And WHY isn't CALIFORNIA joining into this lawsuit?

With the 14 billion dollar deficit, one would think that SOMEBODY in SACRAMENTO might be alive and watching this issue.

Hey Arnold...you have your own paid Education Department up there. AND, we have our own ELECTED state school superintendent, Jack O'Connell. Could you give one of them a call and get the ball rolling???

Beyond the issue of not paying, however, is the actual value of this test-driven curriculum that is being forced onto teachers and students. Add to that the real reasons behind NCLB, providing all the student records to military recruiters, the destruction of public education system and increasing privatization-- subtext in the program. And how many parents actually know that they can REFUSE TESTING???

This lawsuit may only address one part of the problem, but it a good start since it doesn't appear there's much will to stop it otherwise.
###

States rights, YES !

No child left a dime, NO !

Federal aid needs to be restored to all states for education. This aid was cut-off right after 9/11 and the Bush tax cut for the rich.

Tax the rich and restore federal aid to States. Until then our schools will continue to fail.

Inquiring minds want to know: (a) what math assignment is junior reviewing in the above picture? (b) was junior able to understand the assignment? (c) did junior get the 'right' answer? (d) was junior able to help / assist the pictured student or was it the other way around?

jhx261 wrote:
"Until then our schools will continue to fail."
What a crock! You have taken the neocons' bait, got hooked and are choking on the sinker. Of course America's school's are failing (sarcasm), especially since we are the top dog nation of the world right?

Do some schools/teachers fail to teach the kids. Yes, but most (around 85%)of our public schools are highly rated by the parents of students who attend.

See my comments below from another CD discussion the other day:
1. Folks,
As a teacher of 14 years I like to use the following analogy to show the idiocy of "standarized" testing (including district wide "common assessments" that are the current rage.)
If you want to make a lot of money become a McDonald's franchisee. It's guaranteed that you will make a lot more money in one year than I will as a teacher. As long as you follow the "standards" that McD's imposes on your franchise you will be able to put out a product that is the same as all the other McD franchises. Will you be offering a gourmet meal to your customers? Of course not! The meal will be fast, cheap and perhaps quite filling.
However, if you want a gourmet meal you would be better served by going to a restaurant that has a chef that creates the menu and sees that everything is just right. It won't necessarily be fast or cheap, and it may not be quite as filling as the super-sized portions at McD's.
So what do we want in public education, a gourmet meal or McD's? Standarized testing and its accompanying regimes is to public education what McD's is to a gourmet restaurant. Of course the quality of education will not be great with any standardized testing.
I urge you all to read "Educational Standards and the Problem of Error" by Noel Wilson. It can be found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v6n10/.
In the ten years since it was written I have yet to see a rebuttal to this devastating critique of educational standards and standardized testing. (When those in power are challenged by critique and information that exposes the flaws and inconsistencies of their positions,they will ignore it until it goes away. Which is what the public education authorities and politicians have done with this study.)
OYE

Good posts.

The federal government is an incompetent custodian of public safety, let alone education. I submit that the greatest highlights of my education were the rogue teachers who departed substantially from the fed approved book, and threw in their impassioned insights into history, science, english writing and other subjects. Sadly I have a very substandard understanding of most gov by the textbook subjects.

I am not impressed with the young people I meet that "graduate" out of our schools today. They, like their "decider" are largely illiterate and by and large, exhibit no evidence of higher level learning. You look for the depth, but it just isn't there.

Reagan did the same thing to my group, pulling funding so that english classes were held on dark windowless drama stages with no chalkboard and poor lighting allowed.

Some of us learned to self educate ourselves later on the net.

The oppression of this 1984 big brother government is intolerable. Having a population with no critical thinking skills does not bode well for the future of democracy.

NCLB should be known as one of the intolerable acts.

Corruption and incompetence are parts of every government but Ronald Reagan made these qualities policy and elevated to an art form their implementation.

It is no accident that these half-witted Republicans want to don the Gipper's mantle. They want to send a message to corporations and fat cats that there will be no interruption in the flow of wealth from the poor to the rich---never mind if perpetual war is the vehicle by which this is accomplished.

Not that the Democrats have done anything for us lately, but anybody who votes Republican is either a greedy rich immoralist or a fool.

Linda Sutton "And how many parents actually know that they can REFUSE TESTING???" please explain what you're sharing.

pacplyer said "I am not impressed with the young people I meet that "graduate" out of our schools today. They, like their "decider" are largely illiterate and by and large, exhibit no evidence of higher level learning. You look for the depth, but it just isn't there."

I would propose that because the depth of what we see in given topics is personal, and varies from person to person, that schools find such thinking detrimental, as it is troublesome to evaluate/trivialize. In order to succeed in school you must fit a strict mold, you must, by every aspect of what you do, refuse this personal outlook, and accept lovingly the ways of the "decider." If you do not agree with the way things are run, you must simply be incapable of understanding. If you do not write in a given form, providing a certain message, you do not show the right type of connections.

Students are discouraged from thinking freely, because if they were allowed to do so, how long could a large group of students be stopped from crushing the efforts of their indoctrinators? Schools are not the primary places of learning, because that is often separate from the goal of the institution. Schools are meant to instill a certain Way. You are to be a functioning member of society. This, certainly is more important than reading, or thinking. Your right to be an individual part, of a greater more faceless evil, that is the role of the next generation of Americans. They are not to waste their time talking with elders other than their parents and pastors, because all elders, including teachers, who are not parents and pastors, could not possibly have the best interest of these malleable creatures in mind.

The English curriculum is not meant to establish language skills. It is not meant to show elements of communication, and poetry and art. The English courses many students are currently taking in my area, are merely head-fakes for Laissez Faire Capitalism, Conformity, obedience, and fervently embracing the status quo, and the arms of institution.

These students are told to forget about dreams, and deep thinking, and told instead to be the most effective, never tardy when bells ring and automated movements force students to their feet, down some meaningless path, to a more meaningless end. They are told instead to focus on points, tests, and evaluations. Giving names to how well they obey, these grades, and so-called achievement.

I was planted in this society, where the graduates are to be illiterate and shallow minded, and in some ways, this is where roots of mine still lie. but in my dreams these roots are gone, and in at least a few of the graduates of the system, there are those who lay dormant, waiting for the moment to make change for those around them, to create, and release.. there are at least a few who are free but hold their chains in place, so as to please their captors until the hour is right that they may escape from this system, and what it represents.

Thank you for that eloquent response ren ren. And I think you are sage and perceptive indeed. Who knows? Maybe poetic beauty, such as that that flows from your pen, is the spark that will ignite the next "Common Sense" revolution by Thomas Paine.

As George Washington wrote: "time and persecution brings many wonderful things to pass, and by private letters which I have lately received from Virginia, I find 'Common Sense' is working a powerful change in the minds of many men."

I would proffer that the same could be said of posters like you on sites like Common Dreams. Please continue your fine insights ren ren.

Your obedient servant,

pacplyer

Our system of taxaton is retrograde. Our tax dollar should first be paid to our city, who takes what they need and forwards the balance to the state, who then forwards what is left to Washington.

Meanwhile, the No Child Left Behind Act is a pseudonym for No Stockbroker Left Behind, or, No Bush Left Behind, No Cronie Left Behind, and so on. Bush's No Child Left Behind plan was designed to profit his family. Neil Bush's company, Ignite!Learning (a perpetuation of the Bush family's pyromania for those who remember George W.'s last inaugural speech)profited from numerous investors since 1999, then adapted a new strategy by developing Adapting Learning Technology. Las Vegas, for example approved some $300,000 worth of Ignite! material for their school system. For more information, here's the URL: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1022-02.htm

Each time George W. Bush visits a school room is cause for alarm.

many thanks pacplyer, it seems that you shared something of value to yourself and so attracted my interest. I appreciate your compliments.. please do not bow with your words, even in courtesy of greeting and passing.

I hate NCLB but I think our schools and children are getting a bad rap. As one poster wrote "I am not impressed with the young people I meet that "graduate" out of our schools today. They, like their "decider" are largely illiterate and by and large, exhibit no evidence of higher level learning. You look for the depth, but it just isn't there."
Reaching my 40's I look back at how highly ignorant I was at 18. Yes, I thought Ronald Raygun was a great idea for a president. As the years have passed I have realized how little I knew. Our children understand a great deal, but like ourselves as youths realize adults don't have the same understandings we had.

Education is a life long propisition. I know a little less today than I knew for sure yesterday.
Now I have a 13 year old and an 8 year old who have no idea what "a gone with the wind" is or god forbid the Rolling Stones.
NCLB is a mess because it forces a one size fits all program that is meant to meet the needs of states as different as Texas and Hawawii and Delaware and California. Each state and local district should have a lot more flexibility in deciding what is best for their own children.

jas1984 "I hate NCLB but I think our schools and children are getting a bad rap."

I agree with you. But I don't think our education system has much to offer. It is that homogenizing you speak of, that I think, begins the damage (if not the institution itself). I know that nothing I have said here is something I learned in school. That use of parentheses? Not only am I writing casually, I honestly don't know when it is inappropriate to use those, but I am pretty confident that it would not be "wrong." The historical and cultural context, as well as the necessity of personal identity and experience are denied in this system, you may not learn what you need to know, and you may not be yourself while you try to do so. You may not discuss things that are negative or controversial publicly (by social bounds) and you may not challenge the personal authorities you encounter if you are a student/minor, along with those sorts of issues, you are also robbed of your free time, and art and music and politics are special interests, not some inherent part of the young person's day. I think I understand a bit of where the apathy and disillusion in the youth comes from, and why it is they are so philistinistic.

Good points jas, I wasn't trying to slight this generation, only pointing out how compliant they have to be to pass in this aweful authoritarian nightmare we call education. To have a drunk with power moron who can't even spit out simple sentences involved in any part with education of young minds is frightening. The world was a lot safer when he took six month vacations cutting scrub brush on this "ranch" (where there aren't even any horses because he's afraid of big animals.)

ren ren, Written and Spoken Language are fluid and change a little with each passing generation. Witness the varied differences in pronunciation and spelling between Great Britain and the USA. Your usage of parentheses is interesting. In the community college system under RayGun (who I unwittingly adored at the time,) some professors would claim you had to include the punctuation mark inside and other would emphatically bark that it had to be outside. I got A's for a while putting them inside; but I've seen it both ways all my life. My biggest problem, which I have never resolved, is shifting back and forth tenses. I honestly cannot hear the difference even when I say sentences out loud. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that popular culture breaks these rules all the time with music and advertising, so that now we are a nation of idiots who can not agree even how to write, let alone agree whether torture is wrong or not.....

Distressing...

However, ren ren on this board, we are speaking of course colloquially, so it doesn't matter. :-)

I am reading "1776" by the pulitzer prize winning David McCullough and the highest form of praise in that age was to feign that you were the "obedient servant' of the one you were writing to (if I understand that 1700's style in copies of the original letters, which are included with the collector's edition.) Washington used this term "your faithful servant" when he wrote to his subordinate secretary Joseph Reed imploring him to rejoin the cause.

So many things in that period are exactly as distressing as our current period, that I hope you will forgive me for constantly referencing their relevance in our fight against the tyranny of our period's little king george the third.

pac

pensador-oye is quite correct. Politicians have long regarded education as a safe and easy pawn in the great game. When has public education ever been good? When has it ever not needed "reform?" If you believe all the rhetoric, and most people do, American education is a dismal failure and should be scrapped altogether as all the political reforming has failed and failed and failed.

Has to. If it "worked" the political pawn would be off the table.

NCLB has done more damage to education since the Reagan administration. I have been a public school teacher for over twenty years, and never have I felt more like a mindless factory drone, or some idiot donkey forever trying for the carrot that's forever out of reach.

As I mentioned elsewhere, don't miss the play on words in the law's name. NCLB's primary goal is to dismantle public education by setting up unattainable, unrealistic goals so that American children can be indoctrinated privately so that they're not Left Behind when the righteous are raptured.

The only thing I regret is not investing in testing companies who are making (our) money hand over fist.

Usually based in Texas.

Every day now there seems to be a new Common Dreams essay intending to examine the future of No Child Left Behind. In the rash of commentary which always follows, I see a lot of misinformation. It's nice to hear from other teachers, whose various experiences can be chronicled in a forum like this one. But I question some of the other commentators here who seem grossly misinformed, overly-rhetorical, and full of false assumptions.

Here in New Jersey there are many urban school districts which have come to symbolize poor learning and failing schools. I have been connected with one of these for 28 years. These districts have become the black holes of the state budget, sucking up mind-boggling outlays of taxpayer dollars, year after year.

The original intent of the standardized testing connected with NCLB was to increase the accountability of such districts. It was never intended to replace an existing curriculum. It was nothing new. And it was designed simply to measure student progress, or lack thereof, at various grade levels.

In the more affluent suburban districts, the minimum testing levels were met, and the whole business has been no big deal. In the urban districts (they have identified about 30 of these in New Jersey), the minimum testing levels have not been met, the whole thing has become this political football, full of blame-tossing. And the problems - most of the same problems that existed 28 years ago - persist.

That's it in a nutshell.

We had a perfectly decent public school system when it was adequately funded and there were about thirty children or less in a class. Pretending that anything but major funding will return us to that condition is silly.

We also need to stop school funding from being linked to local property taxes -- that is recipe that's meant to make the children of poor people poor, too.

my father, who has done everything from teaching to raising peaches in his 73 years, put it to me this way about nclb and texas' own taks test:

you can't make a calf grow faster by weighing him more often.

Sunny Jim,

One of the issues with NCLB is that even many affluent districts may fall into the swamp as the Average Yearly Progress (AYP) index increases. All students everywhere will be reading on grade level by 2012(?) or else, according to the mandate.

Also, all districts will have a special ed rate of 12%. This alone is mind boggling as that number is an average: the national average. To say that all districts will conform to the national average demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the word 'average.'

My district is a case in point. 24% of my working and underclass district are in special education programs. My school has made The List because this population is not proceeding according to NCLB's expectations, which increase every year (AYP).

Last year we made AYP (the 8th grade test was a bit easier than usual, methinks), but that still leaves us in Corrective Action. (You have to make AYP two years in a row in order to get off the list.) The AYP last year was 91. This year it's 115, and that number is plastered all over the building.

Unless the fix is in (easier tests across the grades) we haven't a chance in hell, which will bring us to our first year of restructuring where the state comes in and tells us what to do rather than advise.

The irony is that my school was awarded most improved in the region the year before the regs kicked in, and was in line for the state award the year we made The List.

Yet the faculty continues to fight the good fight and make the best use of the training and resources. A lot of good stuff has come out of it. However, the heart has been ripped out and we've been turned into scripted machines treating all kids as if they were born from the same mother with the same genetic potential.

If we don't make it this year, and the test is next week (Right, a major test in upstate NY in January... duh.), burn out WILL start to set in.

You can stick a fork in me.

Sunny Jim,
As a fellow public school educator I implore you to read "Education Standards and the Problem of Error" as referenced in my post above. It is not an easy read-I've read it 5-6 times at least and still get more and more out of it when I reread it (and I generally read fairly difficult treatises). But Wilson shows the idiocies of not just "standardarized" testing but of the concept of educational "standards".

What we do to children in the name of education "accountability" is atrocious.

Another good read is "Education and the Cult of Efficiency" by Ray Callahan. Callahan gives us the historical background for how business leaders, since the late 1800's have tried to overtake/influence what goes on in the public schools. Even though it was written in the late 50's/early 60's it is still the definitive history of business leaders attempts to control what goes on in the public school. Unfortunately, since the 60's we have seen business leaders take more and more control of public education through influencing the politicians to pass laws like NCLB.

I also ask everyone with whom I talk if they know who/what authorizes public schools. Almost 100% of the people do not know. The answer is each individual states constitution.
It would behoove all educators in the public schools to read what their state constitution says about the purpose of public education. And it won't mention anything about supplying a good/efficient workforce--much to the dismay of business interests.

OYE

Each school should have it's own elected board of parents that hires a principal and teachers to teach their children. The state government should license teachers and monitor quality of education and report to the people of the state the results.

Boards that suck should be removed for CAUSE by the state or the people through elections. Cause would be graft, corruption, violation of the law, failure to do their duty.

You would not believe the money that is stolen by top level administrators in local school systems.