U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings was in Virginia this week on her never-ending road tour to keep the No Child Left Behind federal program alive. Congress has been debating its renewal for a year now, and Spellings has the lonely task of defending this lightning rod law.
We all want students to read at a level appropriate to their age. We all want them to be able to do math. The trouble with No Child Left Behind is that – as many state education laws had done before it – it passed requirements without giving the neediest schools enough money and resources to attack the problem. What federal money there was shifted to reading and math intervention, naturally, which also meant school systems dropped classroom time and budgets for subjects like history. If you compare state testing items from 1999 and 2008 you’ll see that many states simply dropped social studies curriculum off the exams. Not a great way to build the next generation of informed citizens.
A lot of states are rethinking this power grab by the federal government. No Child Left Behind is an odd push for a “conservative” White House that allegedly doesn’t believe in big government. Virginia is one of several states where lawmakers have said they won’t participate in NCLB if they and the feds can’t agree on the standards and the way they are tested. It was revealing that when Spellings came to Richmond this week she used the federal money as one of her main reasons to stay with NCLB. The state got $352 million in fiscal 2007 from the feds, and she warned it would not be good for Virginia “to walk away from those federal resources.”
I remember the Reagan administration using the same big government money scare when it wanted states to raise the legal drinking age to 21. And it worked.
I think a renewal of No Child Left Behind should give states more flexibility on their standards. If politicians want schools to be more like businesses, they should recognize that economic choice is pushing us towards an ala carte world. For every McDonalds in the economy there are thousands of local and regional businesses that offer more choice for their local markets.
No Child Left Behind should get more money from the feds with fewer strings attached.
And of course it should include history testing! Thomas Jefferson said we needed an educated citizenry. Boosting reading may boost subscriptions to Sports Illustrated, Vogue or Car and Driver, but we Americans need to keep in touch with the communal politics that hold this nation together. We’re losing that, and No Child Left Behind doesn’t help.
Stay tuned . . .
Tags: Bentley Boyd, Chester the Crab, comix, education, history, No Child Left Behind
This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 11:46 am and is filed under History Teacher. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I say that 2012 can’t come soon enough. I wonder what the next solution to our students’ problems will be. I personally like decisions made on the local level for schools, as most schools don’t fit the national statistics and norms.
Tests won’t go away, but in a decade they’ll look like video games. Instead of the fill-in-the-bubble of multiple choice, students will be asked to apply their background knowledge from class in some real-world simulation. Think of the Oregon Trail game! That style of assessment is more fun for the kids and more realistic. Few of us are making widgets in factories anymore – we are asked to be problem-solvers. We are asked to sort through information and decide which data will carry us forward. Someday a computer-driven game will test your fifth-grader by making them chose which course of action to take to successfully steer the nation through the Civil War or Reconstruction! (Yes, the outcomes will be weighted based on value judgments — but so are the anwers in those multiple choice tests! Human will never be able to separate information from opinion completely.)