nclb

Unions Criticize Obama's School Proposals as 'Bush III'

To the surprise of many educators who campaigned last year for change in the White House, the Obama administration's first recipe for school reform relies heavily on Bush-era ingredients and adds others that make unions gag.

Standardized testing, school accountability, performance pay, charter schools -- all are integral to President Obama's $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" grant competition to spur innovation. None is a typical Democratic crowd-pleaser.

Posted in Education, nclb

Eshu’s Blues: Obama and Duncan’s “Race to the Top”

The Obama administration has announced its long anticipated education plan, and it has turned out to be the usual market crapshoot approach to public education which has long distinguished this country from every other.

Posted in Education, nclb, privatization

Teachers File Racial Discrimination Suit Against Obama Administration's School 'Turnaround' Plan

In May, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declared [1] the Obama administration's intent to close and "turn around" 5,000 'underperforming" public schools in poorer neighborhoods across the country.

Posted in Corporatism, Education, nclb, obama, racism

Obama Gives Bush a 3rd Term in Education

The great mystery of education policy today is why the Obama administration is embracing the Bush program. I recently wrote in Education Week (June 10) that it is time to kill the Bush-era No Child Left Behind program. The overwhelming majority of teachers agree with me. Those who educate our kids know that NCLB is a failed program that is not improving our schools but rather turning them into test-prep factories and dumbing down our kids.

Posted in nclb

NCLB No Panacea: US Educational Skills Improve; Learning Gap Stagnates

The basic math and reading skills of USA students have slowly, surely improved over the past 30 to 40 years, new findings show, with sharp increases among many of the nation's lowest-performing students - especially in the past four years.

That's the good news.

Posted in inequality, nclb

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 28, 2009
12:07 PM

CONTACT: FairTest
Monty Neill 857-350-8207 or 8208 x 101
Lisa Guisbond 617-730-5445

NAEP Results Produce More Evidence of NCLB's Failure;

Thorough Overhaul of Federal Law an Imperative for Obama Administration and Congress

BOSTON - April 28 - Despite billions of dollars spent on a test-and-punish approach to school "reform," today's National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report provides more evidence that the federal No Child Left Behind Law (NCLB) is a failure. With few exceptions, across three age groups and two subjects, the rate of improvement slowed compared with the previous period while gaps between blacks and white as well as Hispanics and whites ranged from widening to unchanging to slightly closing.

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Posted in nclb

Education Standards Likely to See Toughening

WASHINGTON - President Obama and his team have alternated praise for the goals of President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind law with criticism of its weaknesses, all the while keeping their own plans for the law a bit of a mystery.

Posted in Education, nclb

Recruiting for the Military in Schools and the NCLB Policy

ROCHESTER, N.Y. - A debate over who, and how, military recruiters can contact Rochester City School District students is heating up.

It comes after Superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard and the district's legal counsel recognized that the school board's current policy was in violation of the No Child Left Behind law.

In 2005, the board enacted a policy that allows parents to choose whether the district can pass along contact information for their child to military recruiters. An "Opt In" sort of a policy.

Posted in military recruiting, nclb

Federal Law Turns Nation’s Public Schools into 'No-Think Zones'

DILLINGHAM-In January 2002, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was signed into law by President George W. Bush. This federal mandate enforces standards-based education reform centered on high student academic standards. So far so good.

Unfortunately, these standards are measured by standardized testing, which consist of a series of questions (often multiple-choice) generated for entire groups of students. Educational officials estimate that 100 million or more of these tests are administered to students across the United Sates every year.

Posted in Education, nclb