The entire effort is based on the pre-supposition that standardized tests can actually measure with accuracy student achievement levels. I maintain that they CAN NOT.

Who sets the standard – and the standard changes over time — a lot like a moving target. NCLB is another attempt at an under-funded mandate to exploit public education, teachers unions and ultimately to privatize (or maybe Federalize) public education.

OK, on any given standardized assessment at least 50% will score above the average and at least 50% will score below the average. According to NCLB all students will be proficient — in some year — 2014 (HI HO!). How this will never happen on a standard measure? I will not.

Now we may change the measure – to a criterion referenced assessment … but this would require a nationalized curriculum. Please read the Atlantic Monthly – A Federalized Education System! Hi Ho!

The aim of it is to produce students who fit a preconceived notion of “educated”, while limiting what “educated” means - and expanding the number of students who are supposed to be “educated” to include those who can’t be. Talk to a special education teacher, who considers it a good day when one of his students learns to tie his own shoe, or gets to the bathroom before soiling himself. Ask him how frustrating it is to have his students forced to take this test - and to have his abilities to teach and his school’s ability to provide an education measured by the performance of students who are simply unable to pass this test. Check out the finagling of numbers that allows wealthy school districts to outsource their special needs kids to other districts so their own funding isn’t influenced by these students’ poor scores.

In my previous school district, one of our schools failed because the percentage of ESL students passing the test wasn’t high enough. Problem was, the number of ESL students wasn’t enough to bring that percentage up. We needed to have (IIRC) twelve ESL students in the school with passing scores - but there were only six ESL students in the whole school. My current school district had a school with proficient scores in the high 90’s, which failed and lost funding because its Annual Yearly Improvement wasn’t high enough.

There are so many good reasons to complain about NCLB that there’s simply no need to bash it based on its political source. Anyone who objects to it simply because it was a Republican idea clearly doesn’t know anything about it and should shut his mouth. (Same with anyone who fully supports it because of its political ties. Neither one is looking critically at the program itself.)

I don’t say that it’s all bad. It’s just the worst plan put forward in education in a generation. It is another cookie-cutter plan well intended for supplying cookie-cutter industry with interchangeable, passive, predictable resources.

That sort of work environment faded away half a century ago, and the leaders of education must recognize the new goals. Of course, they still teach cursive writing.

Cursive was developed so that one leaves fewer gloppy ink drops from your split-nib quill due to lifting it and setting it down again. Actual speed tests show no advantage of script over print using modern writing tools. If speed was the issue, shorthand is superior to either form of writing.

Anyway Phonics works, the only criticism that is remotely valid is that perhaps if one learns to read that way one might have problems with spelling. After all, english is an odd language.

In stead the conservative mind sees education as a privilege best left to the profit making sector. The result is a minimum spent on training and teacher development such that teachers are on their own with what ever notions they pick up wherever.

Funny that is not how military education works.

“Liberals” don’t just trash NCLB, many state governments in the South have petitioned to be relieved of its requirements. Remeber, the program WAS supposed to be funded in the first year at $60 billion, that was W’s promise to Ted Kennedy and the rest of the education crowd in the US Senate. Guess what? W lied, whodathunkit, eh? The funding was initially at $47 Billion and has gone down since then as the fiscal demands of NCLB go up and are mandates and the cost war in Iraq and the pressures of wild give-aways to the rich have socked the US budget. Guess who wins that battle.

NCLB was an idea by the Child Defense League which envisoned something far different than what W and his faked-out compatriots came up with at last. I have seen it and see it as a cynical attempt by the far right to ensure magnify the failures of public education in order to force tax dollars to fund private elementary education in the US. Then, we have religious education getting federal dollars and the schools allowed to flaunt US laws, just like W, and get their ways.

The neat byproduct of NCLB is the demise of the public school which will also bring about the decline or demise of public school teachers unions, usually supportive of Democrats. I see NCLB as the same as the tort reform efforts of the far right, an attempt to eliminate a constituency which has traditionally provided votes and money to Democrats.

To the degree which we may actually take the care needed of children in public education with the present system, OK. If we need to do more, that’s OK. See Bill Moyers [ http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1101-33.htm ] and welcome a conversation about the future of our children in the context of what we do in the upcoming elections.