NCLB

certainly has fallen fall short of its goal of helping to provde all children with a "world-class" education, but that doesn't matter when the ultimately goals of their backs happen to be privatizing public education for profit (unworkable) and to give big handouts to corporate entities.

Certainly, many of America’s lowest performing schools need drastic improvement, and some kind of enlightened accountability process to assist them. But NCLB’s heavy-handed and mechanistic approach to accountability is actually making it more difficult than ever for our schools to be world-class by any reasonable measure of that term.

How do you become world-class when your federal “reform” strategy actually is: 1) driving experienced and talented educators out of the system; 2) creating enormous discontinuity in some schools’ staffing and disconnection with their students and parents; 3) ignoring the inherent humanity, talents, and uniqueness of the individual learner; 4) reducing “the learning that matters” in the 21st Century to annual scores on highly limited and limiting paper-pencil tests; 5) ignoring mountains of research on brain functioning, learning processes, and child development; 6) forcing reductions in the richness and depth of curriculum and learning experiences students are receiving; 7) imposing a narrow, single-method approach to instruction on the diversity of learners and schools; 8 ) preventing those experts with a richer approach to learning and instruction from working in or assisting schools in their improvement efforts; 9) overriding community input regarding school goals, priorities, and operations; and 10) eliminating incentives for schools to innovate in ways that serve their particular clientele?

Yet the likes of Ted Kennedy stubbornly insists the law is a good one, and any shortcomings can be tweaked. Well, no they can't because the motive behind the law is utterly against the spirit of public education.