Local perspectives on the No Child Left Behind Act : field hearing before the Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education, Committee on Education and Labor, U.S. House of Representatives, One Hundred Tenth Congress, first session, hearing held in Flint, MI, April 12, 2007.
Signed into law in 2002, the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) promised to revolutionize American public education. Originally supported by a bipartisan coalition, it purports to improve public schools by enforcing a system of standards and accountability through high-stakes testing. Many people supported it originally, despite doubts, because of its promise especially to improve the way schools serve poor children. By making federal funding contingent on accepting a system of tests and sanctions, it is radically affecting the life of schools around the country. But, argue the authors of this citizen's guide to the most important political issue in education, far from improving public schools and increasing the ability of the system to serve poor and minority children, the law is doing exactly the opposite. Here some of our most prominent, respected voices in education-including school innovator Deborah Meier, education activist Alfie Kohn, and founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools Theodore R. Sizer-come together to show us how, point by point, NCLB undermines the things it claims to improve: * How NCLB punishes rather than helps poor and minority kids and their schools * How NCLB helps further an agenda of privatization and an attack on public schools * How the focus on testing and test preparation dumbs down classrooms * And they put forward a richly articulated vision of alternatives. Educators and parents around the country are feeling the harshly counterproductive effects of NCLB. This book is an essential guide to understanding what's wrong and where we should go from here.
Examining local perspectives on the No Child Left Behind Act: field hearing before the Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education, Committee on Education and Labor, U.S. House of Representatives, One Hundred Tenth Congress, first session, hearing held in King of Prussia, PA, May 14, 2007.
From one of the foremost authorities on education in the United States, Slaying Goliath is an impassioned, inspiring look at the ways in which parents, teachers, and activists are successfully fighting back to defeat the forces that are trying to privatize America’s public schools. Diane Ravitch writes of a true grassroots movement sweeping the country, from cities and towns across America, a movement dedicated to protecting public schools from those who are funding privatization and who believe that America’s schools should be run like businesses and that children should be treated like customers or products. Slaying Goliath is about the power of democracy, about the dangers of plutocracy, and about the potential of ordinary people—armed like David with only a slingshot of ideas, energy, and dedication—to prevail against those who are trying to divert funding away from our historic system of democratically governed, nonsectarian public schools. Among the lessons learned from the global pandemic of 2020 is the importance of our public schools and their teachers and the fact that distance learning can never replace human interaction, the pesonal connection between teachers and students.
Since the early 1990s, the federal role in education—exemplified by the controversial No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)—has expanded dramatically. Yet states and localities have retained a central role in education policy, leading to a growing struggle for control over the direction of the nation's schools. In An Education in Politics, Jesse H. Rhodes explains the uneven development of federal involvement in education. While supporters of expanded federal involvement enjoyed some success in bringing new ideas to the federal policy agenda, Rhodes argues, they also encountered stiff resistance from proponents of local control. Built atop existing decentralized policies, new federal reforms raised difficult questions about which level of government bore ultimate responsibility for improving schools. Rhodes's argument focuses on the role played by civil rights activists, business leaders, and education experts in promoting the reforms that would be enacted with federal policies such as NCLB. It also underscores the constraints on federal involvement imposed by existing education policies, hostile interest groups, and, above all, the nation’s federal system. Indeed, the federal system, which left specific policy formation and implementation to the states and localities, repeatedly frustrated efforts to effect changes: national reforms lost their force as policies passed through iterations at the state, county, and municipal levels. Ironically, state and local resistance only encouraged civil rights activists, business leaders, and their political allies to advocate even more stringent reforms that imposed heavier burdens on state and local governments. Through it all, the nation’s education system made only incremental steps toward the goal of providing a quality education for every child.
