My headline is a more accurate representation of the information about President Obama’s plans to overhaul No Child Left Behind, as presented in the New York Times.

Check this crap out:

 “…In recent meetings with representatives of education groups, Department of Education officials have said they also want to eliminate the school ratings system built on making “adequate yearly progress” on student test scores.

“They were very clear with us that they would change the metric, dropping adequate yearly progress and basing a new system on another picture of performance based on judging schools in a more nuanced way,” said Bruce Hunter, director of public policy for the American Association of School Administrators, who attended one of the meetings.

The current system issues the equivalent of a pass-fail report card for every school each year, an evaluation that administration officials say fails to differentiate among chaotic schools in chronic failure, schools that are helping low-scoring students improve and high-performing suburban schools that nonetheless appear to be neglecting some low-scoring students.

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.”

So…

They want to create a whole bunch of new categories? 

For what purpose?

So they can get around a “pass”/”fail” rating system?

And they want to do this how?

By taking into account a bunch of factors completely unassociated with whether or not not the school is actually getting the job done.

This is nothing but them wanting a bunch of acceptable excuses!

“Oh, well… Our school is in a state of chronic failure, you must simply take that into account!”

Ok.  You’ve been sniffing the entire pack’s arse for years.  And your constant inability to do your job is now supposed to somehow be a reason for us to overlook your piss poor performance?

That’s freakin’ government union logic if I’ve ever seen it.  That wouldn’t fly anywhere else in the world. 

“Oh my gosh!  We’re actually being held accountable!  Holy crap, we’ve got to get off our rear-ends and do something!!!  Oh, the humanity!  What a world, what a world, what a world!”

Now, look, I’m not a fan of Every Child Left Behind.  I know that I have  never thought that my ability, competence,  and intelligence on a subject could be adequately measured by any written test, much less a standardized written test.  Furthermore, I have serious disagreements with the program, and the power it gives the Federal government over the more local governing structures.  In my opinion, the Obama administration should go with the serious funding issues.  Like, what gives the federal government the freedom to create a bunch of standards for high school graduates, force the states to meet them, but not contribute financially in any significant way?

If the community is the one footing the bill, and the community is happy that their schools suck and see no reason to invest the money required to fix the problem, what business is it of the federal government?  Parents that want their kids in better schools can send them to private school, move, heck, we could even make “school choice” a national thing, like the system we’ve got here in Arkansas.

That would have been a much more tolerable goal than setting up categories that allow the horrible teachers in crappy schools to re-affix themselves to the government teat.  To be perfectly honest, in my opinion it is this kind of action that gives our few good teachers such a bad rap.  I’d say that it helps drive the people who would be great teachers off into other fields.

Many of our schools, especially some of the inner city mini-prisons they force the urban poor into, are places where only the people who love a challenge should be allowed to teach.  We need a cadre of teachers that enjoy seeing the gleam of understanding in a student’s eye, that get a thrill when they realize that their pupil is excited about the topic of study and soaking things up like a sponge.

Not a group of people who want to throw out the whole idea of “winning” and “losing”, or “success” and “failure”.  That sort of atmosphere is intolerable to individuals who are capable of setting goals and achieving them.

All knowledge is based on the scientific method, and as Adam Savage of the Mythbusters is fond of saying: “Failure is always an option.”  It doesn’t mean that your experiment wasn’t a success, just that the results you wanted/expected failed to materialize.  As long as you learned something, the experiment succeeded.  But you must learn something, and that is NOT accomplished by ignoring the aspects of the experiment’s result with which you disagree.

I wish that more of the people who were responsible for teaching that to our children understood it themselves.  Even with the flaws inherent in a standardized test, the results of the testing show that our schools have a problem.  We need to deal with it, not make up a bunch of excuses so schools can lay their hands on more federal money.

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