It’s time to say in a national newspaper what millions of teachers, students and parents already know: No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is an appalling and unredeemable experiment that has done incalculable damage to our schools — particularly those serving poor, minority and limited-English-proficiency students.
It’s a stretch even to call the law “well-intentioned” given that its creators, including the Bush administration and the right-wing Heritage Foundation, want to privatize public education. Hence NCLB’s merciless testing, absurd timetables and reliance on threats.
Let’s be clear: This law has nothing to do with improving learning. At best, it’s about raising scores on multiple-choice exams. This law is not about discovering which schools need help; we already know. This law is not about narrowing the achievement gap; its main effect has been to sentence poor children to an endless regimen of test-preparation drills. Thus, even if the scores do rise, it’s at the expense of a quality education. Affluent schools are better able to maintain good teaching — and retain good teachers — despite NCLB, so the gap widens.
Sure, it’s senseless for Washington to impose requirements without adequate funding. But more money to implement a bad law isn’t the answer.
Indeed, according to a recent 50-state survey by Teachers Network, a non-profit education organization, exactly 3% of teachers think NCLB helps them to teach more effectively. No wonder 129 education and civil rights organizations have endorsed a letter to Congress deploring the law’s overemphasis on standardized testing and punitive sanctions. No wonder 30,000 people (so far) have signed a petition at educatorroundtable.org calling the law “too destructive to salvage.”
NCLB didn’t invent the scourge of high-stakes testing, nor is it responsible for the egregious disparity between the education received by America’s haves and have-nots. But by intensifying the former, it exacerbates the latter.
This law cannot be fixed by sanding its rough edges. It must be replaced with a policy that honors local autonomy, employs better assessments, addresses the root causes of inequity and supports a rich curriculum. The question isn’t how to save NCLB; it’s how to save our schools — and kids — from NCLB.
Education writer Alfie Kohn’s 11 books include The Schools Our Children Deserve and The Homework Myth.
© 2007 USA Today
It must be remembered that NCLB and HAVA are identical in their purposes. The stated objectives of these two pieces of legislation are to improve public education and to help Americans vote. Their real objectives are to undermine public education (discourage critical thinking and promote test-taking) and voter suppression via electronic voting. The Administration’s hostility to Democracy & educational opportunity is staggering and unprecedented in our history.
It’s also part of a program to standardize minds, ensure conformity and further the agenda of the authoritarians. As a nice little profitable caveat, their own “people” design the textbooks, which teach kids–at best–how to “test,” but impoverish their creative/thinking processes. Agriculture has gone the way of mono-culture, entire forests are taken to plant ONE kind of tree. This is the model these fools call progress, and it’s depraved in its hubris. Nothing the Bush junta touches has any element of altruism attached; it’s all about an ungodly agenda that places war for profit foremost. Dumbed down kids with no job access will have little choice but to take servile jobs or join the military. And the military wants’ em big time.
Eric Barth makes a good point in the 1st post to this thread, but his point can be widely generalized. EVERYTHING the Bush admin does (”Operation Iraqi Freedom,” “The Clear Skies Act,” etc) is a matter of giving pretty names to vicious destructive policies whose real intent is the polar opposite of what’s expressed by the name.
In fact, this is how PR operates generally — it’s not just a matter of the Bush administration (though they are surely the most brazen & repulsive exemplar of these intrinsically dishonest techniques). Since “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” it’s hard to see why the ruling class would ever fail to lie as much as possible, in presenting its propaganda. The only limiting factor would be a sense of shame — and in these times, the rulers have no shame.
Richm: I agree. It’s also an inverted tribute to Orwell.
Let’s not forget how this law is a disguised approach to bolstering the fortunes of a few select publishing companies. For instance, if a school falls into the category of not meeting the standard there is only one way out— purchase an approved reading program.( Harcourt, Houghton - Mifflin etc) Thousands and thousands of dollars go to standardize a reading program so the next time around the test can be passed. This is not education. This is regurgitation. Companies scramble to get on the approved list. Creative reading programs nurturing thinking ( Open Court)have been replaced.
I’ve worked for a school system in West Virginia for years - as a programmer, not as a “professional educator.” I do, however, know a lot of teachers, and not one in my acquaintance thinks NCLB is a good thing.
There’s a lot that can be done for our educational system, and the first might be to find - and pay - actual scholars to be administrators. One of my jobs, in addition to writing our food service program, has been to edit and publish student handbooks for our 28 schools. It only takes about 3 minutes of reading the submissions by principals and central office administrators to understand at least part of what is wrong with education in America.
There might be five or six administrators who know how to use punctuation correctly. I believe that’s being generous. I don’t think there are more than one or two who can write two sentences in a row that don’t make one cringe. Consistency, knowing the difference between adverbs and adjectives, tense agreement, and other rules of language are nearly non-existent.
This problem is not confined to writing and speaking ability, in spite of my extreme dislike of hearing a supposedly educated person ask me to come into the office and talk to “Mary and I.” Most of the so-called educators I come in contact with don’t read for pleasure, although they advocate reading for children. Most have no idea what goes on in current events, and many are quite ignorant about history in general. They are not much interested in art or good music.
I recently had an exhibit of my artwork at our local art center, and not one administrator showed up for the opening or to visit during the entire 6 weeks it was on display. This would feel like a bit of a slight, but they don’t go to any of the exhibits or openings no matter whose work is there. Out of 1,500 members of the county’s faculty and staff, not one managed to attend a recent Blues in the Schools benefit that featured some of the regions finest blues musicians. They don’t go to the opera or symphony either, so it’s not that blues music isn’t good enough for them.
NCLB is a fiasco, but there’s a whole lot more wrong with the system. The Peter Principle is well represented, too. I know people who were awesome teachers, truly great principals, and just dreadful central office administrators.
Overcrowded classrooms, lack of air conditioning or proper heating, leaking roofs, poor textbooks, and now NCLB. Trying to patch it up is like trying to put new tires on a beat up 1954 car in the belief that this will fix what’s wrong with the engine and transmission. And it will take lots and lots and lots of money. The nearly $3,000 per second that has been squandered in Iraq could have gone a long way toward finding good solutions. No wonder the home school movement is so successful.
If you have read any of the PNAC plans for the American educaiton system this plan has worked perfectly as designed. I do not disagree with the authors view of what has happened to public education in the US as a result of this “experiment”. NCLB has done just that. Every child has been carried forward. It is where they have been carried forward to that is the tragedy. Children are taught that they always win regardless of the outcome, and they are taught to simply follow along and question nothing. They are not taught that they are responsible for their actions. The Public education system has been a target of the far right since its inception. PNAC and the neoconns of today have simply been successful in the endeavor to destroy public education. The Wealthy robber barons at the time of [public educations inception did not want an educated population. They knew that education is the key that unlocks the door of ignorance and allows people to become aware of their own possibilities and potential. They did not, nor do they today want more competition in their greed fest.
There are 2 important things a child needs to learn in order to survive in our world. I mean even without the advances of so called civilisation our world has been fraught with danger for millenia. So these 2 things are quite simple and also the basis for everything we are able to accomplish in life past survival.
1 - Children need to learn how to learn. In other words we need to explore different methods of learning, such as hands on, or note taking and using various resources like libraries and the internet. Each person generally has their own method of what makes certain information stick in our brains for later recall vs. another. A good teacher understands this and will approach each child differently. Of course you need a low student to teacher ratio to accomplish this.
2 - Children need to be taught to think critically and come to their own understanding of things. Part of the reason we suffer in our current situation in the US is due to an inablitlyt to think critically. If this was happeneing people would have questioned Bush’s rhetoric of us and them immediately after 9-11 for instance. We chose instead to follow along mostly because many Americans who are now parents were not taught critical thinking either. Critical thinking simply is deductive reasoning. Americans lack this ability as a result of years of education in the public education system.
An example of deductive reason might follow like this;
The VP is at the CIA office building in Langley every day for the 6 months leading up to the war.
The VP and the rest of the administration are making claims that Iraq has WMD’s and is trying to use them against the US in public.
The Administration then claims that the documents that back up these claims are secret and due to National Security reasons cannot be placed in the public eye.
Any critically thinking person would pause to at least consider that the administration is hiding something in the documentation. Obviously this is a fairly rudimentary example and to make any real conclusions one would need to look at the details much more closely. What most Americans do however is simply accept what information they are fed without question. NCLB is simply the final piece of a long long history of elitists or American Aristocrats who want to destroy the education system. There are many reasons for that, profit, idealogy but most of all it is control of the thinking process that is desired most by the Aristocracy.
WAKE UP AMERIKA!!!!!!
In the book From The Land of the Green Ghosts, author Pascal Khoo Thwe talks about his life and education in Burma / Myanmar. The author ’studied’ English literature in a Burmese university which was closed in the aftermath of the democracy riots of the 1980s.
Through chance, luck, good karma, or some combination of them he met a Cambridge Don who sponsored him to enroll in Cambridge to really study English literature. Below are some of the things the author had to say about his adjustment to Cambridge.
With NCLB (and its successor programmes that may be even worse) it won’t be long before a child in the US could write these words …
“The excitement … that a professor might draw us out on an author instead of dictating to us what to think now turned into the nightmare of having to cope with that very freedom. I hardly knew where to begin.”
“This [freedom of thought] was a freedom, I began to feel, even more radical than political freedom. Perhaps it was even a basis for all other freedoms.”
“In Burma, while we called for democracy, we had not yet developed any serious idea of freedom of thought.”
“[I] was angry at the gross restrictions put on mental development by the Burmese regime … But you could not blame all of it simply on a regime … [F]or our conformity and readiness to learn parrot-fashion is part of our culture.”
The United States is well on its way to being a country of thought-controlled zombies calling for a return to freedom and democracy - words / concepts that the thought controllers will have defined according to the correct answer on a multiple choice test.
How very sad indeed.
Siouxrose and Eric Barth point out the authoritarian goals of destroying public education and critical thinking behind NCLB. This is a “brilliant” utilitarian strategy from the authoritarians. They export many jobs that require complex critical thinking skills to other countries. The resulting economics of the environment dictates that they no longer need to create a populace with such skills. The outcome of the policy is a populace that despises or is unable to utilize reason based approaches, and is therefore less likely to question those in power.
Add to this setup, values that replace “doing the right thing” with “avoidance of the wrong” and then we see a large populace easily manipulable by irrelevant social issues, and emotional catch phrases.
Neoconned, children don’t need to be taught how to learn — they (and we) are learning constantly. And there is so much information our there, there is no way the schools can teach it all. What schools desperately need to do is to be allowed to inspire a love of learning and teach the skills that support life-long learning. This, of course, is a very subversive venture because you wind up with a whole lot of well-educated/self-educated adults who know how to think critically and support an informed opinion.
NCLB is everything its detractors on both right and left claim it is, and less. The first problem that needs addressing is that NCLB was a bipartisan bill; Ted Kennedy was one of its architects. In fact, his primary criticism of the bill was that it was too cheap and not stringent enough. It is yet one more example of how both Democrats and Republicans are letting down their respective constituencies.
I agree with Mr. Kohn: make education a local affair again. I don’t see how the idea that bureaucrats thousands of miles away can better make local decisions than locals can ever gained currency. We must trust our teachers and parents to develop curricula that will meet the needs of their children.
The other problem is that we don’t all have equal abilities. Some people are more gifted athletically; others more artistically. Traditionally, schools have trained their students for academic pursuits. I think this is terribly unfair to those who wish to seek careers in other areas, such as crafts and trades. If a student would make a good doctor, that student should be in an academic curriculum; if a student aspires to be a wood worker, that student too should be trained accordingly. But our schools only serve the students with academic aspirations. It is elitist in the worst sense of that word to think that only students with academic aspirations should matter to schools.
I don’t think it’s a matter of equal outcomes either. How do you compare the abilities of a doctor and an auto mechanic? What the doctor does poorly, the mechanic may do well, and vice versa. So, I think the so-called achievement gaps are really a red herring that distract us from the important issues. In life we ultimately compete against ourselves and our colleagues, and that’s how students should be trained.
Nobody is better equipped to deal with students than their parents and teachers. Taxpayers are paying for an education system that fails to train students properly and is prohibitively expensive. This system is very elitist in that it fails to serve the needs of tomorrow’s working class; they’re left out in the cold in one of the world’s most expensive educational systems. Blame it all on NCLB and our out-of-touch government.
Why in the wide world of sports would anyone believe that copying a Texas education proposal would improve education?
The only reason Texas is not the worst state for education is that there is Mississippi. I suspect that Texas is better at propaganda and cheating, giving the edge needed to stay off the bottom.
Minnesota usually ranks first in education by objective measures. Wisconsin, Iowa are also up there. I haven’t checked the data lately so cut me some slack.
The point is: Next time some jackass politician comes up with a plan lets give it the smell test before we get on board.
Dunnyveg, as a former educator, I tried to instill a LOVE of reading, since when that miracle of the mind is translated, a child can learn just about anything; and for the most part, grammar, composition and spelling improve on account of subliminal exposure/absorption. NEOconned, I like your points about learning, and Dunnyveg, I, too feel that at puberty youngsters should be given specialized training. In prior times, that was known as apprenticeship. Not everyone likes math or is meant to be an accountant; nor does everyone like art, although fewer and fewer schools are now budgeted for arts.
The delivery of education must be removed from the hands of the government. Vouchers are the only hope for public education. My wife and I sacrificed and postponed gratification to be able to send our daughter to a private school (approximately $3000/yr) , now she continuously scores far above her public school counterparts in standardized tests. The private school she attended used proven traditional methods to teach reading, writing and math. If a private school can educate her for $3000/yr/student, why can’t the local public school achieve the same outcome while spending $6000 /yr/student. The public school system in america is broken and cannot be fixed as long as the teachers union and politicians use it to advance their own agendas.
Student accountability should be based on real world performances not fill in the bubble tests published by corporations.
Put teachers back in charge of their classroom instead of de professionalizing the educators.
Allow students to connect their interests to the curriculum and tap into their intrinsic impulse to learn to combat the boring places most schools currently are.
360 degree accountability allows students to show what they know and can do by presenting their significant learning to a committee demonstrating their abilities to do research and present original knowledge they have developed in core curricular areas. Hundreds of schools already do this around the country showing that graduation rates, college acceptance rates and intellectual performance is much higher than in schools that rely on NCLB.
Many schools are already doing these inspiring things:
www.performanceassessment.org
www.essentialschools.org
To improve education in this country, first of all, requires that all 50 states finally outlaw corporal punishment at school! But of course, Bush being from one of the biggest school (and otherwise) paddling state in the country, Texas, left that off the table with this ridiculous policy (he has stated in interviews that his mother beat him all the time, which I’m sure is quite true; the idea that it “did him good” isn’t.) Further, all children at school need to have the freedom of movement to use the restrooms when needed instead of teachers making it into a power play and saying “no” as if it was a privilege.
I’ve read about private, peacefully, nourishing schools abroad that are run democratically by the students, and I think that is great. But ultimately, I think that it is best that a child’s education be in their hands; they all want to learn, and often times homeschooling is going to be better because it can be student-directed; the child learns what they want to know and what they are interested in at their own pace, and isn’t subjected to constant busy-work or bullying at a school.
http://www.dreamingearth.net
The adminstration of George W. Bush will be remembered as the most successful administration in this country’s history. The damage it has wrought, at every turn, will stand as a perfect measure of it’s anti-democratic, anti-life, anti-peace weltanschauung, drenched, as it is, in the boorish brutality and boundless venality of neoconservatism. NCLB testifies to the inclusion of children in their master plan to suffocate all that is good and pure.
It always seemed to me the main objective of NCLB was to punish the public education system along with the teachers, who tend to vote Democratic. It is to Ted Kennedy’s everlasting discredit that he willingly went along with the scam.
Personally, I always thought the fastest way to get rid of NCLB, would be to require all congressional representatives to take the final year’s standardized tests and to post their test scores in a public forum. I wonder how many would receive passing grades?
Talk about “paying dearly” and such. Very recently, the elective course, Technology Education, I teach in deep South Texas, at a public middle school, was “done away with.” Albeit cooler heads, in the higher echelons of the school district’s administration, may eventually reverse this retaliatory travesty, that’s not the main focus of my post, here.
There are those of us who have had enough:
From: PanchoFX@aol.com [mailto:PanchoFX@aol.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2007 4:09 PM
To: Fikac, Peggy; SAEN Letters
Subject: In Pursuit of True Excellence and Justice
What follows is an open, public domain letter to the ladies and gentlemen of the Texas Senate:
Honorable Men and Women of the Texas Senate:
My worst nightmare, on the job, has been administrators who are totally obsessed and blinded by all the bureaucratic mandates they act upon, without question. Teaching to the test is one such obsession, at the middle school where I work. I am one of the few teachers who has not succumbed to the intimidation and veiled threats associated with their “brand of excellence.”
I did not go into the teaching profession to teach TAKS testing. I am a free thinker and love to share my knowledge and skills with others. No one, regardless of power status, is going to rob me of my joy of teaching by running over sound, very essential, and hands-on instruction.
I am a Technology Education teacher in Brownsville, Texas. Since No Child Left Behind’s (NCLB’s) inception (after reading the actual legislation), I knew, even after just a cursory analysis, that it was unsound in many different ways.
It has been hellish for those of us who have not gone with the terrible flow of teaching the test. TAKS testing is a mere extension of NCLB, whereby Texas Public Education is held up, by those with political axes to grind, as the model to which all other states in the union should aspire. But what is actually occurring in classrooms across the state?
Recently, a so-called Governor’s Excellence Award was distributed as follows at my school: (1) Teachers who were designated “TAKS teachers” were given $7,000 bonuses; (2) “Non-TAKS teachers” (eg. electives teachers) were given $1,000 bonuses. The school nurse received $100. The “fairness” of the incentives was far more skewed than I have space to explain, in this forum.
Friday afternoon, 09 March 2007, I hand-delivered the memo, below, to Hector Gonzales, Superintendent of the Brownsville ISD. Attached to it was my un-cashed incentive check. Principle can be a terrible threat to those people accustomed to leveraging their way through life, devoting little, or no thought, to justice.
Sir:
Please be advised that after considerable thought, study, and research, I have found
the so-called Governor’s Excellence Award to be unsound, from top-to-bottom.
Therefore, check number 1898987 will remain uncashed by me.
Thank you for your kind attention.
A respectful, loyal subordinate,
Francisco Solis Garcia, Jr.
I am very happy, today, that people in Texas, and across the Nation, are awakening to the realities of what has been going on with NCLB! The wheels of justice are turning slowly with regard to NCLB/TAKS and the damage being done to the youth in Texas Public Schools, but at least the wheels are turning, in these United States. I hope the Texas Senate gets it right and comes through equitably for all those concerned.
A non-union, free-thinking teacher,
Francisco Solis Garcia, Jr.
1474 West Price Road, # 193, Brownsville, Texas, 78520, 956-832-9122
Subject: More Action on the “Governor’s Excellence Award”
Greetings ALL:
The following message was delivered to select members of the Texas Senate and the San Antonio Express-News:
Why did Francisco Solis Garcia, Jr., aka Pancho, turn down an $1,000 “Governor’s Excellence Award?”
1. Students are being damaged by “drill-and-kill” techniques, “teaching” obsessively and narrowly focused on multiple-choice exercises and “lessons,” and rote conditioning which stunts hands-on creativity;
2. Although all-out teaching of the TAKS tests is legal, there are those of us seasoned educators, who consider such practice unethical, and certainly not indicative of excellent teaching;
3. Sound and ethical educational practice, on the school worksite where I am engaged, is under attack by one-size-fits-all, administrative direction, and a phenomenon known as, “pull-outs,” whereby students are pulled out of electives courses, left-and-right, throughout the school day, to attend tutorial classes in core subject areas, like reading, English, mathematics, and social studies;
4. The immediately above described phenomenon disrupts instruction, rhythm, continuity, and the ability of a conscientious teacher to grade students fairly (Under these very unpleasant circumstances, it is not unusual for students to miss out on 30% or more of their lessons and assignments in an elective course);
5. Again, as a consequence of #3 above, students put between-a-rock-and-a-hard-place get frustrated and problematic, often saying negative things like, “Tech doesn’t matter”;
6. What doesn’t matter to those who are deluded into believing teaching excellence is their lot, is hands-on activities in electives courses (No matter that many electives teachers are integrating academics with hands-on lessons and projects);
7. On the middle school campus where I teach, this self-serving de-valuation of electives courses, has evidenced itself in arrogance, gross unreasonableness, stereotypical thinking, and put-downs of anyone questioning the Site-Based Decision Making (SBDM) Committee’s thinking, about how Governor’s Excellence Award monies should be distributed;
8. The SBDM Committee on my worksite is a stacked deck, whereby representation of teachers with global views is extremely limited, and not by chance;
9. Anyone of sound mind and hard-won, real world experience, under the belt, knows that true excellence, in any field or endeavor, is not the product of the successful passing of a multiple choice test (and, yet, that is virtually the sole criterion applied, in the case at hand, to determine excellence in teaching);
10. The extremely skewed distribution of monies, under the Governor’s Excellence Award Program, at the school where I work, as a Technology Education teacher, brazenly defies logic and standards of fairness (eg. “TAKS teachers,” those professional staff teaching the test, received $7,000 dollar bonuses, and classified staff, teacher’s aides, paraprofessionals, security officers, etc., etc., to a one, received absolutely no share of the incentive revenue;
11. There’s a lot more going on behind the scenes that parents, the taxpayers of the state, and legislators are not aware of, and need to be aware of; and
12. There is no doubt, whatsoever, in my mind and heart, that if I had signed off on the aforementioned check, not only would I have been tacitly agreeing with a patently unsound program, I would have been betraying those who have been treated with gross injustice—students, parents, teachers, administrators, and others, across the state of Texas.
Well said, Nellemason. Learning is instinctual. Before our educational system was ever set up, the literacy rate in this country was 99%. Children will learn to their interests and gifts, given the opportunity, time and support. Coercive learning and crowd control in our schools is based on a deep mistrust and misunderstanding of children, their needs and potential. These practices are what makes school so deadening, impersonal, disrespectful, and joyless for increasingly more and more students.
NCLB is another oxymoron program whose ultimate goal is funneling all of the information on each student (their complete records)into the military recruiters. This was well hidden and, again, our legislators HAD NOT READ the bill they were signing.
The most obvious feature of the program is the punitive testing that has contributed to destroying public education, so that there is a continuing supply of low skill students with few employment choices— thus a fertile ground for the recruiters.
In the meanwhile, like Halliburton for the military, all the Bush-connected companies reap the huge contracts for the dumbed-down materials that school districts buy to meet the so-called guidelines which are a moving target depending on which state you are in. The Bush brother, Neil, is one of the key recipients. Mom, Barbara, had even “contributed” after Katrina as long as the money bought materials from her little boy’s business.
Wouldn’t it be interesting the have President Bush take one of the NCLB tests…. Wonder which level he’s bail out on!!!!
###
Ok, all you tree-hugging Algore faithful! Just thought I would poke my head in the door of this liberal “bash Bush” party and let you know what the far extreme other side is thinking.
SURPRISE! Many of us agree with you on the main premise - NCLB must go and must go now! All this high-stakes testing stuff is ridiculous. Let’s get back to the IOWA Basics tests, nationally normed, not formulated to cater to this reform math theory or that whole-language teaching method.
We believe that it is actually against the law to force states to comply to fed control of schools, since the constitution says that whatever it does not give to the fed govt is up to the states. Education is a state issue, and the fed govt taking it over, coming up with standards and the like is simply illegal.
That said, we conservatives want the control to be local only. Not even states should have a lot of control over local districts. Charter school option is there to correct through competition when a district is unacceptable to parents, same thing with open enrollment. Parents evaluate a school by quality teachers and test results to be sure, but we also evaluate by how far to the left they are taking our kids politically and socially. A kindergarten teacher that simply “has to come out” to his class and announce that he is getting married to a man and adopting a child is not a quality teacher - he is an activist who doesn’t get that the inappropriate info he is giving upsets parents.
Now that I have thoroughly enraged the rest of you, (I smile to think about how much you hate parents like me!) you have to admit that we do have something in common. Why don’t we partner together and fight the NCLB legislation that your man Kennedy is just as much at fault for as my guy Pres Bush. It’s Bush’s “compassionate conservative” side that caused this ed mishap in the first place, and I don’t like it one bit. So if we can do what the US did by joining the Saudi’s when it was convenient and prudent, we can get rid of NCLB and return control of ed where it belongs. We can then again take up the fight against each other there!
Just for the record, the dumming down of school texts and such are a result of the left. Reform math is a liberal idea to teach kids math by letting them explore and discover…instead of teaching them so they can go farther than the last generation did with math. Child-lead learning will never work unless it is in the context of homeschool, where a parent can cater at times and lead at times, to ensure the child is progressing properly. A teacher with many kids (even if class sizes were down to 15 or 10) would never be able to tailor each child’s education like that. So maybe parents who like that sort of philosophy should homeschool and stop trying to turn the public ed system into feel-good do-whatever-I-want fuzziness. Students must learn to be submissive and obedient when young (that includes ASKING to use the bathroom and waiting for permission) when appropriate or there will be less and less order to society as they grow. Everyone needs to know how and when to submit. Especially kids.