| Topic: |
Sociology > Education |
| User: |
"Peeter" |
| Date: |
22 Mar 2007 07:57:26 AM |
| Object: |
BUSH's "No Child Left": LIE or MIRAGE? Both? |
Rather slowly but surely the United States are beginning to treat the
ultra-foolish No Child Left Behind ruse for what it is -- another BUSH
ADMINISTRATION empty bag!
Even benighted pentacostals, evangelists, reborns, intelligent
designers, and other FOOLS now recognize that Bush and his criminal
crowd have yet to posit any program or policy based upon facts, truth,
or rational thought.
FOR the Bushies, all is POLITICS!
Thus we have their knowingly UNWORKABLE No Child abomination. Buy it
-- along with the twin failed oil wars without end, Katrina "aid,"
prisoner torture and rendition, illegal phone taps, Patriot Act, and
faith-based hooey -- and you, too, are dumber than dog *****.
----------------
"In Fairfax's 'No Child' Fight, A Refusal to Leave Children Behind"
By Marc Fisher
The Washington Post
Thursday, March 22, 2007; B01
Jack Dale is no anti-testing zealot, shielding the little ones from
the reality of a competitive world. He's not out there with the
activists who believe the No Child Left Behind revolution in American
schools has turned education into a grim, mechanistic culture.
But the superintendent of Fairfax County [Virginia] schools, who
presides over one of the highest-achieving systems in the land, has
taken a stand at the schoolhouse door: "The last thing I'm going to do
is subject some third-grader to tears because someone's standing over
them saying, 'You must complete [this standardized test], you must
complete.' That's not happening. Let them fire me for it."
In the next couple of weeks, either Dale or the U.S. government will
blink. Until then, threats and counterthreats are flying across the
Potomac. Dale, backed up by his school board and several other
Northern Virginia superintendents, insists he will not require newly
arrived immigrant children to take the same reading test that other
kids take. And the feds reply: Oh, yes, you will -- and if you don't,
you'll lose $17 million in federal dollars.
This is not about accountability; Dale's all for that. In fact, the
children at issue are already tested twice a year on their English
skills. When they reach a decent level of proficiency in their new
language, they take the same test everyone else takes. But Dale
refuses to make a kid who has just arrived in the country sit at a
desk and be humiliated by a test that can only make him feel like a
moron.
The federal approach to No Child Left Behind is what you might expect
from an administration whose response to a failing strategy in Iraq is
to throw good bodies after maimed ones. "We need to stay the course,"
Raymond Simon, the U.S. deputy secretary of education, told The
Washington Post's Amit Paley. "The mission is doable, and we don't
need to back off that right now."
No Child Left Behind is built on a mirage. At some point that's always
just over the horizon, the law assumes, all children in the nation
will miraculously read and compute at grade level, simply because they
have been tested and tested and tested again. The theory is that
somehow, when told the exact number of children who are lagging in
achievement, teachers will agree to render the magic that they have
thus far withheld and -- poof! -- those kids will become smart,
cooperative and productive.
As we get closer to that utopia, it's becoming ever more clear that
Some Children Remain Behind and that, gadzooks, Not Every Child Is the
Same. Oh, and this: Staking everything on a test doesn't produce a
flowering of inspired teaching, but rather what Dale, a former math
teacher, calls an "obsessive focus on tests."
"You focus obsessively on multiplying two-digit numbers," he says, "as
opposed to how to apply that knowledge in the real world and how to
play with mathematics in a creative way."
The flaws in the nation's new education regimen continue to elude the
Bush administration. Dale has met twice with senior officials in
Washington to push for enough flexibility so schools are not condemned
as failures -- even if 500 kids took and passed the tests, "two
Hispanic children or two special education children didn't pass, and
the rules say that makes the school a failure." Both times, senior
Education Department leaders told Dale there would be no exceptions to
the rules. (Virginia's two U.S. senators jumped in on Dale's side
yesterday, filing a bill that would force the feds to give Fairfax
schools and others a year's reprieve.)
In most of the country, the children in classes for non-English
speakers were born in the United States, and Dale agrees that by third
grade, they should be tested in English, as the law requires. But in
Fairfax, 63 percent of children in such classes were born in other
countries. Those children, Dale says, deserve a little time to soak in
the language before they are subjected to high-stakes tests in
English.
What this is really all about, the superintendent thinks, is an
unresolved debate over whether there should be national education
standards. Remember, the same people who now mandate Testing Uber
Alles were pushing two decades ago to abolish any federal role in
education.
Under the No Child law, designed by a purportedly conservative
administration, the amount of time that a superintendent such as Dale
must spend satisfying the federal bureaucracy has skyrocketed from
hardly any to hours and hours each week.
No Child Left Behind is built on a lie. Not every kid will go to
college, no matter what you do. So you can either lower the standards
enough to pretend that everyone is succeeding, or give up on the lie.
But the feds won't talk about that; they just repeat "Stay the
course," and any school system that balks is threatened with
punishment.
"I've been warned that to speak frankly in this area is not wise
personally or professionally," Dale says. But he's speaking anyway,
because, as a good teacher, he knows that "we don't succeed well when
we go punitive. You need standards, but they should be aspirational;
it needs to be about incentives, not punishment."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/21/AR2007032101970.html
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: BUSH's "No Child Left": LIE or MIRAGE? Both? |
22 Mar 2007 03:16:55 PM |
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Bush overlooked the fact that some foolish fuckwits consider
pickaninnies Children. Nigglets headbone's are solid. They are
strictly motivated by their innate savage instincts.
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| User: "_ G O D _" |
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| Title: Re: BUSH's "No Child Left": LIE or MIRAGE? Both? |
22 Mar 2007 06:03:18 PM |
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<//ORD@True.edu> wrote
news:hpo503dob6mk8slrd46pvdkm5jmhqeagrd@4ax.com...
Bush overlooked the fact that some foolish fuckwits consider
pickaninnies Children. Nigglets headbone's are solid. They
are strictly motivated by their innate savage instincts.
So, you think that you are not motivated by your
savage instincts, and evidently, you believe that
your head bone is soft, rather than solid. But do
you really have enough evidence to disassociate
yourself from entire human race, which includes
people with different pigmentation of their skin?
--
_____________________________________________________
I intend to last long enough to put out of business all *****-suckers
and other beneficiaries of the institutionalized slavery and genocide.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The army that will defeat terrorism doesn't wear uniforms, or drive
Humvees, or calls in air-strikes. It doesn't have a high command, or
high security, or a high budget. The army that can defeat terrorism
does battle quietly, clearing minefields and vaccinating children. It
undermines military dictatorships and military lobbyists. It subverts
sweatshops and special interests.Where people feel powerless, it
helps them organize for change, and where people are powerful, it
reminds them of their responsibility." ~~~~ Author Unknown ~~~~
___________________________________________________
--
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