…And yet the law’s main problem continues to be unrepresented in the news stories. The problem is that some students are not smart enough to do well on tests. This might be considered too obvious to mention but for some astounding details about No Child. For openers, it proposes to eliminate — not reduce, eliminate — the “achievement gap” between prosperous and impoverished students. The gap is tremendous and in large measure reflects socioeconomic IQ differences. The states with the most students eligible for the federal free/reduced lunch program (a fairly good indicator of poverty status) reliably produce the lowest reading and math scores…
From Forbes, an excellent article by Dan Seligman on the fraudulent nature of Bush’s only major stab at “compassionate conservatism.”
Posted by Jerome Doolittle at February 29, 2004 07:14 PM | TrackBack
Even normally smart people just don't get that NCLB is at its core a simple attempt to attack public education. For example, see Ruy Teixera arguing that the Democrats should not tamper too much with the act because voters support its goals. This argument of course focusses on the title and the noble preamble to the act, language with which even critics of the act agree, rather than looking at what the language of the act after the title and preamble in fact does.
http://www.emergingdemocraticmajorityweblog.com/donkeyrising/archives/000400.shtml
Posted by: sinful on March 1, 2004 09:34 AMMaybe Bush and his cronies want to create a "Lake Wobegon" country, where "all the children are above average." What is really astonishing is to watch Bush recreate his so-called Texas education miracle on a national scale. We've seen that that "miracle" really entailed falsification of records and the undercounting of dropouts in Houston. Bush came into Washington vowing to remake the nation in Texas' image, and, unfortunately, he really meant it.
Posted by: Mike on March 1, 2004 09:45 AM