I work in education, so not surprisingly I know many teachers. As a group they don’t seem very impressed with No Child Left Behind. Naturally, they liked to think they where already doing the best they could under the circumstances. My opinion is that NCLB is a cynical attempt to undermine the public schools as a step towards privatizing education.

The waste and red tape in public intuitions is largely a result of NCLB type legislation. My college has to employ fulltime staff whose primary responsibility is to produce the reports the government requires for federal funding. Accountability initiatives of various kinds account for a large amount of the paper done by the staff and administration. The University system recently inaugurated an accountability based planning program. The idea is to base future policy on the results of tests evaluating every facet of University system operations. This requires a whole new state level bureaucracy, with local branches to oversee the evaluation process. The ironic part of it all is this: when you evaluate the overall quality of colleges that have applied accountability based planning programs in the past, it is clear that the approach doesn’t work. Basing policy on the results of testing would indicate that the first step the University system should take is to quit trying to base policy off testing.

I suppose this depends on the school. I suspect that there is a huge difference between a posh grammar school and your average neighbourhood Catholic school.

Sounds like the stupid red tape again.

Not quite. It's a matter of degree. I agree there should be some testing, but you can overdo it. Come to my country, and you'll see. Teachers just read out of the textbook, students spend all their time cramming, and there are very few creative projects. It's probably gotten somewhat better now that kids aren't required to learn in English anymore, but they used to memorize model essays from tutorial centers en masse, and spill them out on 'creative writing' exam papers. Suicide due to exam stress is quite common. The US isn't going to reach that point for a long time, but if you make teachers' jobs depend on this year's test results, they're going to spend a lot of time cramming crib notes into their students' heads, instead of risking their energy on that poetry project, which may in the long run, be more valuable.


Political corruption, isn't that lovely?


I'm all for a national standard too, having come out of the British system of GCSEs and A-levels, which served me quite well, thank you. The problem is tying this next year's budget to this year's test results. Doing that encourages schools to a) tell their worst students to drop out, and b) lie about their test results.

What really needs to be done is cutting through all that red tape and bloated bureaucracy. No Child Left Behind doesn't seem to address that.

Kea:

I totally agree that, for the school systems to improve (public/private/any...) we HAVE to stop politicizing the educational system. Also, I think it would be nice to limit the upper administrations pay. I would like to see a limitation stating that a super intendant can not be paid more than 2X the amount of the average teacher with the same number of service to the system (a first year administrator can not be paid more than 2X a first year teacher...etc.)

I also agree that the next year's budget should not be tied to the previous years outcomes. It should be scaled over a period. For example, and audit every 10 years. If the (enter grade here) numbers do not improve over a 10 year period, your budget will be affected...OR a new administration team needs to be appointed.

Also, if the students need to pass a national exam...all teachers should need to prove their abilities in a certification exam. We require nurses, doctors, lawyers...heck even my brother the electrician needed to pass a certification test to be liscensed by the state. I feel that educators (one of the MOST influencial positions in a society) should do the same.

Just my thoughts!

It was specifically created to add to that bloat. Masses of money get wasted on the companies that create the tests (who gave generously to Dubya back in Texas), but nothing actually gets spent on education. Hell, red states are telling the DOE to pound sand, and refusing to take part in the whole program. It's a classic money wasting unfunded mandate.

Btw; if you want to see how completely dishonest, corrupt, and pointless this whole law is, look how it played out in Texas. The only difference between this and the national program is the number of students getting screwed.

However, I will raise the question for clarity.

IF there was a way to rid the system of all political madness and beuracratic hoo-haw. AND, if REAL reform was done to eliminate the administration money hogs. Would you support a national testing system aimed at forcing schools to improve outcomes?

Again, I don't think your yearly budget should hang in the ballance...but how about a ten-year educational audit?

The reason I ask is some people don't like the national standard because of the funding/political garbage in place now. Some don't like it because it calls for reform and accountability. I would just like peoples clear stand on this.

I as a student personaly don't like this new national standard of testing because it gives us another test to deal with during high school. We are tested with unit tests each week in every class(those with units anyways), have our own finals, the Stanford 9, the SAT, the ACT and now these new state tests that are part of the NCLB(AIMS in Arizona for example). I think this causes already frustrated teenagers to have more problems with the test and occasionaly even fail on purpose. Maybe I am an american teenage idiot, but shouldn't there be more to our high school experiance than just passing various tests all the time? I realize that tests are nescessary, but schools should be about education, not testing.

I am not sure if national tests per se are good.

While there are some minimum skills that every student should know upon graduation i think it is a net positive if graduates from different schools (or different teacher within one school) have somewhat different skills. Say some are better in calculus some in algebra.

So i think a catalog of required minimum skills and some guidelines how far advanced student should be in any subbranch, that is used for local tests would be better.

I do not think a schools budget should depend on its performance. The performance of schools should be monitored by an appropriate agency, and if a schools performance lacks behind an analysis why this happens should be made. If the result is that it happened due to incopetence of the personell, incompetent personell should be fired and replaced with better ones. But cutting the schools budget is counterproductive. In most cases changes and reforms do have initial costs. So even if the schools administration is aware what the problem is with their schools if at roughly the same time the budget is cut they will have it doubly hard to do anything against it. If the administration does not know what the reason for their schools problem is, any form of punishment does not really help either.

If I may expand a bit on the Capt.'s first post:
private school teachers, by and large, are indeed paid substantially less than public school ones. Of course you make up for this by a substantially easier job - in that you won't have the terrible distractions that go with teaching in a public school; private schools have the ultimate behavior-modification tool, that being threat of expulsion for the student. Any parent spending buckets-o-money on their kid' education is going to work very hard to keep that kid in the school. Public schools in my area now have essentially no meaningful threat to the kids; it's all carrot and no stick. You couldn't pay me enough to try to teach in a public school again - the 2 or 3 kids trying to wreck the class are immune to anything the teacher can do, and therefore the other 35-40 kids get shafted.
I think there's little argument that much of the money in the public school systems doesn't get to the students, but rather goes to administrative costs. In Baltimore, it definitely doesn't go to building maintenance or classroom equipment.
I would argue a little about the 'teaching-to-the-test' point; of course teachers use tests and quizzes to try and measure improvement. However, at least in this area, "teaching to the test" seems to mean "making sure the kids know specifically the answers to the test so that we keep our jobs", rather than "teaching the subject and using the test as an indication of information retention and understanding". There is a real difference.
I think national standards are theoretically a good idea; however, they're just as subject to gaming as any other national rules. I say keep them to a minimum; I bet local governments will be more likely to adhere better to locally-derived standards. All you have to do then is hope that your state has reasonable standards.

The major part of the bureaucracy is to facilitate accountability to various levels of government. Now, if it were just about funding, maybe not so much of an issue, but there is also the need to be accountable for test scores, and if they're supposed to be confidential test scores, then you know there's going to have to be extra signatures at each link in the chain.

From discussions with my old secondary school teachers, they state that even in our system (where the bureaucracy is reasonable), they have next to no free time - it's tied up in marking, then making sure those marks are placed in a format that others can read, so they can show how their students are doing. It's also tied up in things like lesson plans, meetings, etc.

In theory, it can be possible to have a bureaucracy that doesn't actually do anything for anyone - the bureaucracy itself just makes work for itself.



Teacher's wages and teaching supplies are not the only things that schools spend on. Maintenance, in particular, sucks up an enormous amount of money, especially in older schools. If there's a computer network in place, there needs to be money allocated to software licenses (and the inevitable hardware upgrades and hardware failures!). There's groundskeeping, there's often amounts allocated to advertising, even in public schools (more students, after all, mean more funding).

It takes a lot to keep a school abreast. Some of these can be reduced, but most are important parts of the school's system. You shouldn't skimp on maintenance, it's important to keep your grounds in reasonable shape, etc.



Please let's not start on parenting exams (or at least, start a new thread for it!)

At any rate, I agree with you, the thought that parents are paying to send their kids to schools and not caring what comes out of it boggles me, but then I'm not American, and I don't know the system there. I have seen in my neck of the woods parents who honestly believe that the teaching of their children has nothing to do with them - that's what they pay the school for. I think that's an abhorrent attitude, but I have seen it, and that is an attitude that tends to breed a lack of care about a child's learning...

PS, come to Alberta. The teachers are underfunded HORRIBLY, yet we still have the second best eductaion in the world, only beaten by finland.

I see a problem, you don't have to have a teaching degree in the US to start teaching at a kindergarten level, the level where habits and most problems and good things start, and teachers are not having to go to university. SO really, thats causing a lot of problems. This means that under educated teachers may be teaching the youth, I know not all teachers don't have them but hell I could do it, and I'm 15.

Maintenence is a horrible thing to pay, my school division pays millions to keep up 30 some schools, which is general maintence like janators, light bulbs, leaky faucets, toilets, broken windows and more. But thats needed, you can't have water leaking and wasting more money, you can't have over flowing toilets, the floors have to be clean for image.

The time a teacher spends marking insane, not all tests are scantron or like math where its right or its wrong. English is incredibly abstract and that is a pain to mark and correct, my mother stays till 9:00 PM at her school preparing for school.

You know, its scary to hear the number of people dropping out is increasing, I hate that people don't try, but people aren't intrested into it. Not everyone will work on because it will help them in later life, I think that schools need to find a way to get kids to come, even if it gets expensive.

give them candy on random days (not in a normal pattern, a good pysch thing to do because then they think, well if I don't go I may not get a candy for my work, instead of thinking, well I can get a candy tomorrow, see what I mean?) or actually give them money for things they do right, for example, you got that assignment right, you get 25 cents, and 25 cents times the number of days a kid is at school can make a good profit. Yes expensive but there is no real way to do it, teachers need to excite and get their kids to be intrested, or reach an understanding of you put out in school, adn i'll put out in money. I don't see many other choices.

Now of course thats not what is happening in alberta, I think the reason we are doing so well is because the teachers are committed heavily, even underpaid they still love their job.

The premier of Alberta didn't even finish high school, and neither did his Education Minister, if I recall correctly. Alberta's got a pretty messed up education system compared to Canada. My dad taught at University of Calgary for 8 or 9 years and at some point he had to take a significant pay cut, so after 9 years he was earning only a tiny bit more than what he started with. Stuff is pretty bad in the US, though, especially in the bigger cities, I don't know how it would compare to Alberta. I went to a fairly nice public school in Calgary, but I don't really know that much about what the rest of the system was like.
In any case, I hate it when [most] Albertans sneer about the US because the US is basically like one big Alberta. Going off on a tangent here, but one time he broke his ankle and had to wait around a couple of days with a broken ankle before he could get surgery, which he needed rather badly because his ankle bones were discombobulated. The health care system works in the rest of Canada, why not in Alberta? Probably because it's so underfunded, when I lived there, there were always some public workers about to go on strike. My dad used to complain about the "Tories" all the time. I love listening to those old oi! bands like the Oppressed and Last Resort and stuff, when they complain about the Tories because I can somewhat relate to that sort of thing.
As for schools, what they need is more money, especially in the inner cities. In Indianapolis most of the inner city schools don't even have air conditioning, this with a school year that starts in the middle of August! My mom works in a library in a lower middle class to fairly destitute neighborhood and everyday that's not a school day, the library's full of kids whose parents don't really give a poop about them and they just want somewhere to hang out. If schools actually had the resources to do something innovative and engaging for these kids, I think it would make a really big difference. Of course, nobody in Washington or in most state houses, for that matter, wants to improve the educational system substantially. What would really improve the schools would to just give them enough money to get the job done, maybe siphon away a couple billions from coporate welfare, or Star Wars, or the military, or the CIA, or some garbage like that. But if you endorse that, then you're a socialist and you'll never get elected because the voting population will be terrified of you. Supporting education rather than corporate tax breaks and bunker-busting nukes is some sort of fringe ideology, how irrational is that?

One: The education in Alberta is actually 2nd in the world. Not post secondary, but k to 12. The system is good except for the payments to the teachers.

Two: the underfunding is because the Tories main goal for the last while was to get rid odf our debt, which isn't a bad thing, but they got their priorities wrong, the debt shouldn't go ahead of the people.

The health care needs revamping, the fact that it takes so long is stupid, but thats because you can get betetr money in the US, all OUR doctors love to move to the US so they can get paid more, so Klein needs to stop being an asshole and fund things. Hopefully now that the debt is gone, he will do something with teh revenues, (doubt it, but I hope)

Three: What the hell do you mean that Alberta is one big US? I mean the US has many things and meanings attached to it, explain.

Most people in alberta that do complain about the US though are doning it because there are major differences between the US and Alberta. One, Alberta is debt free, Two, we have good education, Three we don't support war as much as some of america did.

And for that matter, how long did you live in Alberta? and at what ages?

Uhh...just to clarify, my original intent for this thread was to say that there is too MUCH testing, because of the No Child Left Behind Act.

It serves to define education in terms of the authority: "We say you have to learn this, so you have to learn this", instead of making a child interested in learning and letting them learn more of what they find interesting to them.

Students have to be taught the test, so they only learn certain specific areas of beaurocratically determined knowledge, instead of learning what they consider fun and relevant. Also, they basically have a *quota* to hold children back. Advancement isn't based on knowing a lot -- it's based on what percentile you are in with regard to ability to memorize the required information. If everybody deserved to advance, or if everybody deserved to be held back -- the same amount of children would still be held back.

And really? Essay question formats test knowledge a lot more than multiple choice. Multiple choice makes you cram specific facts which you will then forget -- essay questions make you actually understand the subject.


Also, there's a fundamental truth about conditioning. If you reward somebody for doing good, they associate the actions with good rewards. If you just punish somebody for doing bad -- they will only not do bad when the threat of punishment goes away. Children will care more about learning if they are shown on an individual level what learning should mean to them, and allowed to have some control over what they do and what they learn. If they are told "This is important to learn -- learn it"...they won't care.

Testing is a fundamentally self defeating approach to learning. And No Child Left Behind makes education solely about testing.

Actually, Bob, I have to disagree with you on several points.

1. The national test is designed to be random multiple choice questions covering a wide variety of subjects, and subject matter. In order to fair well on the test, your school would have had to do a fair job on teahcing on several different areas of subject matter special to each field studied (math, science, social science....etc). It is impossible to teach to the test since the questions for the test are random per year from a test bank, covering several different subject. For example: One year, the 9th grade test could cover phsical science, algebra, governmental function. The following year physical science focusing on magnetics, geography, etc. In order to "teach to the tests", you would need to know what subjects are on each test each year. This information is not published before hand. Thus, to say "they teach to the test" is incorrect. This is a statement, agian, by the NEA (even though the helped construct the testing method which the stated was sufficient for assuring adequate learning).

2. Essay questions are considered fairly poor methods for testing knowledge and specific understanding. It is one of the many reasons they are not used on professional board registry tests. They are subjective, and are very difficult to grade on a specific basis. They may force the student to write in full sentences, but they are VERY poor at identifying depth of knowledge.

Again, just my thoughts.

Multiple choice questions test the memorization of facts. Essay questions test the student's ability to reason and analyze. Well structured essay questions can be a lot more difficult to answer than multiple choice tests - ones where you can't get away with just waffling or blabbing everything you remember about a subject in no particular order. Try doing the A-level analysis of historical sources paper, and you'll see. To do well on that paper, you need to have both a good understanding of the events, and an ability to analyze on the spot. I did those exams in highschool, and maybe I'm crazy, but I could actually feel my brain slicing through the all the different layers of interlocking issues and going "Ahah! I've got it!"

No exam I took in college ever felt that difficult, or cleverly devised. And it doubt it was because I'd gotten smarter. The hardest ones were only hard because they asked about really random obscure stuff. The only times I ever got those "Ahah!" moments was when writing 20-30 page papers about things like American constitutional law and Chinese political corruption. And I wasn't on a strict time limit with those, so it was a lot less intense.