Teaching Tuesday: The Post Wherein I Go Retro

Well, retro back to October, 2004.

While procrastinating today, I was tooling through the archives over at Fightin' Bob and I found a piece from noted education author and researcher Gerald Bracy. In it, he lays out the "Seven Deadly Absurdities" of No Child Left Behind. I think it's important to remember, on this day when we elect our next superintendent, how odious a law this truly is:

1. The No Child Left Behind law (NCLB) uses the phrase “scientifically based research” 111 times and demands such research from educational researchers, but no scientifically based research—or any research--supports the law’s mandates.

2. NCLB lacks research support because NCLB depends solely on punishment. As schools fail to make arbitrary “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP) the law imposes punitive, increasingly harsh sanctions. No psychologist, educator or organizational theorist would establish such a system, much less expect it to work [. . .].

3. [NCLB] punishes the entire school for the failures of the few, often the very few. [. . .]


4. All students must be proficient in reading, math, and science by 2014. This is ridiculous. In his 2003 presidential address to American Educational Research Association, Robert Linn projected it would take 61 years, 66 years, and 166 years, respectively, to get fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-graders to the proficient level in math. [. . .]


5. As a consequence of #3 and #4 above, California projects that by the witching year of 2014, NCLB will label 99 percent of its schools “failing.” Minnesota, one of the nation’s highest scoring states, projects that 2014 will find 80 percent of its schools wanting.

6. Any school that fails to make AYP for two consecutive years must offer all students the option to transfer to a “successful” school. Thus, if a school’s special education students fail to make AYP one year and its English language learners fail the next year, the school must offer all students the “choice option” in spite of the fact that the school worked for the other 36 student categories.

In cities, the choice option is a farce. This year, Chicago had 200,000 students eligible, but only 500 spaces for them. [. . .]

7. Schools alone cannot accomplish what NCLB requires. After all, between birth and age 18, children spend only 9 percent of their lives in schools.

Go read the whole thing--my excerpts don't do it justice.

I'll report later on the election results as I learn them.