Sunday, November 20, 2005

Furthermore, call a moratorium on NCLB

The double-talk coming out of the Education Department in Washington amounts to this, No Child Left Behind is not working correctly so they're tinkering.

In business, if I sell the customer a ticket to NY and the train arrives in Boston instead that means something is very wrong. I don't know of too many businesses that then turn around and charge the customer again for a ticket from Boston to New York and get away with it (and we might wind up in Montreal!).

Today, NCLB is passing the cost of this flawed mandate AND THE TINKERING onto every one of us. We are being asked to pay over and over for more nonsensical and empirically failing policy.

Our kids are being jerked around. Our schools and teachers are being jerked around. Hard working parents are stressed and stretched to all kinds of crazy limits to get their children into the right programs and Washington wants to play cop because some idiot in Washington gave them a badge.

What's more. In admitting that it isn't working, are they assuming responsibility for the wrongful harm they've done to schools, administrators and teachers caught in this educational quagmire? IMO, somebody should look into it.

And, before more damage is done, this program should be sent to a corner for a timeout until somebody figures out what should be measured and what to do with those results. Today we are condemning schools and ram-rodding expensive educational program changes based on psuedo-science.

Our teachers know better what our students need and the local community knows as well. The inside the beltwaty crowd should experiment on their own kids, not ours.

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