NCLB at face value isn’t bad, and I wouldn’t characterize it as a competition, but it had a few fundamental flaws. The biggest was punishing underperforming schools, which is just… really stupid, like how exactly is that going to make the schools better? The second was teach to the test, since we quantified (poorly) what education is. That enforced rote memory over critical thinking and reasoning skills.
My more personal gripe is statistical, though. Using cutoff scores without actually accounting for covariates (like previous scores) has also gotta be the worst possible way to track success. If a student is reading at a 4th grade level while in 10th grade, a school is punished if they read at an 8th grade level in 11th grade (a four year improvement!). Like, Jesus Christ, I’m so glad Obama admin at least fixed most glaring problems in 2015, cause yikes.
NCLB at face value isn’t bad, and I wouldn’t characterize it as a competition, but it had a few fundamental flaws. The biggest was punishing underperforming schools, which is just… really stupid, like how exactly is that going to make the schools better? The second was teach to the test, since we quantified (poorly) what education is. That enforced rote memory over critical thinking and reasoning skills.
My more personal gripe is statistical, though. Using cutoff scores without actually accounting for covariates (like previous scores) has also gotta be the worst possible way to track success. If a student is reading at a 4th grade level while in 10th grade, a school is punished if they read at an 8th grade level in 11th grade (a four year improvement!). Like, Jesus Christ, I’m so glad Obama admin at least fixed most glaring problems in 2015, cause yikes.