Perdido Street School blog: I Don't Get It (NCLB changes)

[tonysam]

So much of the coverage of Obama's NCLB Jr. proposal reports that the Obama administration is undoing the prescriptive and punitive elements of Bush's NCLB.

But that is not true.

The law requires states to close 5% of the lowest supporting schools and fire all the teachers there. It requires states to "turnaround" the next 5% lowest supporting schools and fire half the teachers. It requires all teachers to be tracked by test data and suggests adding tests to subjects other than reading and math in order to do so. It changes Title 1 grants to a competition so that only districts that do EXACTLY the kinds of "reforms" Obama and Duncan want get the funds. And it will push national standards so that every teacher in every state must teach the same things every other teacher in every other state teaches.

...

I'll repeat - Obama wants to ranks all schools in the nation, close or turnaround the lowest 10%, fire all the teachers, track teacher data and rank teachers according to test scores, institute national standards prescribe the curriculum teachers use, and change the funding formula so that only states that do EXACTLY what they want get money.

...

You can be sure if President McCain or President Palin was pushing this kind of bill, those same Dems would be hammering it.

But because this is Obama, they're cheering it.

More

[msongs]

1. lol obama knows where his bread his buttered nt

[tonysam]

2. Why is it I somehow yearn for the godawful George W. Bush

when I read stuff like what Obama is doing to education?

By the way, USA Today has an article about Arne and the proposals:

In a briefing Friday, Duncan told reporters he will give the high performers both freedom and financial incentives to stay that way.

"We want to get out of their way," Duncan said. "But we also want to learn from them."

For the USA's lowest 5% of schools — about 5,000 — Duncan says he'll require them to take drastic steps to improve, including firing their principal and, in some cases, at least half of their staff, as happened last month at a Rhode Island high school.

That proposal could widen a rift between the administration and teachers' unions. After being briefed on the plan Friday, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said she was "surprised and disappointed that the Obama administration proposed this as a starting point" for reauthorizing the basic law that guides federal education spending, saying teachers "should be empowered and supported — not scapegoated."

The blueprint is part of the administration's planned overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the most recent version of which was nicknamed No Child Left Behind (NCLB) by the Bush administration. The law, which seeks to use federal funding to push school improvements nationwide, mostly through annual testing in reading and math, is overdue for a reauthorization and Obama wants Congress to do it this year, with a handful of radical changes.

USA Today

"Radical" doesn't begin to describe the proposed changes. This is nothing more than an assault on democracy, thanks to Democrats being bought and paid for by the same neoliberal interests having bought off the GOP.

[proud2BlibKansan]

3. Bingo!

[ProgressiveProfessor]

4. He is following in Ted Kennedy's footsteps