The Last Days of Kayak

Game On!

Unlikely Opponents of NCLB ?

Once NCLB supporters, these conservatives are turning on the law. While they still make strong claims about the value of standards-based reform overall in improving student learning, (claims that I think are wildly exaggerated and unwarranted), they all express desires to reconsider the law and dramatically change the fixation on standardized tests.

Get Congress Out of the Classroom. By Diane Ravitch
[excerpt] DESPITE the rosy claims of the Bush administration, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 is fundamentally flawed... The primary strategy — to test all children in those subjects in grades three through eight every year — has unleashed an unhealthy obsession with standardized testing that has reduced the time available for teaching other important subjects. Furthermore, the law completely fractures the traditional limits on federal interference in the operation of local schools....
Can This Law Be Fixed? A Hard Look at the No Child Left Behind Remedies. By Frederick Hess and Chester Finn
[excerpt] Whatever the political value of promising to "leave no child behind," the results thus far threaten to undermine two decades of hard-won gains in educational accountability. NCLB's dogmatic aspirations and fractured design are producing a compliance-driven regimen that recreates the very pathologies it was intended to solve. It is time to relearn the lessons of the Great Society, when ambitious programs designed to promote justice and opportunity were undone by utopian formulations, unworkable implementation structures, and the stubborn unwillingness of supporters to acknowledge the limitations of federal action in the American system.