NEA sues administration for not funding NCLB

So the God-awful "No Child Left Behind" Act (PL107-110) is finally getting its comeuppance. The National Education Association (NEA) has filed suit in Eastern Michigan District Court to make the federal government pay for its program rather than forcing states (and in turn local school districts) to pay for the program. The suit, Pontiac School District v. Spellings, will hopefully get rid of this awful program.

The No Child Left Behind Program (alternatively called by some of my Democratic friends during last year's campaign as No Child Left A Dime) does a few horrid things that I'm still scratching my head over, some time after its passage.

1. It forces teachers to take time out of curriculum studies to make them prep for standardized tests.
2. Standardized tests do not actually test anything other than a student's ability to take a test ... During my high school years, I was forced to take a stupid standardized test that at the time was not required for graduation (but it was by the time my sister graduated). That year, fully half of the people in my graduating class's honors program failed (er, "did not meet goal") on at least one section of the exam. If it had been just me, I could have rationalized that it was my problem, but when so many honors students are failing, there's something fishy going on ... Namely, those of us that had been constantly taught to think "outside the box" were having a great deal of difficulty restraining ourselves to the narrow confines of what the graders were looking for. To put this another way, the multiple-choice exams often had more than one answer depending on how you looked at it, and the open-ended essay questions were being graded on such a low level that those of us who wrote normally (i.e. at the honors level) were graded down for not following the strict structure that they were looking for. Some people were able to change how they thought for the test, but how does that help anyone?
3. NCLB forces states to adopt these measures with no funding from the national government (which is the key issue NEA has). This is causing states to pass on the funding problems to the local school districts. So not only do teachers have to stop teaching to "teach to the test," but money for extracurriculars such as music and art are being cut so that these school systems can afford to implement the mandatory changes.
4. NCLB actually does leave kids behind. If enough students at a school fail these standardized tests, that school's funding goes down. Right--let's punish poor students and poor schools by making them poorer. Instead of spending money to try to fix failing schools, let's withold money from those schools, so the good teachers leave, textbooks become wildly out-of-date, and maybe then the students will do better.

Now, don't get me wrong: there are many, many (many, many, many, many)things wrong in public schools today. The fact that students of mine are allowed to go to college without actually being able to write a grammatically correct sentence, let alone a full-fledged paper, is disturbing enough. But the responsiblity needs to be on the heads of the teachers, not some bureaucrat in DC. Think of this:

1. Student repeatedly does poorly.
2. Teacher does not have time because of overcrowding and the simple time constraints caused by having papers to grade, etc. to give that student the one-on-one time he needs.
3. Teacher passes student (albeit barely) because he does not want to deal with the ire of parents, etc., who seem to think that it is Student's right to pass the class, regardless of the work Student has (not) done.
4. Student believes it is his right to go to college, and finds one that will accept him.
5. Professor likewise passes Student because she is afraid Student might sue (this sounds far-fetched, but professors have been sued before over this ... And I've been threatened, myself, because I have "unrealistic expectations"--like making sure students hand in their work on time and penalizing them when they do not)

So what is the point of education? If you've spent as much time in the education system (like I have), you must wonder. The more I think about it, the more I truly believe that colleges place a greater emphasis on athletics than they do on education. Primary and secondary education likewise is being told that there are certain things that are unimportant (i.e. art, music), but other things are vital (sports, stupid test-how-well-you-take-this-test tests).

I wholeheartedly agree with other NEA positions: better pay for teachers (to attract those that want to teach but also want to make money), smaller class sizes (so students get more one-on-one attention and so teachers aren't so overwhelmed with work that they can't have a personal life, which drives many more people from the classroom), and loads of other issues.

The system in this country his seriously broken, and by no means is NCLB the way to fix it. If American children are to compete internationally in the next fifty years with those overseas, we need a system that will allow students to learn and not submit to sue-happy parents.