No Child Left Behind?
Professional development?! Teacher preparation?! ‘No child left behind’ really means 'all children left behind.'
Before we returned to homeschooling, at the end of every term, my children got a day or two off from school for the teachers’ “professional development.” I used to think that this meant the teachers were attending training on how to be better educators, or something similar. Not so! Recently someone in the school PTA told me that what happens is this: All the teachers get together by grade level to adjust the curriculum down for the next term.
For example, all the 4th-grade teachers get together and look at their students’ scores. They find the lowest-achieving children in their grade, then readjust the curriculum back to that child for the coming term. No Child Left Behind has become ALL children left behind, because schools are afraid of getting a bad rating and fines from the Federal Department of Education.
Personally, this horrifies me. Why not get special tutors for those that are behind, and let the rest work ahead at their own pace? And many of those who are behind wouldn’t be behind if we changed what/how we’re teaching the teachers to teach in the first place! It’s a self-propagating, downward spiral.
Although a conservative myself, I realize that not all conservatives have good family values, and vice versa. I was disappointed when President Bush enacted “No Child Left Behind.” The only good part of it was if parents could take vouchers to the charter schools of their choice, but that was never achieved for most people. Here’s what Hartman Rector, Jr., said in the interview referenced previously:
“They say education has failed. It has not failed, it is doing exactly what Dewey set out to do. He had two major goals: #1 Get God out of the schools; #2 Get mothers out of the schools; and they’ve done it. (John Dewey was the founder of modern public education and a signer of the Humanist Manifesto. He designed an educational system where God and family influences would be excluded and where students would be separated into academic or tradesman tracks.)
“And that’s where we are today. Today about 3% of the students get PhD’s. Dewey would have wanted a few to get doctorate degrees, and they would do the thinking for the rest of the people. Today 17% of our students are dropping out. Dewey would have felt they were needed to do the more necessary menial tasks like pick up the garbage and dig the ditches. Then he would have wanted the rest of them (80%) to learn how to follow orders, to follow rules. Dewey set out to do what we are achieving today.
“Dewey set out to implement what Plato taught – the Great Society, completely planned. Nobody has any way to get out of the mold they put them in. [Not so great, eh?] That’s what this ‘Goals 2000’ education is designed to do. The Governor of Texas (George Bush) has got it implemented in Texas already, and he’ll try to do it in every state in the Union if he gets elected. We haven’t got anybody to vote for.”
Well, Bush was elected and he did implement it nationwide, under “No Child Left Behind”. The crippling continues…
Just a note: all conservatives are not Republicans and vice versa. According to Jonathan Krohn in, Define Conservatism, the characterization of a conservative falls under these four core values:
1. Respect for the Constitution
2. Respect for Life
3. Less Government
4. Personal Responsibility
NCLB actually undermines these values by lowering the educational standards for all children, by government mandate. Homeland Security also undermines them, and undermines our Bill of Rights, big time.
Even if you don’t agree with my conservative values, you need to understand that what I’m saying about the need for parental involvement in early reading the right way is true, regardless. It’s for everyone and all belief systems or political views, secular, religious, liberal, or conservative. Our children’s futures deserve our best efforts!
Consider this: more than 22,260 secondary students in Texas were listed as withdrawing to home-school in 2008. Similar statistics are happening all over the United States. Parents are waking up! Every child has a right to be well bred, well fed, and well led. The ideal isn’t always possible, but we need to do our best for our kids.
What about foster children who don’t have an advocate? As mentioned in Vol. 4 of It's Not Rocket Surgery!, The Godfrey Method can do a lot to help heal the learning struggles caused by the emotional traumas and educational methods faced by these children.
Oprah Winfrey has magnified our public education failures on several of her television shows and website. She highlighted the movie, Waiting for Superman, by Davis Guggenheim, which opens Sep. 24, 2011. She called it, “The movie that could revolutionize America’s schools.” We shall see…
On Sep 20, 2010, Oprah reported shocking educational statistics:
- Since 1971, educational spending in the U.S. has grown from $4,300 to more than $9,000 per student. But reading and math scores have flat-lined. [After a constant decline.]
- Among 30 developed countries, the U.S. is ranked 25th in math and 21st in science.
- High school dropouts are 8 times more likely to go to prison.
- Approximately 7,000 kids drop out of school every day.
- It is estimated that by the year 2020, there will be 123-million high-paying, high-skill jobs in the U.S., but only 50-million Americans to fill these positions.
Will your child be ready for the technology jobs of the future? Not if you leave it up to the Departments of Education in our universities and government. Parents are the key!
On Sep 15, 2010, Oprah also aired a show that focused on education activist Michelle Rhee, who “won’t back down”. Ms. Rhee is the chancellor of Washington, D.C.’s school district. She has been firing “bad teachers” right and left in an effort to improve the District’s public education. However, her concentration on teachers is a bit mis-guided because we can’t improve education until we change what we teach the teachers to teach! State legislatures tie their hands with faulty curricula from the lobbying of erroneous university professors and their political cohorts. Period.
Yes, there are children with legitimate learning disabilities, but the vast majority of children with LD-diagnoses don’t really have them or would have them to a much milder degree; they’ve been caused by teaching theories that don’t work. Don’t blame the teachers because they often don’t know what they don’t know, having been dragged down the wrong path by flawed mentors in universities. This whole process has been snow-balling since 1967 until now. And it continues.
For No Child Left Behind to be real, more and more parents need to homeschool or get involved in a major way in their children's education.
http://thegodfreymethod.com
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