End Voodoo Education: Vote "NO" on Revised no Child Left Behind
Dear Senators Sanders, Warren, Tester, & Paul,
Next week you should vote a loud "NO" on the legislation to revise No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the current version of the basic American education law the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. You should do this -- Tester knows because he tried to eliminate it -- because it continues the abominable federal mandate that all states must give annual standardized tests.
Why do I call this Voodoo education because just like Voodoo or supply side economics it has been proven not to work. It just shifts to the states the administering of the worthless tests which was and is the heart of the problem with corporate test-based accountability.
Who says they're worthless? The National Research Council of the National Academies of Science in a 2011 report "Incentives and Test-based Accountability" says it. The report stated, Conclusion 1: "Test-based incentive programs...have not increased student achievement enough to bring the United States close to the levels of the highest achieving countries." One of those programs was NCLB.
President George W. Bush imposed it without any research that it works and we've known this for five years and yet President Obama and his non-educator secretary of education, Arne Duncan, expanded its use to evaluate teachers.
It is time to drive a stake into the heart of the federal testing mandate.
If not, and the NCLB revision passes, then 20 million public school students and millions of teachers will waste most of the next five months -- that's half of this school year -- doing test prep and then getting upset, stressed, and even sick when they actually take the tests. My neighbor described what happened in her class on test day. "Most of the kids were stressed and one little girl just threw up; it was a disaster."
If not, and the NCLB revision passes, then 20 million public school students and millions of teachers will waste most of the next five months -- that's half of this school year -- doing test prep and then getting upset, stressed, and even sick when they actually take the tests. My neighbor described what happened in her class on test day. "Most of the kids were stressed and one little girl just threw up; it was a disaster."
A whole generation of students attended school for seven years under President Bush's NCLB and then spent the last seven under NCLB on steroids, better known as the Obama Administration's Race to the Top. Ah yes, winners and losers racing to nowhere.
The waste of instructional time, genuine teaching and learning, is enormous. Students may spend 20 to 25 hours actually taking the math and ELA tests but a study, "TIME ON TEST: The Fixed Costs of 3-8 Standardized Testing in New York State", found that students had to wait over an hour each day for "testing related activities" -- 20 End Voodoo Education: Vote "NO" on Revised no Child Left Behind | John C. Fager:
