigoted and are impatiently waiting for a Fascist Nazi leader to rally them to light the ovens. i feel these sociopathic mental ill people are products of abusive families or experiences.. of course there are the genetic motivated types that often create a circle of violence or information disease resulting in extremist bigoted types.

if the Reich wing got together with malevolent psychologists and developed a mind control program to initiate in the public schools that was so infuriating and frustrating and hate creating.. that it actually brainwashed susceptible children from a very young and impressionable age to become Rabid freeping republicans.. they could tip the scales to the NeoCons FOR EVER. this is what the Wahabie Islamic Extremists are doing.. creating a plethora of suicide bombers:shrug:

[acmejack]

1. Oh Sam, this day just gets better and better...

Looking at Norquist's ugly mug & listening to his vile spew, seeing the ME come apart, watching the economy teeter on the brink of disaster, and considering this scenario- this all adds up to a massive OH SHIT and on a Friday, too!

[sam sarrha]

2. do you think there is a possibility of this.. they are that evil

[elehhhhna]

5. it ain't working on my kids, that's for sure.

[sam sarrha]

13. i qualified it by saying susceptible children.. and there are a lot of em,

i am glad that your's are not..

i came from an abusive dysfunctional family, fortunately i have Aspergers Syndrome and i am not 'Neurologically Traditional' and i never really knew what was going on.

i was/am obsessively compulsive about learning things.. i never really learned anything in school anyway.. i could read when i was 3, i have an IQ of 164 but am functionally illiterate with a literacy of 6th grade on a good day,i may be slow but i am persistent.. except for being a savant with technical material, i have worked at Shell Research Development Corporation, Boeing Space and Communications on the F22 and Delta3 Rocket. i also had a job doing taxonomy on Bacteria till a guy with a degree took over and mess everything up..

[Freedomofspeech]

3. Having just retired from public education...

and my husband a school superintendent, you have no idea what No Child Left Behind is doing to our schools. The bottom line is the government wants them to know this fact and that fact, but NO critical thinking skills. God forbid that anyone think, why, they might start questioning the government. Teachers have the constant pressure of teaching to the test, and everything else in the classroom is out the window. It's a disgrace.

[sam sarrha]

4. i am aware of that, i posit that they did this to create Republican voters

when i was school we had to read,..'Hidden Persuaders'.. about the psychological techniques used to get us to do what me might not do otherwise ..it changed my life and essentially took me out of the consumer world.. and make me think critically about politics also.

[elehhhhna]

6. True. It's horseshit meant to create bogus statistical " improvement."

Plus school admins are cheating. BIGTIME. And the teachers know it.

[sam sarrha]

7. there is an epidemic of Third Graders in Florida, there is a glitch in the

test and there are 10's of thousands of third graders failing.. many the 3rd time.

[leveymg]

8. I think you're onto something here.

NCLB seems to be an attempt to overturn the principles of the progressive education movement -- that taught critical reasoning and ethics over a rote memorization and rules-based system of learning -- and revert to the Good Old Days. You're quite right that there's a social agenda behind this.

The purpose of education, pre-Dewey, was thought to be the reinforcement of the existing order, with the children of the wealthy being taught the lessons of antiquity through a rigorous study of Roman and Greek classics in their original languages while the masses were kept to a basic curriculum that imparted nothing more than basic literacy, numeracy and enough civics instruction to make them aware of their limited duties as workers and soldiers.

The idea of education for broad participatory democracy evolved in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, led by enlightened patrician intellectuals such as John Dewey. The result was a much wider pool of talen and the requirement for a broader sharing of power. That model of democratic empowerment worked well until the generalized reaction that started in the middle of the 20th century, the results of which is a withdrawal of federal support for public education which the NCLB testing regime is meant to justify.

[Richard Steele]

10. It's easy to forget what a RECENT development this all was.

And a certain segment of the "privledged class" still
wants to undo it and return to the "good (for them) old days"
educational system of the early 1800s,
where real progressive education could only be obtained
via very expensive, very EXCLUSIVE private channels,
while PUBLIC schools churned out worker-drones with
just enough basic skills to make them worth exploiting.

[elehhhhna]

15. In other words, the system that produced GW, the MBA. lmao!

[cgrindley]

18. Speaking as a university professor

A little bit of rote learning would make me do a happy dance.

I'd love it if students came into a first year class able to understand pronoun/antecedent errors, or subordinate which/that errors, or know what a fallacy of choice was, and so on. I'd love it if I didn't have to spend a lot of my time convincing them that when they are writing a term paper, their feelings are utterly irrelevant, and that the only things that count are their writing, their use of refereed sources, their use of logic, their adherence to correct MLA style, and their structure. I'd love it if I could teach some fairly classic essays to a first year audience without having to explain what satire is, or what Ireland is, and so on. I'd love for students to have enough rote knowledge to be able to tell me when the US civil war was, or when the country joined WWI or WWII. Students are so poorly informed nowadays that they are unaware of everything from Star Trek to the USSR. It's mind boggling.

Perhaps all of this touchy feely crap in high schools is good for people who don't go on to college, but I'm sick and tired of having to undo all of that garbage.

And before anyone jumps on me for not being left enough for you, forget it. I'm slightly to the sinister side of Che, and if I had my way, I'd nationalize all universities and all private schools in a heartbeat and require a government training program and licence prior to the ownership of a Bible.

[elehhhhna]

19. Great post. All my gals know of history they learned at home...

they're 10 & 12. The eldest corrected her Soc. Studies teacher last year during the WWII section when he stated "Anne Frank must have survived or we wouldn't have her diary".

Signed,
Ashamed of Texas

[leveymg]

22. Dewey would agree with you about your mis-educated students.

You have my sympathy for having to deal at the university level with the malformed results of the American educational and class systems.

I hope you don't, however, subscribe to the fallacy that experiential education ("progressive education") is just student-driven, unstructured "touchy-feely crap". Your post strikes me as more snark than serious critique of modern educational theory.

The most common misunderstanding about Dewey is that he was simply supporting progressive education. Progressive education, according to Dewey, was a wild swing in the philosophical pendulum, against traditional education methods. In progressive education, freedom was the rule, with students being relatively unconstrained by the educator. The problem with progressive education, said Dewey, is that freedom alone is no solution. Learning needs a structure and order, and must be based on a clear theory of experience, not simply the whim of teachers or students.

The fact that your students haven't learned the rules of grammar and can't locate Ireland on the map isn't so much the fault of progressive education as it is a failure of parenting and a mis-allocation of social resources. Children brought up in homes where there is an abundance of books, maps and globes, art materials, tools, musical instruments, and above all, involved parents, tend to be both self-educated and open to new educational experiences.

[sam sarrha]

25. you have to have the essential basics to begin with..NCLB isn't doing that

either

[rodeodance]

9. I see it as the further dumbing down of America.

[unpossibles]

11. I agree - imo it's all a part of the program to make

people stupider. seriesly. ;)


seriously though, I have noticed that it goes hand in hand with the vilification of science, the media, and of universities; both being seen as Liberal brainwashing.

There's an old saying that a dumb dog can be easier to train than a smart one.... If you get people to disbelieve any factual information and to actively distrust the people presenting facts and combine that with a reduction in the ability to critically think, well... the result is all around us in the number of people who don't believe in evolution and who think Hussein was behind 9/11. And who think the Bush Crime Syndicate is moral and godly.

It makes me sad. It's like they read Orwell's 1984 and instead of being horrified by it, used it as a playbook.

[MadHound]

12. I don't see NCLB as some sort of mind control program per se

More that it is an effort to not only dumb down the next generation, in order to make them more compliant and gullible. In addition I see NCLB as a way to provide a cash cow for Bushco's buddies by providing them with ever more private, for profit schools. It is also being used as a reward for Bushco's RW fundy base, shuttling ever more children into their religious indoctrination programs that go by the name of "education"

[cgrindley]

16. I think that the background idea of NCLB is sound

I grew up in Canada and was part of the first class of students to receive 50% of their marks from the government in the form of standardized testing. This was back in 1984. It's still going on and as an educator myself, I know that I can trust Canadian product to at least have basic literacy in a variety of fairly obvious subjects. Here are some points perhaps you haven't considered.

Without standardized testing, we have no guarantee that grades are grounded in reality. It is typical, as far as I am concerned, for exclusive US prep colleges to routinely "give" A level grades to merely average students and B level grades to students who would not pass in the Canadian system. The SAT is such an utterly simple exam as to be worthless except to weed out the illiterate. I'd like to be able to trust the abilities of incoming college students without wondering if they were the beneficiaries of social promotion or an incompetent school district or a parent who can spend 40k a year to purchase their child a good grade.

Standardized testing also allows teachers to be exposed for harboring grudges against students. In certain provinces of Canada, if an exam score is +/- 20% of the classroom grade, a teacher has some explaining to do.

Standardized testing also levels the uneven playing field between boys and girls.

Standardized testing also allows parents to make informed choices. Back in my home province of British Columbia, a right wing nutjob thinktank called the Fraser Institute publishes test score reviews of all BC schools. Sure these people are utter assholes, but I don't know any parents who will send their children to substandard schools on purpose. If you had a choice between two free schools, both of which were in your neighborhood, and both of which your child had a legal right to attend, why would you send your child to the school with the lower test scores?

Don't forget, the UK has had A and O levels or their simulacra have been around for yonks and work fairly well.

The problem isn't with NCLB, it's with its funding. The US should stop funding schools at the local level and fund them all equally and nationally. Every school district should get the same funding allocation per student. It is unfair that a high school in Westchester NY should get more money than one in the Bronx or in West Virginia. It's the funding that's the screwed up part. Funding schools by property tax is idiotic.

As a university professor, standardized testing is something that I desperately want in my incoming first year students. As it is, I have no real faith in the SATs, much much much much less faith in the ACT (which could be passed by a piece of Adirondack furniture). I need something; since I started teaching in 1992, there's pretty much been a total collapse in basic freshman literacy.

[MadHound]

21. NCLB is a curse, plain and simple

Not only are there huge funding problems, but it is sucking up more and more educational resources in order to meet a goal that is designed not to be met. Teachers are finding themselves having to devote more energy, effort and time to teaching towards the tests, rather than providing a solid educational experience.

And as NCLB standards continue to raise the bar to unnattainable levels, more local taxes are having to be diverted to education and funding for the unfunded mandate. And yet and still, more and more schools are finding themselve falling into the "unacceptable" category, despite having raised their overall scores.

No, NCLB is indeed designed to put more and more public school students into private schools, which are mostly religous schools in the US. It isn't designed to educate our students better, it isn't designed to improve the education system. It is designed to start providing public money to go into private, mostly religious, schools.

For you see, when a school becomes unacceptable, it is expected to bring up test scores all on its own. No extra funding, though that is desperately needed, no extra teachers, even though the teacher to student ratio is going through the roof, no extra resources, though in many schools, especially inner city and rural these extra resources are desperately needed. No, it is simply a matter of either making do with the situation on hand, or fail and watch a bunch of students being bled off into the RW fundy school down the road, which interestingly enough doesn't have to administer the NCLB testing.

Meanwhile as more and more teachers are forced to "teach to the test" subjects besides reading, math and science are getting increasingly ignored. We are now raising a generation of students who have less historical, civic, economic, and humanities knowledge than ever before. This is neither the right nor wise thing to do. Sure, Johnny might be able to add two plus two, but he is also ill-equipped to be a participating citizen in his own democratic government. Things that make you go Hmmm.

And while I agree, there are many problems with the US educational system, throwing and unfunded mandate like NCLB into the mix simply doesn't help, in fact it causes harm. The US education system has been running on economic fumes for decades. Education infrastructure is crumbling due to years of neglect, student to teacher ratio is down because of lack of funding and lack of pay for teachers, lack of student accountability due to parental non-participation, all this and more needs to be addressed with an infusion of money and resources. Instead we have a program that is, in all reality, designed to drive public schooling into the ground. That is a disservice to our children and our country, and the US is going to be paying a heavy price for this madness shortly as these students enter college, the work force and society ill-prepared and under equipped.

Next year NCLB is up for renewal. I'm desperately hoping there will be enough Democrats elected to Congress to kill off this monster. Otherwise there is going to be a heavy price to pay as American society is deliberatly dumbed down.

[cgrindley]

28. So how come standarized testing works

reasonably well in other countries? Is it simply a matter of inadequate funding? Something's got to be done to fix the problem because to tell you the truth, I do not trust SAT or high school grades anymore, and a lot of my time is utterly wasted attempting to bring students up to a level that they should have mastered back in middle school (I'm not complaining about developmental education, I'm cool with that, it's just that if someone has apparently satisfied their high school English requirements and are ready for university, I'd like them actually to be ready for university). I don't know why it has to be my problem.

[leveymg]

23. I can't speak to the Canadian example, but disagree about the value

of NCLB and your reasoning that parents should abandon community schools on the basis of published standardized test scores.

Our child enters Middle School next Fall in the northern Virginia suburbs. For the past five years, she has attended the neighborhood elementary school at the top of the hill. Prior to that, we sent her to private pre-school and kindergarten.

When she started First Grade, we seriously thought about placing her in an elementary school with higher test scores. We live in a neighborhood with a very high concentration of recent immigrants and minorities. As a result, children in that community school didn't score well, particularly in English. The school receives a lot of Title One funding, which means class sizes are smaller and there are additional resource teachers.

Even though we had a choice to send our child to a whiter, "brighter" school in another part of the county, we're glad we gave the neighborhood school a chance. Our child thrived and has has had exposure to an amazingly wide variety of cultures. Her classmates come from homes where 42 different languages are spoken. As a result, she has learned diplomatic and social skills -- along with democratic attitudes -- that will surely benefit her in ways that aren't measured by the Virginia Standards of Learning exams.

While our daughter has obtained an exceptionally good education -- she tests at the top and gets straight A's - the school itself came very close to being decertified.

Something is wrong with the standardized testing regime mandated by NCLB where "failing schools" provide outstanding educations.

[cgrindley]

26. It works a little differently in British Columbia

With regard to your first point. I don't think that the two systems are comparable. In the city of Victoria, which is about 3 miles by 3 miles, there are 300,000 people or so and about a dozen decent high schools and junior high schools, all free to the public. Any kid can choose to go to any of them. Since the city is so small, you're really never more than a mile or so away from 3 or 4 schools. It's no great inconvenience. I have three kids (12, 12, and 15) and they each go to a different school (one is in French immersion, one likes certain sports, etc). It's nice to be able to see how each school does on the standardized tests to make an educated choice.

With regard to your second point. Great, I'm glad that it's working out for you and working out for her. People on DU probably spend a lot of time helping their kids and fostering in them the correct attitudes towards a lifetime of learning... but on the flip side, there are many parents who are not you, and who are never going to be all that proactive.

When a kid finally gets to college, they're not going to get graded on exposure to other cultures or social skills. They're only going to get graded against a set of standards. I guess you could always decide to send her to Brown. Do they even have classes?

I think that the major objection that NCLB punishes failing schools, encourages teaching to a test, and is unfairly funded are excellent objections to its implementation, but not to the general concept of standardized testing. Take the ***, of which I'm a certified reader, and it's a shitty shitty shitty test and as far as I can tell, the scoring isn't even remotely anchored to planet earth; but the idea of having a standardized test to determine placement in college English is good.

I think that it's the duty of the teachers and principals to ensure that no one teaches to a test (which only creates lower scores in my opinion), and I think that together we should create a situation where all schools are funding according to their need. And yes, poor schools should be identified, but they should be fixed and the root social problems responsible for school problems should be addressed by a caring and compassionate society.

[Sir Jeffrey]

14. NCLB is also a massive giveaway to businesses...

In order to comply with all of the rules, the schools are being forced to upgrade their methods of monitoring school performance and individual performance. Here is how it works in practice, according to a family member of mine:

You meet with the administrator to discuss ways to monitor the students in, say, history for example. In a class of 30 students, the teachers have to quiz the students over the approved government interpretation of an event (Civil War, WWII, etc.) At the end of the government approved lecture, you quiz the students. If enough students get too many wrong answers (4 of 30, for example), the entire class has to start over with the lesson. This continues until the entire class gets the right answers. Think back to your school. How much material could your class have covered if the entire class had to get, say, a 90% minimum on a test?

In order to do this "instant monitoring" of students, the schools have to purchase hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment designed to slow classes down. This system is designed to create "fact-memorizers", not "critical thinkers".

Any Democrat criticizing NCLB simply because it wasn't full funded HOPEFULLY has no clue what they are saying. It needs to be eliminated, not given more money.

[NashVegas]

17. Exerting Federal Control Over What Has Always Been a State/Local Issue

It has entirely dumbed down the NYS Regents Exams.

[elehhhhna]

20. BINGO BINGO BINGO

[insane_cratic_gal]

24. It's a way to for the Right to Stop Public education

Eventually schools will fail this Cabal's requirements and as such it will be closed down and a Charter school pop up in it's place.


They making bigger divisive strides between Liberal/Conservative mind sets.. preaching that public schools are too liberal (See O"lielly war on christmas)

High school kids have to test out of 12th grade now, if they fail they have to keep taking the test.

Welcome to 3rd world Education. A friend of mine from Jordon, had a brother who did not graduate till he was 23 because he couldn't pass his exit test. I long suspect that our own children will be staring down the same barrel.

I just pray the next sitting President (hopefully Gore) Over turns this bullshit and fixes education by not dooming it to failure.

[ComerPerro]

27. You sure its just 21% of males? I'd wager its higher, closer to 35 or 40

[cgrindley]

29. I hope you're joking

because that's really offensive and is bigoted towards a huge proportion of one gender and paints a really needlessly negative image with a really broad brush. If you honestly think that 4 out of 10 males is a potentially goose-stepping oven stuffer, perhaps you need to turn off the computer more often and get to know more people.

[ComerPerro]

30. One, I'm male. Two, I know lots of other males. Three, I know

how many RW males think.

and Four, I find it reasonable to believe that slightly more than 50% of males have conservative / neocon / republican tendancies.

And, given that I think that about 99% of Republicans are potential goose-stepping fascists just waiting for another Hitler to set them on a path to totalitarianism, then I think my post explains itself