 Monkeying Around With Education While we all were waiting for the inevitable shutdown to begin last night, we thought we might actually try to be more effective than the idiots in Congress - a low standard, we know. Still, we began by looking back through some recent news, and came across more stories about the ever-failing No Child Left Behind law. The law - also known as NCLB - now appears to be reaching critical levels of failure in our home state of Nebraska.
As Margaret Reist detailed in the Lincoln Journal-Star last week, sixty-five percent of Nebraska's schools failed to meet the Bush-era NCLB academic target last year. That failure is in part due either to a stubbornness to change or simple stupidity by both Nebraska's Governor and legislature to formally request a waiver from the Federal government on the NCLB standards, as other states have done.
As Joe Dejka outlined in the Omaha World Herald, even some Nebraska schools well-known for high academic standards, like the Omaha-area Millard North and Millard West high schools, have now run into some well-known problems with the NCLB - namely, the bananas requirement that schools be nearly perfect in their testing results. Those unrealistic standards, in fact, are a big part of why 42 other states have applied for waivers from the Obama administration on the NCLB standards and have been granted those waivers.
Many educators say the problem is simply that so-called educational "experts" keep insisting on more and more testing - the kind of nutty educational policy that's often the hallmark of educational standards efforts.
Some educators even say the Obama administration's attempt to do something similar, Common Core, is equally bad.... |
