On September 23, 2009, USA Today published an article about the U.S. Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, trying to gather the support of educators nationwide to help him reform education in this country. He hopes to have new education legislation close to passed by early in 2010. Duncan points out in a speech that he made on Thursday September 24, that after 50 years of school reform and education ruling, the country is still waiting for the day when all the children in the United States have access to high quality education. Duncan is urging various education groups to take a more active role in helping and promoting education reform.
Duncan and other groups are looking to improve upon the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). He hopes to promote a well-rounded education, which was passed in Congress with overwhelming numbers, but now has lost many of the supporters. In the Teacher Community there have been many criticisms of NCLB. One of the biggest criticisms regarding NCLB is that it focuses too much on teaching for standardized tests.
Applebatch wants to know what ideas teachers have for reforming the No Child Left Behind Act. Should it be reformed or totally redone? There are so many criticisms of the act. Will NCLB be able to overcome these critiques and successfully reform the nation’s education system, or would it be better to scrap the idea for a whole new plan of attack?
How has the No Child Left Behind impacted you in your classroom? Has it caused great changes in your method of teaching? Do you have any tips for others about helping to improve the success of students? We know that you have an opinion about this issue, and through our online Teacher Network you can discuss your opinions and ideas with other educators, talk about what needs to be done to reform our nation’s education system, or even discuss and share the ways you have discovered to work around the bureaucratic system.
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Under Arne Duncan, the Chicago Public Schools became more politicized than ever. In his his defense, his boss was Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley, who had removed Paul Vallas as the school's CEO. As a teacher affected by Central Office decisions that often ignore the needs of individual school communities, I found myself working under constant scrutiny that ignored any success that wasn't measured by test scores. And so my inner city school remained on Probation, first under Vallas, and then Duncan.
ReplyDeleteDon't be fooled by the platitudes spoken by Duncan. The bottom line is that policy was driven by politics, and usually this meant that the students and teachers had to absorb the unpleasant fallout that usually disregarded their needs. There have been opportunities to make substantive changes in failing schools, but that would have required making changes in communities, developing businesses there and greatly improving social and health networks that would have provided services and interventions that are needed in these communities. Instead, schools in these very troubled communities are expected to work miracles, their success and failures dictated by standardized tests. And when they fail, the most expedient solution based on Duncan's approach is to turn the school around, which means displacing an entire faculty. All the failures must have been the teachers' fault, right?