The Promise of Change? Not What We Were Expecting: No Child Left Behind to Stay

From the New York Times:

"Education Standards Likely to See Toughening

WASHINGTON — President Obama and his team have alternated praise for the goals of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law with criticism of its weaknesses, all the while keeping their own plans for the law a bit of a mystery.

But clues are now emerging, and they suggest that the Obama administration will use a Congressional rewriting of the federal law later this year to toughen requirements on topics like teacher quality and academic standards and to intensify its focus on helping failing schools. The law’s testing requirements may evolve but will certainly not disappear. And the federal role in education policy, once a state and local matter, is likely to grow.
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The clues emerge from the fine print of the economic stimulus law that Mr. Obama signed in February, which channels billions of dollars to public education. The key education provisions in the stimulus take the form of four “assurances” that governors must sign to receive billions in emergency education aid.
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The stimulus requires governors to raise standards to a new benchmark: the point at which high school graduates can succeed — without remedial classes — in college, the workplace or the military. Mr. Duncan has gone further, saying he wants to be a catalyst for the development of national academic standards.
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The teachers unions, which in 2007 fought a bare-knuckle lobbying battle that scuttled Congress’s last effort to rewrite the No Child Left Behind law, are voicing muted concern over a couple of provisions in the stimulus.
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In one of the stimulus assurances, for instance, governors must pledge that their states are building sophisticated data systems. Among other functions, such systems would link teachers to students and test scores and thus, in theory, enable the authorities to distinguish between effective and ineffective teachers. In a March 10 speech, President Obama endorsed using such data systems “to tell us which students had which teachers so we can assess what’s working and what’s not.”
but is barred from speaking on the record about committee business..."

To read full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/education/15educ.html?ref=global-home


It seems like the only distinct difference between Obama's plan and Bush's is that Obama has attached money to his. There is actual money going to schools, giving them the potential to improve. The only problem is that the economic crisis has hurt states so much that schools will probably need large amounts, if not all of the money they are receiving from the stimulus to keep their teachers and staff, not necessarily to spend extra money on new programs.

The article from the New York Times states that Obama was endorsing new data storing systems which would allow test scores to be linked to teachers so that schools could see if teachers were performing up to standard.

There is a reason that many teachers hate No Child Left Behind: you cannot judge a teacher or students by test scores. In schools where students are underperforming, linking a teacher to a group of test scores will not help. The students are going to perform worse than students elsewhere regardless of the quality of the teacher. If Obama wants to raise the academic standards on tests, then these students now will just seem to be doing even worse. The system needs to change, not the details of the tests.

This plan completely contradicts what the agenda states at whitehouse.gov. It states, in relation to K-12 education, "Obama and Biden will reform NCLB, which starts by funding the law. Obama and Biden believe teachers should not be forced to spend the academic year preparing students to fill in bubbles on standardized tests. They will improve the assessments used to track student progress to measure readiness for college and the workplace and improve student learning in a timely, individualized manner."

In this statement, the Obama administration is saying that they are moving away from standardized tests and towards more individualized, effective assessments. The moves that they are currently making in regard to No Child Left Behind show that this is a lie.