WyBlog

Obama's education strategy: No Union Left Behind

Via Fausta Wertz we learn that Barry has big plans to eviscerate the standards set in the No Child Left Behind Act.

The Obama administration is proposing a sweeping overhaul of President Bush's signature education law, No Child Left Behind, and will call for broad changes in how schools are judged to be succeeding or failing, as well as for the elimination of the law's 2014 deadline for bringing every American child to academic proficiency.

No more deadline means that the teachers unions can stop worrying about accountability. Barry will give them oodles of more federal dollars to ease the pain of having been almost forced to produce concrete results.

Instead, under the administration's proposals, a new accountability system would divide schools into more categories, offering recognition to those that are succeeding and providing large new amounts of money to help improve or close failing schools.

Because one thing that's been proven in New Jersey is that you can't throw enough money at failing schools! Billions and billions and billions of dollars have been lavished on urban schools across our state and generation after generation of kids still can't read or write.

The cost per pupil now exceeds $30,000 per year in Camden, NJ. And year after year their schools fail NCLB. Somehow I don't think providing them large new amounts of money will do one iota of good.

Our schools don't need "new money"; they need new ideas. They need competition from private and parochial schools. And yes, it is past time for us to acknowledge the power of "the V word" - vouchers. Yeah, I know, vouchers will drain the best and brightest away from the public schools, and take badly needed resources with them too.

So what? Shouldn't "the best and brightest" be given the opportunity to succeed? The egalitarian notion that every kid deserves a public education only results in consigning everyone to wallow in mediocrity. Let's weed out the disruptive kids, the gang-bangers, and the hoodlums. They don't want to learn anyway; why hold up everybody else's progress while trying to cajole them into paying attention?

What if attending math class was subjected to the same kind of rigor we impose on participation in athletics? To play sports you have to try out, and if you make the team, you have to agree to attend all the practices, work at improving your skills, and show up for every game. Design a similar scholastic obligation for school. And then just like in sports, if you don't hold up your end of the bargain, you're out.

This way we let the students who want to learn leap ahead of the kids who are just taking up space. Eventually the waste-oids will either wise up or die off.

Sure that's harsh. But life is harsh, too. And what we're doing now, which is failing to help the kids who could be helped, is a crime against humanity.

Posted at 16:38 by Chris Wysocki   [/obama_watch]   | Trackback | Perm Link |
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