No Child Left Behind, From a Certain Point of View - Page 2

Global warming is real, it is not man made and there is nothing we can do about it. They're trying to turn that into the next bubble and the people who own the companies (Al Gore for example) that will profit from this are pushing it. Slowly people are realizing this, there is a vast chunk of data missing from the whole manmade global warming analysis and that data is from roughly the 15th century when we had a large cooling period (mini ice age). Normally we have a variance of +2 to - 2 degree's global temperature however every 400-500 years we're do for a +4 or -4 variance and there's nothing we can do about it. This will be a slow increase and we can prepare for it.

Katrina was not the future, it was an anomaly. You build a city below sea level next to a high hurricane area you should expect to get flooded. Unfortunate but not unexpected.

NCLB was a good effort, something that was needed. It is not the answer, everyone pretty much knows that but at least funding was increased so this way when someone with a plan comes along that can fix it, there is money there to do so.

Oh Jesus fucking Christ in a sidecar.

yt great post, and it deserves a dedicated thread to discuss those issues. However when it comes to education, I do not think at all that "evil corporations" are really significant causes for the problem. These multi nationals exist in other countries too (1st and 3rd world) and their education system produces better results.

You said throwing money at the problem will fix things, as you can see, we're spending lots of money per student. Ironically with Bush, spending I believe has increased. Obviously that is not the problem.

The problem is the quality of educators, the bureaucracy, politics inside of the classroom (creationism, not talking about religion, not offending anybody), not challenging students and the deep cultural problem that I think you are pointing out but that in my view is the fault of the parents. They are just not that involved anymore.

But the first thing is people have to recognize this problem predates NCLB, if you don't see this it just means you are wasting time playing the part in your partisan political role.

In 100% agreement with ElCap on this one.

I'll throw in my vote for this as well -- I've seen the hordes of the disinterested and talentless in IT.

All this flows from the problem JuddL pointed out.

Take the issue of not enough tradespeople: kids discount the very real skills and knowledge (and earning power?!) required to be, say, a carpenter versus going to college and majoring in, say, film criticism ;-). We've stratified various classes of profession (e.g., working with your hands versus sitting on your ass) and even learning activities (e.g., university vs college vs trade school) and the people who perform them.

Ask any kid who'd they rather be: one of the many faceless MBAs who just got laid off in this last round of financial bloodsport or the master plumber who charges you through the nose to look as his ass crack.

It must be awesome to be omniscient!

What I wrote is my opinion and my point of view, and I'm not saying there will be floods like Katrina. I'm saying there will be humanitarian disasters like Katrina because the post-Reagan political mindset is that ok to let poverty levels rise, to let the infrastructure crumble and let important societal functions and property get privatized as long as Halliburton, Walmart, ExxonMobil etc. get their tax breaks/subsidies and the richest 1% get their all-important tax cuts!

It wasn't needed. The opposite was needed. What NCLB did was automate education systems similar to how McDonald's franchises are operated, taking power out of the hands of the teachers and placing into the hands of the bloated ranks of administrators.

ElCap, thank you for reading. I should clarify that I'm not saying that the corporations solely have made this situation so. But I believe that there is a destructive partnership between big business and establishment politicians to shore up their personal corporate interests at the expense of the common people for a variety of reasons.

I believe my own eyes, what I see in public schools. I don't believe the statistics that get thrown out there because, yes, maybe the money is being spent, but it's not being spent on the children, the classrooms and the teachers. And has there ever been a study of the per student spending in the running of private schools versus public schools?

On your first point I agree. I think teaching should be a profession that attracts the best and brightest, not the least inspired and most desperate. I've had great experience with teachers in public schools though. To the man (or woman), they're frustrated by administrative t-crossing and i-dotting. If left to their own devices, if given adequate resources, the teachers I've known could turn out energized, inspired and high achieving students.

As far as the fault of the parents, yeah, definitely, but think of what the world throws out as values for parents. In America, how many parents get to take time off to take care of children versus Europe and some other parts of the world? How valued is parenting as a contribution to society? Answer: not very. To even keep food on the table and the electricity going, both parents have to work multiple blue collar jobs to even provide bare minimum. All the while advertising and media churn on and on about the good life and how great it is, how indivuduality = the car you drive or the shoes you wear. The combination of factors that goes into beating kids down is vast and toxic.

NCLB is a different problem. The problem that predates NCLB is that every administration post-Reagan has been talking about trying to get something for nothing. This problem did not exist in America before Reagan went after education and social programs, when there was a healthy middle class, when the entire fulcrum of the country was not corporate profit over virtually every other consideration.

Let me ask you another question, have you ever compared the curricula, resources and quality of education between a good public school and a good private school? Try it some time. It's eye opening to say the least. How many children of the rich and powerful do you think go to public schools? Probably none, if not very very few. The truth is they're worlds apart, and when you consider the requirements and expectations of good universities, your average public school kid - even one with very high intelligence - will generally not have jumped through the kinds of hoops private school kids have been jumping through for years. They're different worlds, and unless they're extraordinarily talented at something, most regular kids are denied access to that other world.

So, when you hear talking heads publicly discussing education, they're not talking about education for everybody. They're talking about education for the great unwashed. I believe every single child should have the opportunity to receive the best education possible. Our future as a people depends on it, but most people don't seem to see the correlation between education and general quality of life for a community and a country. What they see "out there" are criminals who should be locked up (just look at the disproportionate prison rates in this country compared to other countries if you don't believe me), not children whose great potential went untapped because our society does not consider them worth the time and money.

Sorry to be melodramatic about this, but nothing pisses me off more than the anti-family, anti-child attitude of a country that professes to be the opposite.

And by the way, when I say the "rich and powerful," I'm not demonizing every single one of them. I'm painting with a broad brush to illustrate the motivating powers in the country. There are some incredibly rich people who've made great contributions to society for altruistic reasons, especially in previous generations where that expected and before the mantra of "greed is good."

If I did, you'd be sorry you asked! Trust me!

You don't. But a lot of people view education in this country not as any ability to improve themselves or learn about the greater world around them but as a resume builder.

This is not true for everyone (I'm not going to fault some people for a specific career centric path but I do wish people would spend less time in narrow minded pursuit of a career objective) but it seems a common mindset that education, espeicailly higher education, is more about having something to put on a resume to show to prospective employers than any real inclination towards learning.

I used my example with people I know/knew fairly well because I think it's not an uncommon experience: You go to school, kind of float along so you can get a B.A. in something, and scrabble around to find a job that earns you a comfortable living after you graduate. This isn't true for everyone but a lot of people enter college with the thinking "I just want the paper so I can get a job."

Yeah, but I really liked the first part.

Story of my life!

Point is, Katrina is a reflection and amplification of how we treat the poor and unfortunate in our society, and it's not pretty.

Funding alone is not good enough, especially when it is "trickle down" funding. Every public school teacher I've met in the last few years - trust me, this is an area of expertise of mine - has expressed how much of classroom supplies* they fund out of their own pockets because the school district or the governing board is in debt because of this or that. So even if there WAS a funding increase, it either didn't go to the right places or it wasn't enough. I'm inclined to say both in conjunction with the idea that NCLB did all the wrong things to "fix" a broken education system.

Also, how did NCLB fix anything, aside from funding increases which in my experiences (see below) had little actual impact? The actual policy of the bill is to make uniform the education system - i.e. incorporate special needs kids in regular classrooms (which has had mixed success so far, but really - these kids take up more of the standard teacher's very precious time at the expense of the regular kids, ending up with special needs kids who don't get enough attention and normal kids who don't get enough attention. Sigh.)

Honestly, the worst thing it did was to further put constraints on teachers limiting what they actually teach, mostly because of increased emphasis on standardized testing, which is a terrible way of measuring quality of education. All it does is force teachers to "teach to the test," which means that they have to focus on certain performance objectives in Math and English while not only ignoring whether the kid really learns those two subjects, but also ignoring, literally, every other subject of knowledge traditionally taught in classrooms. My mother teaches 5th grade and while she has been able to sneak science in the curriculum here and there, she has not taught the kids a single fact pertaining to history. Not a one. And that's perfectly - necessarily - permissible under the current education system.

The point that I think yt is trying to make - one of them, at least - is that when you let teachers fucking teach, they do a far better job than when you put useless constraints on them. Considering the generally low amount of pay a teacher gets, they're either in it for love or they're out of it within their first few years anyway. Or, hell, they love the profession but they can't afford to stay with it - hence why my senior English teacher in high school left a few years ago, in spite of being probably one of the best teachers I've ever had.

Now, I'm not blaming all of this on NCLB, but it has certainly exacerbated the already-existing problems in the US education system to an enormous degree. It needs to be gotten rid of, immediately and unconditionally ala the Japanese militarist government circa 1945.


*another note: The IRS only allows you to declare a certain amount of this on your taxes - it's between 250 and 750 IIRC, I don't have the specifics with me right now - while the rest, well, you're fucked as an educator. Either your kids don't get the learning supplies they need, or you fund it out of your own pocket. Wow! Those federal funding increases really worked!

Also, yt, I really enjoyed your rant as well, particularly the bits concerning Reagan's (and his successor's) slow dismantling of the progress made in creating a strong middle class in the 30s (FDR) through 60s (LBJ), because I totally agree. I'd like to hear the rest of it too...

I think you are correct to question if NCLB is someting that is making our education system far worse than it already is, however NCLB is a classic example of what our educaton system is really all about: indoctrination. The whole idea of making our schools more uniform fits right in with American imperialism.

I completely agree with this.