No Child Left Behind, From a Certain Point of View

My wife has a degree in High School Education. No Child Left Behind is the reason she now works in insurance.

But the article doesn't claim that there is any proof the policy has created more dropouts, just that "it seems like it". If that is the case, I think it is pretty shameful that NCLB or not, we have "educators" that behave no better than Enron.

Even without the dropouts being a result of NCLB, it has more than it's fair share of problems.

For a lot of these schools, especially the poorer ones, NCLB has pretty much forced their hand to these tactics. Yes, it's forced many of these schools to raise teacher hiring and basic education standards, which is a good thing, it's still made an environment that forces far too many teachers to prep for the standardized tests and not a whole hell of a lot else, especially considering it doesn't help any other school resources beyond those that enforce the tests.

Really, the No Child Left Behind Act is working in the same way we're "winning" the war in Iraq.

Yeah, No Child Left Behind is why my mom took an early retirement. She couldn't deal with just teaching standardized tests (to special needs kids, expected to use largely the same curriculum as everyone else!) anymore.

There's also a lot of strong arming by the government, with the general message being "Teach this this way using our approved materials or lose every penny of federal money." Bush touts that test scores or going up, but that really doesn't mean that much when 1) 3/4s of the semester is spent teaching nothing but the test and 2) they keep moving the goal posts to change was is an acceptable score. I think right now getting a score of "approaching basic" is considered a pass.

The US public education systems has always been a disaster since I remember (early 90s when I entered US senior high), so some of you are saying this makes it even worse. However, can somebody please post some sample questions from these standardized test?

Nobody agrees with having teachers "teach to a test" but I'm also skeptical of US public school teachers in this area, is the material in the test really that foreign to what they are supposed to be teaching? I find that a bit hard to believe, specially in the areas of science and mathematics.

The schools then push the teachers to teach the test, not teach a child how to think and learn on their own. It's a fucking travesty. My daughter's in 3rd grade and I haven't met a teacher yet who doesn't roll their eyes at the mention of No Child Left Behind. Fucking Bush motherfucking cocksucker asshole evil shithead dick dick dick!

But what are the questions?

Why can't teachers tech their subjects and cover the questions in the test? Is the content that divorced from what they're supposed to be teaching at their grade level?

It isn't that the material is foreign, it's that by teaching the test and nothing but the test you're severely limiting the education students can get. While I had no shortage of absolutely awful teachers that I would never defend, I also had really great teachers that made efforts to make hard to understand topics accessible through very outside of the box methods. Under No Child Left Behind, it's very difficult to teach that way because you're not teaching the test.

These tests are very, painfully basic stuff (in high school, I had to take the Louisiana Education Assessment Program or LEAP test, but I think most states tests are pretty similar). Reading comprehension, science and math, etc. For a frame of reference, these tests, at a comparative highschool level, are probably about 1/4 as challenging as the SAT or ACT. They're not hard tests at all. In the end, you end up catering to the lowest common denominator by spending months doing modules or sections on figuring out what a sentence like "Jenny went to the bakery and purchased some muffins" really means and you end up alienating and boring not just the great students, but the average students as well.

No Child Left Behind is a program obsessed with the elimination of the Bell Curve, but only in the sense that the measure for success should be lowered so that that underachievers have to do less to meet it.

Like Drew says, it encourages mediocrity by concentrating on remedial shit.

Plus- When a teacher has to teach a national standardized test, they are unable to tailor their teaching to the unique needs and/or talents of any specific class. For further examples watch season four of The Wire.

Also- Fucking cockfuck Bush shitheel dick ass motherfucker.

So the test makes sure most kids can pass the very basics of what they're supposed to know at that grade level, then if the teachers are doing the job we pay them to, I don't see why they have to "teach to the test".

The US is seriously behind the rest of the world, many 3rd world countries are way ahead of us when it comes to elementary and high school education. How are we to know how teachers are performing if we can't even test the very basics of what their students are supposed to know?

And BTW I know what a problem this "teaching to the test" is. I have a niece in high school who has complained about this very clearly, I'm just questioning the need to teach to the test in the first place.

I see where your coming from, El Capitan. My response is basically that this "solution" is just as bad as the existing problem. I would dare say it makes things worse because it discourages teachers from teaching to the kids and discourages kids thinking on their own.
And it's basically government sponsered extortion. But I wouldn't be surprised if that existed before NCLB.

But that's exactly the point.

You should feel secure that, by arming children with basics, you're going to give them the ability to perform well on a standardized test. Sure, some will do better than others (the Bell Curve), but, all things being equal, things would sort themselves out in the end.

The government doesn't look at it like that. They're so obsessed with the test and so obsessed with lowering standards that the vast majority of this stuff isn't teaching basics, it's teaching remediation. There are kids in fifth grade classes spending entire semesters going over stuff that should be covered in the third grade. And for most of those kids, their education is suffering for it.

My Dad had been working with "at risk" students for about 16 or 17 years in a public middle school. Ironically enough NCLB didn't include special classrooms for troubled students at risk of flunking out of school. Now my dad's been moved to teaching social studies to the greater student body, including (leagal) kids from Somalia and Mexico that don't speak any English, and the flunkies have been left to flunk.

My high school adopted a remedial approach to getting test scores up a few years before NCLB was created. Basically, most of the kids had a reading level of below 6th grade and was testing below 30% for standardized tests. The school's solution? Devote an hour everyday to forced reading. I was fine with this, because I brought books to school anyway, but the books they provided were well below the third grade level. We're talking Star Wars tie-ins and heavily abridged versions of classics. I would watch students just keep the same page open and fucking veg out.

Meanwhile our curriculum was heavily cut back to make time for shit like this, so I missed out on a lot of interesting projects and discussions with teachers who actually gave a damn about making a positive impression on the students. I feel sorry for any student that has to try to wade through all of the remedial pandering and actually try to learn at an advanced level.

One of my wife's problems with NCLB is that "teaching to the test" only encourages one specific learning style. Even within math and science, there are radically different ways students learn (my wife could explain it better, so please forgive the simple example), such as being auditory learners or visual learners. Basically, the only thing it makes students good at is taking standardized tests.

Not to mention the fact that some brilliant students suck at taking tests. Yeah, it stinks that there's no easy way to group them and compare them against all the others, but shouldn't that be the teachers job to evaluate whether they're getting through to those students? And, even with relatively high student-to-teacher ratios, wouldn't the teachers be better at evaluating those students, instead of the government?

It all comes down to the fact that they're trying to ram all kind of pegs into a square hole, and the government doesn't care what gets lost trying to force them through.

On the teachers evaluating the students, that's what grades are for. However, at the end of the day, NCLB means that we don't trust teacher's evaluations. In a way, I can see what that is the case. Specially when teacher performance is concerned, this whole exercise shows that educators will "fudge" the number to favor them.

wydren, your complain is more against tests in general. I think that is a different problem, take this program out and you still have the "student sucks at test" problem.

I still think though, if they're testing the basics for that grade level, then they shouldn't be spending so much time "teaching for the test". To me, what this indicates is that schools are still not doing their job, and not teaching kids what they need and encouraging mediocrity.

It isn't the schools, it's No Child Left Behind. Almost every teacher you talk to about it is going to tell you that is perhaps the most awful education program they've seen. They don't want to be doing this. They want to be teaching in more enlightening, individual, and expressive ways, but they aren't able to.

And like I said, they can't just not "teach the test" and hope they're giving the kids enough to do well. They're strong armed into it by the threat of losing federal funding.

I don't want to come off as Mr. "No Child Left Behind", but the educational system in the US has been in the crapper way before this program. As somebody that immigrated to the US as I was starting senior high in 89/90, let me reassure you that the system here has been substandard at least since then.

So I don't think this mess is caused by this program, you can argue that it has made things worse (and the article doesn't claim to prove it) but I think things have been messed up since before, and at worse it means this program is just not affecting the fundamentals of the problem.

I also would like to see the educators of this country take some responsibility. This country spend much more resources and money into education than others and they still can't teach kids fundamentals. There is something just not right about the way we go about teaching kids in this country, and let me tell you it is not NCLB and teacher/student ratios.

Graduation rates should be a measurement, agreed.

Extra curricular activities ... maybe. At the end of the day though, you do need to measure if kids know the basics. There is no excuse for non-special needs kids to not know how to read and do basic arithmetic. I could even argue that there should be no class called "fundamental math" in senior high school.

In some ways I would raise the standards, I think you're trying to loosen them. When you compare against the rest of the world, if you want to keep up, you are going to have to be more demanding of students (and their families), not less.

Look at 2nd languages, why can't schools teach a foreign language starting from kindergarten or the 1st grade. By the time they do "teach" (and I use that word loosely) a second language, it is too late. Look at kids in Europe, being bilingual over there is nothing special.

I'm not sure about the other stuff, but this is 100% right. I can't think of any reason not to teach kids languages as soon as they start attending school. (I can think of arguments, but not reasons.)

The argument, I'm learning this semester, is that patriotic jackasses believe that teaching a second language to our children takes away from the child's American identity, and that during the formative years, the focus of every American child should be on being an American.

Meanwhile, one of the best performing schools in the country is in Southern California, with a 85% student population where English is their second language.

It's like rain on your wedding day.

No Child Left Behind is doing EXACTLY what the government wants. Ruin the education of the young generation and put teachers to the point of not giving a shit. My girlfriend is a teacher and they all say the same thing.

I'd love to meet the morons who wouldnt want young people learning a second language. I went to Europe and a girl came up to me about 10-12 years old and said something to me in German and she saw I didnt understand so then she tried French then English. This girl knew 3 languages perfectly, that was one of the most impressives things I saw in Europe. Here in America many 10 yr olds can barely speak English.....why is that?

Because they are not mandated to learn a second language at a young age.

High school is nuts, in my country you don't chose what classes you want to take, they are chosen for you. You only make decisions based on what you want to specialize in for senior high and that is just general subject (science, accounting/business, law/government, etc).

I think a lot of other countries have higher and more strict standards imposed on students, but in the US people seem to resist this.

I'm not going to disagree, but I think you're grossly undervaluing what can happen when a bad situation is made much, much worse. And "it's always sucked" doesn't really fly as a valadation of the current shitty education policies.

I agree that there are fundamental problems with education in this country, but I also see that what we're doing right now is exacerbating the problem exponentially.

Yeah, I can see how my post was kind of saying I don't like standardized tests in general, but that's my biggest beef with NCLB. It makes government funding based strictly on standardized tests. That means schools stress things that can be tested on standardized tests, like basic math and reading comprehension. Other things that can't, like music and, ironically enough for this conversation, foreign languages, are brushed aside if they're even offered at all. Sure, you can test if students know the definitions of certain words in a foreign language with a standardized test, but you can't judge if a student truly knows and can speak the language. That would have to be something more individualized.

I read an article that stated that kids are more obese, and one of the reasons (among others, of course) is that schools are dropping phys ed classes to focus on those standardized tests more. It's messed up that the government would encourage that, and by tying funding to the results of those tests, that's exactly what they're doing. Indirectly, sure, but that doesn't change the result.

Yeah, the American education system is abysmal, and it was before NCLB. There are many reasons for that. For example, my wife told me that in some schools, there are 2 administrators for every teacher. During her student teaching she knew 2 teachers who were in the job strictly because they had to teach for 2 years to become administrators. They didn't care about the students or the education those students got. They were just there to get a better job. I'm sure that factors into the problems with American schools.

I agree that teachers should have to show results with their students, I'm just not sure of the best way to do that. I'm just sure it's not standardized testing, and it's a bad idea to tie those standardized tests to the funding. It tells me something that all the people I know who support NCLB aren't in education, and everyone I know in education says it's a bad idea. Anecdotal, yes, but it's a 100% ratio.

I'd say this is one of the biggest problems with American education today.

That is a fair observation, but since NCLB is meant to evaluate teacher/school performance, I think it is fairly obvious that they would resist it.

And BTW, I am worried about that 30% you mentioned, but I'm more worried about the majority of kids, who don't know fundamentals and can't compete in the global economy. Fix that first, and lets come up with something creative to those who can't fit into the system. But we're playing catch up, and while the arts are very important (I did take AP art in school) we have too many kids who can't do basic math, don't know their own language and don't even know what science is in the first place.

I'll give you that, but from most of the people I've talked to (now we're not talking the 100% I mentioned earlier) are more concerned with how NCLB affects the students than they are with their jobs. Like I said, my wife doesn't even work in education now and she's still against it.

I think most people would agree on that. However, the question then becomes "Is NCLB fixing that?" And I think a lot of people would answer, "No, it's not." And in fact, like someone mentioned in here earlier, the only thing it is doing is holding back the students that can move beyond the basics, since so much of the year is spent teaching students to pass that one test. The administrations are forcing teachers to spend that time on this test because that determines their funding, and they don't get time to teach anything beyond the basics. No child is getting left behind because they're slowing the rest of them down.

Which is better, to have no child left behind because the rest are forced to move at the same pace, or to have a few that get left behind and a few that excel?

I encountered this conundrum in my college years. Like El Capitan, I took an AP Art course in high school and enjoyed it so much I eventually enrolled in one of the Art Institutes. At the time (mid '03) it was a pain in the ass to enroll. You had to bring in a portfolio and have an actual interview with the director of your major. Classes were small and you really felt pressure to excel because everyone was held to a higher standard.

Then the flood gates opened and they started caving in to pressure from the company heads. Portfolio showings and interviews were no longer held and they were bringing in people who had no previous art experience. "We'll teach you how to draw" was what one student was told. Classes were massive and we were now moving at a snail's pace so all of the unexperienced could keep up.

Three years later and all of these students still can't draw or use any artistic concepts worth a damn, and they are being graduated. Now the city is filled with subpar "artists" waving around a Bachelor's Degree while people like myself have to refer to online tutorials to fill in the gaps for class concepts we were never able to touch on due to remedial pacing. It's a nightmare.

Now, I know this is college level, but say the same thing happened in California with the tens of thousands of students, you have bright students that aren't able to reach their full potential in the classroom while we have a plethora of young adults waving around a diploma, lacking many if not most of the skills needed to survive on one's own, and they are all demanding to have decent jobs that they really don't deserve.

I graduated from high school in 1980. Within a couple of years of my graduation, the school district made a major change due to budget concerns.
There were still 2 high schools in the district but now they had 1 of everything...One football team, one basketball team, one marching band, one drama department, one debate team, one chess team. How many students did not try out since they now had a 2 school pool to choose from? How many were left out? NCLB is a concept that can not be brought out into the real world using an test score to be the measuring stick. Education in this country has been below standards for years/decades before NCLB. Throwing money at the issue will not solve it. Standardized tests are not the answer. We need as a society to get more involved in the process. Teaching as a profession needs to be lifted back up as a honored profession. We need more positive images of teachers and not the latest what teacher had sex with a student in the media. Parents have to be more involved with their child's education. People need to take some of the responsibility onto themselves to show their children that reading and math and science are important. We need to try to lift all the children up as high as they can go...and we need to realize that they will not all reach the same level. By expecting more from them we will be better preparing them for their futures.

NCLB is a disaster on every level. On the other hand, an under-educated populace certainly works out well for him and his masters.

I don't believe NCLB is meant to keep the population dumb, again, if you take a long view of things and compare with other countries the fundamental problems in the US education system clearly pre-date NCLB. What I see now is a lot of people, even educators, using it as an excuse to what was already a very broken system.

Students need to be challenged. The current system doesn't do that, and again this is from before NCLB. I came to this country for the 10th grade, and I was surprised to find out people were just starting to take trigonometry then, when I had already take a couple of years of it in 8th grade.

We already talked about the language thing, it is an embarrassments that children are not mandated to learn another language at a much earlier age. And this should not be an optional thing, it should be a requirement!

We need better teachers, obviously I think you can raise the quality by offering better pay. No offense to those with relatives in education here, but a lot of the people in the profession today are people who are there just because they wouldn't cut it in the corporate or real academic world. My physics professor was literally crazy, my art teacher couldn't draw and my computer teacher knew less about programming than myself when I was 14.

Guidance counselors are a disaster, I had one that would encourage kids to take the "easier classes". When I found out there were easy classes ( a new concept to me, you don't get to chose in my country ) I decided to go to the regular class. The counselor discouraged it. I was strong enough to fight her on this, but guess what, most kids are going to chose the easier classes. Doesn't take a genius to figure that out!

You also need deep cultural change, education should be valued over work for young people. Many kids waste time working fat McDonald's and in extra curricular activities because not enough emphasis is paid to plain old education.

Kids today don't know anything about politics. Don't parents talk to their kids about what is going on in the world? My 7 year old knows the candidates by name and is always asking me who I'm going to vote for. I knew a guy in senior high who didn't even know Bush Sr. was the previous president to Clinton!

How come kids can't talk about religion at school? They should be teaching classes on world religions, if you are offended by that, then we can send your kid to an extra hour of physics. Schools are so afraid to insult anybody they don't teach anything to kids. I also think in some type of voucher system. If somebody wants to teach their kid about creationism, be my guest. Give them a voucher and let them go to a creationist school, that way they won't waste our time and my kids won't be learning pseudo-biology.

On the topic of vouchers, I know many here are probably really against those. But today, I want my kids to learn much more than what public school offer. I should really have more options here, instead of waiting for the whole system to change by the time they are already grown up.

NCLB seems to not be helping, but it is not even a significant part of the problem. Teachers can complain about it all day, but they're obviously not doing their job. Kids do have to pass and demonstrate they know the basics at the end of the day.

Real academic world? What is that, exactly?

Teaching at a University, not the local high school.

Upper case for emphasis.

I've been teaching in China for two and half years and feel I can speak on this matter. Standardized tests are the norm, for example, the college entrance examination. High school is all about preparing these students to take this exam and the focus is on math, physics, chemistry, chinese and english. When it comes to a well-rounded education, that's where it suffers. Do the usual: where is England on a map and they fail 9 out of 10. History is another matter, but that's due to state policies mandating their own version of history. Even college here is a joke - they're overloaded with a bunch of meaningless tests and certificates - I just taught an intermediate level English class to one particular girl who graduated last year as an English major. It's not even funny.
I don't know about America, (I'm from Montreal, Canada) but it seems that increasing population, bad education policies are forcing the standards down and the apparition of more of these standardized tests.

As a recent college grad, with memories of high school still fresh (and I attended as good a high school as there is), I'll say that the biggest problem facing the American education system is the way Americans perceive education. Education is valued in our nation not for its own sake, not because it makes one a better, more self-aware, more complete person, or a more capable participant in society, but because if you do well in school you have a better chance of acquiring wealth. There's too much emphasis on future career prospects and not enough on the intrinsic value of knowledge. If we learn, as a society, to value learning I'm certain the rest will follow.

I think this is the nail on the head. We don't see Education as an end but a means; getting into a good school, having a "worthwhile" major, and finding a well paying job. I'm not going to rail against people for their chosen profession but the staggering numbers of people I went to high school with that ended up in the mortgage industry or low level banking is absurd.

What worthwhile degree do you need in order to be in the mortgage or "low level banking" industries?

You throw money at anything it will flourish. The fact is that education has been starved since the "Reagan revolution" began chipping away at it. Schools weren't suffering like they are today before Reagan. The fact that Schwarzenegger thinks the state budget can be fixed by slashing education is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Pretty much the greatest hope for this nation is education.

With two kids in public school, my experience has been that the quality of the teachers isn't the problem. They're frustrated by NCLB schedules, the dull and completely uninspired texts, the officious administrators that are disproportionately fixated on test scores, and the apathy and/or neglect/abuse of parents.

If we as a people invested WAY more money in education, gave teachers their freedom to teach back, streamlined administrative layers by breaking up giant school districts and made some degree of parental engagement mandatory I think students as a whole would be better served. I grew up in California and had great teachers for the most part, and the best ones I had were distinguished by the fact that they went off the beaten track to inspire and give context to the importance and freedom of education.

ps. you may think I'm loony but I do believe that the corporate interests with the most power in this country have a vested interest in a populace of "dumb consumers." Who spends more time with kids, teachers or advertisers? Who has more resources to engage kids? Who has more access to kids' minds?

"U.S. tops the world in school spending but not test scores"
http://www.usatoday.com/news/educati...mparison_x.htm
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1208/p01s02-uspo.html

How does this work? Can you name this cabal of conglomerates that conspires to keep the populace dumb? I mean, I work at a big corporation, are we doing this because I see no signs of it and quite the contrary.

Not every federal dollar goes to the students. When you look at how cronyism and pork fit into the thousand dollar toilets in the military, it's easy to see how expensive construction, software programs, etc. get a lot of that money. Oh hey look, George Bush's sinister brother got federal funds for his NCLB project! I'm sure instituting NCLB and paying for all new sets of materials from companies that are no doubt tied to some sort of Bush cabal scheme also took a lot of that funding.

Being in the eye of the hurricane so to speak in LAUSD, where teachers often don't get paid when they should, have to ask the PTA for basic supplies and pay for buses out of their own pockets, it doesn't look the way the statistics paint it. And I'm sure as awful as LAUSD is, there are no doubt far worse off school districts.

The whole system has become as corrupted as the aforementioned bloated military budget.

I see it as a bigger picture, ElCap, and even so I recognize that people do not necessarily want to take that particular red pill. I see the power struggles in the world generally in terms of rich and powerful versus everyone else. Most people, especially online, call me paranoid for this, but I think at its essence the tide of more advanced civilizations tend to turn this way.

So getting back to the original idea, what we have is a general cheapening of life for most of us at our own expense and toward the profit of those with the most power and the most to profit. I'm not talking about every company or even every corporation, but with a big company comes access to the ears and future profitability/power acquisition of those in already in power. The corporation begins as one thing but gradually boils down to a profit making enterprise, and the political forces they acquire become their facilitators.

Food is made more cheaply. Livestock is drugged, given hormones, fed garbage and the feces of other animals to provide as much as possible as cheaply as possible regardless of the quality of the product and the health of those it's meant for. Toxic chemicals and other substances are dumped indiscriminately into the water supply and into the air, but for the preservation of profit, that's a non-issue to the people whose salaries we pay to look out for us. Whatever the side effects are are no known, or not publicized to the degree that any of us will ever know.

Commerce has moved towards the cheapest possible solutions - slave labor, cheap, unregulated materials, increasingly flimsy production. In the zero sum game of outsourcing, the very people who these products are meant for are put out of work en masse by their production elsewhere (obviously some products don't fall into this categories - I'm thinking of like Toyota, which has gained market share through quality). The possibilities that were brought into American life by Roosevelt in the new deal - the guarantee of some form of living wage, the opportunities for blue collar jobs that could pay these wages, the promise of a middle class -- are fading away.

Poverty is rising in increasing numbers and neighbor does not look after neighbor. Hurricane Katrina wasn't an aberration - that's the future. Those lucky enough to live above the poverty line watched in horror - even we even watched at all - as a third world disaster unfolded in squalor and misery before our eyes. I'm not saying the solution is handouts, I'm saying that's our country. By looking the other way as Reagan dismantled the New Deal, we let this degree of hopelessness and poverty back in after the horror of the Depression had faded from memory.

Media is a disaster. Commercials during children's programming used to be banned. Now, children's programming is almost ENTIRELY commercials. In between actual commercials, the cartoons are knocked off to sell consumer products. Every series on the Disney channel is intended for ancillary profit streams. Have you ever tried to watch the programming for kids? Other than adult swim and a couple of other things it's the most mindless hackery I've ever seen. It exists for no other reason than to fill time in between incessant commercial breaks and sell products. They are being raised to become the perfect consumers.

Kids are the easiest advertising marks there is. And the fact that the federal government have allowed them to become targets, I think, has contributed greatly to the worsening quality of life in America.

And education has become as automated as possible with NCLB and other "improvements." Individuality, genuine expression and the joy of learning are casualties. Schools are overcrowded, illiteracy is rampant, and anyone who can't keep up does fall through the cracks. I don't blame this solely on schools. The general cheapening of life contribues to the situation at home, in neighborhoods and in communities.

The news is another disaster. How do control people more than by controlling what they know and how they process information? People are led around by the nose from one non-story to the next, focusing on the superficial ripples in the water rather than the underlying currents at work. When I'm at my office, people always rush to tell me their take on the latest crazy reverend or naughty official and I have to tell them I don't give two $#its about that. I'm worried about Bush's hard-on for Iran or the federal bailout of Bear Stearns wherein the same @ssholes whose greed facilitated this economic debacle are being rewarded for their greed and short-sightedness. The meat recall was treated like a freak occurrence rather than an endemic and worsening issue. But people look at me with blank stares. They don't talk about those things on CNN or Fox News.

But right wing tv and radio is a whole other nightmare because it's designed to program talking points into people, and any kind of discussion with the indoctrinated is like talking to a wall. Why do people argue that there is no global warming other than to defend the profit margins of the polluters who only staving off the truth to continue their massive profit-making enterprise? Even if it's not catastophic climate change (which I believe it is), wouldn't it be worth changing our systems to get out of these voluntary wars created for the sake of foreign oil? Or to innovate and modernize like most first world nations are? Or to put people to work in American factories that will facilitate this important change?

And for-profit healthcare is a disaster. Again, you have people who have been manipulated subtly into spouting talking points that exist solely to defend the profits of the industry, not because it would benefit them personally.

Thinking these complex issues through with context and information gathering is not on the agenda of NCLB. Filtering ideas through yourself and deciding your own take on what's happening is not on the test. The Constitution, the ideals on which this country was founded, has been essentially removed from civics books! A constitutional law scholar said that most lawyers and politicians he knows have no idea what's in the Constitution. That's not an accident.

So what all of this adds up to for me is a corralling of people who are NOT in power into a downward shift in their way of life -- get into debt, stay in debt, be afraid, don't think about the big picture, be angry at another race or people who practice another way of life or philosophy, blame them for your problems, hate on them because it's easier to think of yourself as better than another type of person than it is to think that there might be another group of people out there who make sure the lightning flash stories that push x button at y time will get hammered into you and ignite those "better than" vindictive feelings anytime something too big ignore looms on the horizon -- like say an impending "war" with Iran or the fact that your phone can be tapped for no reason or you can be shipped off to Guantanamo or the fact that US attorneys have been hand-picked for their loyalty to Bush and the country is now seeing the kinds of selective prosecutions that ensue or the fact that there hasn't been a genuine and truthful election in this country in a decade or the fact that they can't get needed healthcare for their families or themselves because X insurers profits are more important than their quality of life?

Anyway, sorry that was long, but that's a fraction of my basic rant.

Actually, if you wouldn't mind continuing...