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Educational patchwork
States should cooperate on ending the glaring inconsistencies among academic standards
Sunday, Feb. 22, 2009 | 2:06 a.m.
A new study has confirmed what many critics of the No Child Left Behind federal education law have said all along, that many school districts judged as failures would be judged as successes if only they were located in a different state.
This is because the Bush administration did not want to broach the divisive issue of national academic standards. So states were allowed to continue setting their own standards, meaning that mediocre school districts could continue to be mediocre if the state set low achievement standards — yet be rated as successes under the federal law.
Just as unfairly, school districts that had surpassed mediocre but were within states with high standards could end up being labeled as failures.
This obvious problem is receiving attention from President Barack Obama’s administration, which is leaning toward encouraging states to cooperate on a plan to establish national academic standards for core subjects.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the Associated Press every state needs standards that make students college- and career-ready and that are benchmarked against international standards. “A high school diploma needs to mean something, no matter where it is from,” he said.
The study, released last week by the Washington, D.C.-based Thomas B. Fordham Institute, found fault with the way school districts are evaluated. “It misleads people into thinking that we have a semblance of a national accountability system for public schools, and we actually don’t,” said Chester Finn Jr., president of the Fordham Institute.
In a column last week in The Washington Post, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said national standards can be achieved without abridging the right of state and local educators to influence curricula. “Education is a local issue, but there is a body of knowledge about what children should know and be able to do that should guide decisions about curriculum and testing,” she wrote.
With cooperation among educators, we believe achieving more consistency from state to state is a realistic and worthy goal.
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The bigger problem with NCLB and testing to "Standards" is that it doesn't guarantee anyone is really ready to enter the workforce or be prepared for the future. Filling out the dots on a standardized test doesn't require any level of higher level thinking.
In the fifties, when we were confronted with the need to catch up to the Soviet in the space race, the education system didn't institute a series of tests to make sure everyone was equal. Rather schools innovated, encouraged project based learning and encouraged kids to think outside the box.
If we are to compete in the 21st Century we need to rethink education and it's not in dismantling the schools we have and replacing them with charter and private schools. We need to limit the amount of standardized testing, lower class size and encourage teachers to use project based learning and innovative strategies that encourage student learning.
http://www.edutopia.org/
http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/
It's about time we had some national standards for academics - not to mention national standards for funding. Not to mention the end of unfunded federal mandates such as NCLB. Not to mention the end of NCLB itself, since it requires that special ed students achieve at the same level as others, and that 100% of students be proficient at grade level by 2014. Are some kids going to acquire new, more efficient brains by then? Or start showing up once in a while? Perhaps the states will actually start failing all kids who are below proficiency by 2014?
This fat, massive, overwrought legislation was passed so that schools could not possibly meet standards, thereby opening education to private industry profit-motive takeover.