Left Behind.

NEW YORK (New York Times) Sept. 26 - As a candidate, George W. Bush once asked, “Is our children learning?”

Now he has an answer.

“Childrens do learn,” he said Wednesday.

The setting was, yes, an education event where the president was taking credit for rising test scores and promoting congressional renewal of his signature education law. To create the right image, the White House summoned the city’s chancellor of schools, a principal, some teachers and about 20 eager students from P.S. 76.

The visual worked fine. The oral? Not so much. For Bush, it was a classic malapropism, the sort of verbal miscue that occasionally bedevils him in public speaking and provides critics and the media easy fodder for ridicule. Subject-verb agreement actually is taught at Andover [legacy admission], Yale [legacy
admission] and Harvard, the president’s alma maters, but in an unforgiving job that requires him to speak hundreds of thousands of words with cameras rolling, the tongue sometimes veers off in mysterious ways — and someone always seems to notice.

His latest misstatement masked a serious issue, of course. As Bush’s first-term No Child Left Behind law comes up for reauthorization, many in Congress are attacking it from both the left and the right. The president is trying to preserve what he sees as one of his most significant domestic achievements, an effort to increase accountability through rigorous standardized testing. The latest report card released by the National Assessment of Educational Progress gave him some ammunition.

"The No Child Left Behind Act is working,” Bush said with first lady Laura Bush, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein [the man who wants to pay kids cash for grades: sheesh] at his side. “I say that because the nation’s report card says it’s working. Scores are improving, in some instances hitting all-time highs.”

Bush said that lawmakers should pay attention and not mess with success. “My call to the Congress is: Don’t water down this good law,” he said. “Don’t go backwards when it comes to educational excellence. Don’t roll back accountability. We've come too far to turn back."

Others offered a more measured assessment. “Unfortunately, this administration has dropped the ball on education reform by shortchanging this law to the tune of $56 billion since its enactment,” said Sen. Edward Kennedy [who helped to write and co-sponsored this mess] (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate education committee. He vowed “to provide the solutions and the resources needed to ensure that students and schools can succeed.”

The test results released Tuesday are not the ones used under No Child Left Behind, but the administration said that they show the progress since the law was passed with bipartisan support. Math scores improved among fourth- and eighth-graders, and black and Hispanic students made gains, although they still trailed their white counterparts. Eighth-grade reading scores, on the other hand, have not changed much since 1998.

Education specialists are divided on whether the federal law has succeeded in raising achievement for all students or in narrowing the historic achievement gaps between demographic groups. Passage rates are rising on many tests given to satisfy the law, including those in Maryland, Virginia and the District. The gap between white and black students is shrinking in some places.

But some scholars do not credit the education law. NAEP scores, for example, rose in some states and fell in others, and the general upward trend began well before No Child Left Behind. “My general view of this is that the president has been serially dishonest in claiming that No Child is accomplishing its mission,” said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. [Snide asides mine.]

The rest of this article is here. NCLB is not helping our childrens learn. NCLB is a massive federally unfunded mandate that is killing public education and driving good teachers out of the profession. The more cynical teachers among us will tell you that, way back when this monster was in its formative years, that was the idea: slap a bunch of random and redundant regulations and arbitrary “standards” on public schools districts, demand unrealistic and frankly absurd “goals,” and then punish districts which cannot comply. The original plan was to give money to local parents whose schools had “failed” so that they could send their kids to private schools; in other words, vouchers. That’s already part of some of the existing legislation. More of that is coming, no matter who wins the White House next year, because most of the front-runners think that most of NCLB is just peachy.

It isn’t. It should be thrown into the circular file bin of history. I just returned from my younger son's high school "Back to School Night." He's a freshman. We followed his crazy schedule and visited each class for fifteen minutes. I have yet to see a set of more enthusiastic, better well-trained, more fired up teachers than my son is blessed with this year. Not a one on cruise control. Ramped up like mad. All using the latest technology. Excited. Upbeat. And in not one of their presentations did I hear the word "state testing." I did hear a lot about education and real learning, though. No, NCLB needs to go. Because it isn’t helping our childrens to learn. Gotcher Exhibit A right here. Look what his apparently mediocre education has done for us.

TAGS: Education, NCLB, Bush