Educational Advice for Our Future President
When I think about what is wrong with the education system in this country, I think about No Child Left Behind (NCLB). This piece of government legislation was signed into law January 8, 2002 and holds the purpose of providing “all children with a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education.” Basically, this means that the federal government wants to ensure that all children get the appropriate education and that disadvantaged students do not fall through the cracks in the system. This sounds all well and good, but in practice this act is going to fail miserably. As well intentioned as NCLB is, it needs to be re-evaluated immediately.
NCLB calls for “100% academic proficiency” by the year 2014, but nowhere in the act does it state clearly what the term proficiency means. I would suggest that President-Elect Obama develop a clear definition for the term proficiency and also to consider that the goal of 100% proficiency is unrealistic; only in a utopian society is this a reasonable goal. Unfortunately, we do not live in a utopia; we live in the United States of America. I would urge the future President to develop a system that focuses on a set rate of improvement for each individual school instead of aiming for the impractical target of 100% proficiency.
I am also concerned with fact that states are able to define their own standards for adequate yearly progress (AYP). Schools have the ability to set low standards in order to achieve their AYP goals; this is something that I would advise our future President to consider. He should set standards for each state so that they are not selling students short with lower standards than other states.
Although there are several other problems with the No Child Left Behind legislation, I believe that these are the main issues that need to be resolved. I hope that our future President takes these issues into consideration and makes the appropriate adjustments to this well-intentioned government educational policy.
This post was submitted by Jake Axelson.
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“Proficiency” now is nothing more than marking bubbles on a test that results in a total above an ungrounded, arbitrarily set “cut score.” More troublesome, the mandated tests are sensitive only to racial/SES differences, not to differences in instruction.
This fog can be cut through.
A child who can read any text with understanding equal to that were the communication spoken is “academically proficient” and requires no further formal instruction in reading. This instructional accomplishment can be reliably achieved by Grade 3 at the latest for aggregate children.
The National Mathematics Advisory Panel has laid out a road map for instruction that will reliably deliver students who can do math through Algebra:
http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/mathpanel/report/final-report.pdf
Working with these definitions, determining the accomplishment of academic proficiency is straightforward and transparent.
The obstacle to achieving the aspirations of NCLB is not in our students and teachers. It’s in the rhetoric of our content “standards” and the chicanery in registering performance that is cruelly termed “accountability.”