Comments on: NCLB at 5: What can be done?

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 04:20:24 +0000

I’d like to know: do we really believe that absent massive federal interference, American public schools are utterly incapable of properly educating children? Because unless we believe that, unless we believe that NCLB was an absolute necessity and Godsend because prior to the implementation of NCLB, virtually every American educated in our public schools K-12 ended up as drooling, dysfunctional morons (this would include the folks who dreamed up and passed NCLB into law, wouldn’t it?, then there is no excuse for the existance of NCLB or anything like it. Who’d like to step up first and admit that American education turned them into functional idiots?

If a given school district isn’t doing as well as it could/should, the means for the voter/parents in that district to deal with that lack of performance existed before NCLB and will exist after NCLB, like all save-education-in-one-swell-foop ideas, oozes back into the anti-intellectual swamp from when it crawled. If those voters don’t care, or choose not to exercise their ultimate power over their local schools, no amount of federal hammering and nanny-statism is going to be of help.

And I feel like I’m banging my head against a wall even mentioning this, but might I be so bold as to suggest that parents and kiddies bear some small responsibility for academic acheivement? Why is it in all of the noise on this topic, we never hear anything about that?

Sorry folks, but for me, one of the most horrifying sentences in the English language remains “I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help.”

By: Darren

Darren — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 02:20:18 +0000

If the Democrats succeed at shunting NCLB off to the side, what will be left to drive any improvement at all? Before, we had kids all over the place failing, and the best the educrats could do is wail and moan about institutional racism and/or the need for more money. Will we go back to that? Not that we’ve gotten very far from that, I’m afraid….

By: david foster

david foster — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 21:09:40 +0000

“Gone is the focus on campus operations and administration. Student learning is now the chief concern”…as, of course, it should have been all along. It’s interesting how organizations of all types lose sight of their reasons for existing.

I read about a woman who was put in charge of a loading/unloading facility (ship/road/rail) for an oil company. It wasn’t working very well; there was a lot of bureaucracy, unhappy employees, and expensive delays for tankers. She asked herself: “How would I run this place if the main objective were to load and unload oil?”…and from thinking about that question, was able to greatly improve both operations and employee happiness.

But of course, the main objective had *always* been to load and unload oil–there was no other reason for the facility’s existence! Yet this had been largely largely forgotten over time under layers of increasingly-byzantine procedures.

At least in the private sector, competition puts some limits on the forgetting-the-mission process. In K-12 education, prior to NCLB, there really hasn’t been much of a limit at all.