{"id":476,"date":"2007-10-04T08:57:07","date_gmt":"2007-10-04T12:57:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.citizennetmom.com\/?p=476"},"modified":"2007-10-04T08:57:07","modified_gmt":"2007-10-04T12:57:07","slug":"get-congress-out-of-the-classroom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.citizennetmom.com\/?p=476","title":{"rendered":"Get Congress out of the Classroom"},"content":{"rendered":"

Diane Ravitch, Professor of Education at New York University, has an excellent opinion piece<\/a> in yesterday’s New York Times.  She served as the assistant secretary for education research from 1991-1993, the latter part of the term of George H.W. Bush<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It might be a little surprising, therefore, that she would come out with a rather strongly critical opinion of No Child Left Behind<\/a>, the flagship legislation of Bush 43<\/a>:<\/p>\n

DESPITE the rosy claims of the Bush administration, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 is fundamentally flawed. The latest national tests, released last week, show that academic gains since 2003 have been modest, less even than those posted in the years before the law was put in place. In eighth-grade reading, there have been no gains at all since 1998.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She also makes a good case for juxtaposing the roles of states and the federal government with regard to education:<\/p>\n

No Child Left Behind can, however, be salvaged if policymakers recognize that they need to reverse the roles of the federal government and the states. In our federal system, each level of government should do what it does best. The federal government is good at collecting and disseminating information. The states and school districts, being closer to the schools, teachers and parents than the federal government, are more likely to be flexible and pragmatic about designing reforms to meet the needs of particular schools.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This idea — that the best government is that which is closest to the people — is supposed to be one of the core principles of the Republican Party… but maybe that’s a just relic from the days when the Republican Party embraced "principles" rather than "values."<\/p>\n

Her next two paragraphs illustrate some of the flaws  in the current system (other than the absolute impossibility of 100% of children attaining 100% proficiency by 2014):<\/p>\n

\n

However, under current law, state education departments have an incentive to show that schools and students are making steady progress, even if they are not. So the results of state tests, which are administered every year, are almost everywhere better than the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the benchmark federal test that is administered every other year. <\/p>\n

Many states claim that 80 percent or more of their students are proficient in reading or math at the same time that the federal assessment shows only a minority of students in those states reaching its standard of proficiency. <\/strong>We will never know how well or poorly our students are doing until we have a consistent national testing program in which officials have no vested interest in claiming victory.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(emphasis added)<\/em><\/p>\n

We know this is true.  We know it’s true in Tennessee — that our own standards are lower than those of the NAEP<\/a>, and sinking.  But, the NAEP isn’t given to every student, or even taken at every school — it’s a so-called "representative sampling," of which I am somewhat suspicious.  I don’t know the last time that the NAEP was given to students in Oak Ridge, to which students it was given, and whether the "representative sampling" for Tennessee is any decent measure of how our<\/em> school system is doing.<\/p>\n

What would it cost to completely do away with the TCAP, and use the NAEP for all students instead?  If all states did away with their own proprietary tests and used the NAEP instead, would that not achieve some cost savings, in addition to doing away with states’ gaming the system through artificially adjusted performance standards?<\/p>\n

On the downside, if it is that, it would mean that all the states would have to align their standards — what subjects they teach at what levels — with the NAEP rather than the state test.  With that comes the possibility of federalizing educational standards, which I don’t think is a good idea.<\/p>\n

I’d love to know what you think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Diane Ravitch, Professor of Education at New York University, has an excellent opinion piece in yesterday’s New York Times.  She served as the assistant secretary for education research from 1991-1993, the latter part of the term of George H.W. Bush. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.citizennetmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.citizennetmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.citizennetmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.citizennetmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.citizennetmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.citizennetmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.citizennetmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.citizennetmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.citizennetmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}