Now more than ever, we must speak up for teachers
American public education remains front and center — which is not necessarily all good, but on the whole it’s a heck of a lot better than a sharp stick in the eye, and better than being ignored.
No Child Left Behind
Start in Washington, DC, where President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are calling for some fundamental changes in the law known as No Child Left Behind, the Bush Administration’s version of Title One of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. I doubt you could find more than a handful of educators who like NCLB these days, but whether anyone in the nation’s capital will be able to agree on what a new version should call for is highly questionable.
To recap the law’s flaws would take a long time; Learning Matters produced an award-winning series on it a few years ago, which you can see here. In my view, the best thing about NCLB was its insistence on ‘disaggregating’ data so that high scores from one group can no longer mask low performance by other
