Obama Calls for Sweeping Change in Education Law

[FarCenter]

By SAM DILLON
Published: March 13, 2010

The Obama administration on Saturday called for a broad overhaul of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, proposing to reshape divisive provisions that encouraged instructors to teach to tests, narrowed the curriculum, and labeled one in three American schools as failing.

By announcing that he would send his education blueprint to Congress on Monday, President Obama returned to a campaign promise to repair the sprawling federal law, which affects each of the nation’s nearly 100,000 public schools. His plan strikes a careful balance, retaining some key features of the Bush-era law, including its requirement for annual reading and math tests, while proposing far-reaching changes.

The administration would replace the law’s pass-fail school grading system with one that would measure individual students’ academic growth and judge schools based not on test scores alone but also on indicators like pupil attendance, graduation rates and learning climate. And while the proposal calls for more vigorous interventions in failing schools, it would also reward top performers and lessen federal interference in tens of thousands of reasonably well-run schools in the middle.

In addition, President Obama would replace the law’s requirement that every American child reach proficiency in reading and math, which administration officials have called utopian, with a new national target that could prove equally elusive: that all students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career.

“Under these guidelines, schools that achieve excellence or show real progress will be rewarded,” the president said in his weekly radio address, “and local districts will be encouraged to commit to change in schools that are clearly letting their students down.”

<SNIP>http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/education/14child.html?th&emc=th

[tonysam]

1. A real explanation of what this is about is at Schools Matter

If Obama did not doom his Party's chances with the bollixing of health reform, he seems intent on sealing fate of the Ineffectuals by adopting the Business Roundtable plan for school privatization, a future citizenry of non-thinking drones, and total segregation of the poor.

In NCLB 1.0 devised by Bush's public schools demolition experts, the triggering mechanism for blowing up schools was called Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), and it was based on formulae developed by states that set out each state's trajectory toward the mythical goal of 100 percent proficiency in reading and math by 2014. States could choose to take the steady step method to assured smithereens, or they could devise for themselves easy payments on the front end with huge balloon payments in the later years. The "ballooners" were counting on NCLB being dumped into the Potomac before the day of reckoning in 2014.

And that is exactly what is going to happen, according to the Prez. Sort of. What no one outside the Walton, Gates, and Broad camps could have imagined, however, is that NCLB 2.0 would be even more draconian than the torture of AYP under the original NCLB. At least with AYP, there was always some small chance that your low class school could cram, pray, or cheat its way to making the cut score for the never-ending annual tests.

Now with the Oligarchs' new plan, the bottom 5 percent of schools will be targeted each year for "turnaround," and it doesn't matter what the poorest schools do, because the poverty that assures them their status at the bottom of the barrel makes them sure targets for conversions of urban schools into apartheid charter chain gangs, either that or the second-most popular option of firing all the school staff.

Obama's NCLB 2.0: Worse Than the Bush Version

Obama's a freaking disaster when it comes to education.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

2. NYT seems bound and determined to eradicate the knowledge that Ted Kennedy lead this for our side

NCLB clearly has flaws that need to be corrected (there were some good things in there). NCLB was also had significant bipartisan support.