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1) The project isn’t funded…The requirements for schools are unreasonable and will lead to even good schools failing and potentially being shut down because it demands sustained growth in test scores. It is punititive, rather than fixing schools it's solution is to punish bad schools, which of course will only make them worse, leading to them being shut down. It is designed to kill public education.
2) Another is that it forces a standard on the schools but doesn't provide funding to enact the means to reach the test goals.
3 )Culturally biased testing used as a means to justify the destruction of public education.
Rather than paying teachers a living wage NCLB puts the onus on the teachers to prove that their students can pass these tests engineered to be biased against the schools that need the most assistance. It's a self fulfilling prophecy.
This is propogandically used to justify voucher programs that siphon off public funds from public schools to right wing fundamentalist "Christian" schools and other elitists private education schools.
4) If schools can't pull out of probation after so many years, the federal government will take them over. The end result will be privatization of schools, which will surely put a pretty profit into those that own stock in the *school* companies.
5) Schools must always show improvement. So if your school gets an "A," where do you go from there? In a public school system, there will always be students who do not meet success rates. This is not accounted for.
6) It's just plain stupid. My school district will never be considered as "making adequate yearly progress" even though it's one of the better districts in the state.
Why? Because we have a separate school for middle/high school students who are discipline problems. The students are sent to this school for a 9-week grading period, or more if necessary, and get more intensive instruction and stricter discipline. It's been a wonderful addition to our schools -- these students are given the opportunity to improve at their own pace, and the regular schools have fewer discipline problems so classes are not disrupted.
What does this have to do with NCLB? Well, because this school is a temporary way station for students, no one graduates from it. Therefore, under NCLB rules, it has a 0% graduation rate (even though its students graduate from their home high schools). That 0% affects every school in the district and makes it impossible for any high school to get a passing grade.
7) Teaching to the test, Manipulating results, and unfunded mandates First it creates an environment where they are forced to teach to the test or lose their funding.
Second it is a known factor that when money is a factor people will bend things to get it. We have seen how the test results get fudged in various charter schools and programs in Texas. Kids mysteriously vanish from the school rolls without dropping out. Kids are pressured to opt out. All to keep the money flowing. Its a bad bad idea.
And third is the fact that the no child left behind is really a means to dismantle the public education system. Its the Bush Inc formula. Dress up as the champion of something. Strut around proposing programs. Get them put in place. And then do not fund them. This not only destroys the program but because the system you drop this one is struggling to make it work they de-fund all the other programs to keep it alive. Like George's shot at NASA. You simply give them a white elephant they cannot take care of and then make sure they do not have the resources to keep it up. Its a win-win for the right. They dismantle the government and make it look like passing new programs is useless.
8) Military recruiters will have unrestricted and uncontested access to schools participating in the No Child Left Behind Act, which means all the well off kids attending private schools don't have to put up with fliers or an accelerated draft notice.
9) I'm an educator in training and have learned a bit about why NCLB is lunacy. The nuts and bolts of NCLB is that schools must have X percent of their student body pass all the standardized tests administered by the state every year. The percent increases every year up through 2011, when the act officially ends.
The problems:
- The percentage goes up gradually until about 2008-2009, when schools have to have close to 97% of their students receiving passing scores on standardized tests. By 2011, schools must have 100% of their students passing the tests. That's right, 100%. If the schools don't have 100% passing, they're subject to disciplinary action by the state and federal government, up to and including firing teachers and administrators. I don't know about the rest of you, but I consider the expectation all students will pass standardized tests to be about as reasonable as expecting a cow to jump over the moon.
- As if 100% passing wasn't bad enough, the act forces schools to include all their students to be included in standardized test scores. That means all the students with learning disabilities, emotional disabilities, physical impairments and so on must take the tests and their scores must count toward the school's overall score. Even worse, the NCLB act recognizes eight different "minority" subgroups of which a student can be a part, ranging from ethnic minorities to those with the disabilities mentioned above. Any of these groups are considered to exist in a school if the school has ten or more members of that group. Any one student can be a member of more than one group, so, theoretically, a black student with dyslexia would qualify as a member of two groups. Here's the kicker: if any one minority group in a school doesn't pass the exams, then the whole school is considered to be failing, even if the overall percentage of students passing is higher than that required by NCLB. One now sees how the practice of having students exist in multiple groups is utterly devastating towards a school's chances of passing. If the black, dyslexic child mentioned above does poorly, then that child's scores help submarine the average in two minority groups. The only explanation for such a backwards way of doing things is because the Bush administration wants to submarine public schools. Not only will public schools (particularly schools in poor areas) not meet the overall standards, any school with a lot of "problem" kids will never pass because their minority groups will tend to fail.
- Perhaps the most damning critique of NCLB, however, has nothing to do with its simplistic, asinine mechanics. Many state school standards around the country were actually getting away from using only standardized tests as a judge of a student's performance. Schools were considering grades, portfolios and more evaluative measures of a student's performance to determine whether the student was learning. The ONLY component of NCLB, on the other hand, is performance on standardized test scores. Making test scores the sole criterion of judgments forces teachers to "dumb down" the curriculum in a way that's a million times worse than any conservative ever complained about occurring in a public school. Students aren't dumb: if you emphasize processing skills only and don't encourage them to think critically, you'll get a bunch of robots who only care about the "right answers" to things. Creativity and critical thinking are stifled. We preach about needing wizened, tech-savvy kids to fulfill tomorrow's jobs, but all we do is pander to a culture who thinks constant testing equals education. This is the true disaster of NCLB.
10) To destroy the union. The teacher’s union is a very strong and mostly democrats (the teacher’s union, always lends its support to the democratic candidate in presidential elections) Democrats tend to spend more on education and school funding then do the republicans.
The NCLB was thought up in conservative ‘think tanks’ it meets all the republicans fascist objectives…
It destroys a democratic union, it will force school vouchers, it will give our federal tax dollars to private and Christian schools, it will keep the poor of our population, dumb, under-educated slaves for the corporate machine, it gives the military access to the young, for propaganda intent on students, it makes it appear, that the republican fascist, care and are trying to do something for ‘education’ in this country.
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