http://www.ed.gov/nclb/landing.jhtml
I quickly skimmed through their slideshow, and here are some interesting things I picked out.
"The goal is 100 percent proficiency for all students in 12 years."
"When we raise academic standards, children raise their academic sights."
"Ensuring that every child reads by the 3rd grade."
"Standards provide guideposts for academic achievement, clearly telling teachers, students, and parents where they are going."
"The Challenge: To establish clear expectations of what students should know and be able to do for schools, teachers, and students.
The Solution: Require each state to establish its own standards in the core content areas of reading, math, and science. "
This is utterly impossible due to many factors. The presentation stated that things will be much more flexible to achieve this goal. No matter how flexible the program is, its not going to change the children they're trying to teach. What they are trying to do is make a proficiency level that everyone must meet. They're trying to make unintelligent children learn faster and intelligent ones learn slower. This isn't going to accomplish anything. Slower children who are being pushed to learn something their minds cannot will become frustrated and give up, while advanced ones being held back will never learn to their full potenial because of some ridiculous line someone set. Also, you CAN NOT force a child to learn if they don't want to. Sure, make them sit in school and hope that they will get over it and study. You can put a book in front of them and demand that if they don't do well on this test they'll be held back from everything. You know what that kid is going to do? The minute they turn 16 drop out. Now, if they decide to "not leave them behind", the only thing this will do is spend more resources on a lost cause. Personally, I don't think shipping them off to a different school is a bad idea. If the school itself is presenting the problem to the student then maybe the change will be good. If someone doesn't want to learn something they can leave.
Standardizing education will only lead to problems. If it is done correctly it can fix many of the ones we have already, but if done the Bush way everything will be fucked up even worse.
"Provides separate, measurable objectives for all children and for specific groups (disadvantaged, racial/ethnic, disabled, LEP)"
I am fed up with this racial and ethnic bullshit. People of different minorities fought to be treated equally by the majority, so just because they have darker colored skin or female gender they get easier standards? Its bad enough that they're putting these retarded things on us already, and then the general public gets screwed over once again. Sure, the minority public was screwed in the past. But there is ABSOLUTELY no reason for this now. If someone truly wants to succeed they can, whether they have blonde hair and blue eyes or not. Maybe some of these whiney assholes will get over their physical differences and stop pretending they have mental ones. Sometimes it can be a tough barrier, because a social issue infuences how you think. But if these races would stop influencing their children that they ARE so wonderfully different and special then maybe they wouldn't think like that.
"Why 100 percent? Anything less means children will be left behind."
Then maybe some need to be. Its the way nature works. Everything is one big competition, and the process is called survival of the fittest. Its nothing new, either. I'm not saying we should leave children behind, but maybe we should accept that we all can't be good at math or a fast runner. Alot of time has been wasted on hopeless plans.
And hey, maybe one day people will stop being a bunch of elitist jackasses.
