The Nickel Drops
I’m not an educator, and have no expertise in the field beyond what it takes to write a tuition check, so I haven’t tracked the “No Child Left Behind” thing much more deeply than to assume that if the Bushies promulgated it, there must be a catch. (Up until this moment I hadn’t connected it with the Left Behind book series, but that may bear some analysis as well.) And I had a gut feeling that we needed some consensus on how to measure achievement, so I discounted a lot of the wailing about the testing regimen. Still, if push came to shove, I was against it because Bush was for it. One thing my education gave me was consistency in my prejudices.
Then this morning I saw this article, and the things I couldn’t reconcile about NCLB came into focus. Much like you’d turn up the heat on an employee you wanted to drive out of the firm, NCLB seems designed to predefine vast areas of the public school system as a failure, then go about dismantling and replacing it with a combination of vouchers and charter schools and some fundamentalist Christian form of the madrassa system.
I can’t really say anything authoritative in support or rebuttal. I do feel that the basis for any improvement in the system is a Marshall Plan kind of investment in dollar terms, in order to attract top talent to the teaching and administrative ranks, and to provide a physical plant that faculty and students will inhabit voluntarily, even happily. Without Iraq kind of money, without new-stadium kind of money, no initiative of any ideological stripe is going anywhere.
