NCLB - “No Child Left Untested”

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The controversy rages about the Bush administration’s NCLB (the chillingly misnamed “No Child Left Behind” act).

I believe that this travesty of a boondoggle (the only people who benefit are the testing companies) has the potential to destroy what is left of American public education.

You may feel otherwise, and that is great. If someone can defend NCLB with proof that it has been generally successful, then “bring it on.” But please keep in mind that skewed, cherry-picked statistics, folksy phrases and anecdotes are not proof.

A healthy debate, on the other hand, would truly be welcome. What concerns many thinking people, though, is that debate has been anything but healthy so far. Like so many failed policies, it is being propped-up by rhetoric that holds no positive value, and is often destructive.

Here is an example of how the debate, from the highest level of the Bush administration’s representatives, is being manipulated:

In a government press release, Margaret Spellings, Bush’s Secretary of Education, recently stated:

“I find it amazing that we’re actually debating whether or not it’s reasonable to give every child the bare-minimum skills they need to participate in our democracy and our economy.”

What I find amazing is that Americans seem not to be able to see through the lies that Spelling’s statement assumes.

Nobody is debating if it’s reasonable to give children skills. It’s a blatant lie for her to assert that anyone is. What we are debating is the very dubious presumption that NCLB does anything like actually accomplishing that.

Also, like so many people who would like to make little obedient drones of the next generation, Spellings assumes that the reason we want children to learn is to benefit our democracy and our economy. While those are good goals, they are only communal goals. Learning is not only good for the community, it is good for the individual.

That is the core of the problem with NCLB - it totally devalues the individual student, teacher, parent, district, etc. Of course, any national law inherently must focus on society at large, but the brutal, insistent and non-compromising drive of people like Spellings to corral us into her way of thinking, by using twisted arguments to make an invalid point is positively Orwellian.

Children need to learn more than just “facts.” They need to be able to think for themselves. If every child learned how to do that, they’d grow into adults who would be able to find the disingenuous fallacy in Margaret Spellings’ argument.

For the best coverage of NCLB I’ve come across so far, check out Jim Horn’s SchoolsMatter blog.


Tags: