Retiring 18 years ago as a former science teacher and school librarian for 22 years, I escaped the “No Child Left Behind” education wrecker. I have been around many, many, teachers every day of my wonderful career. And I am still in awe of all the talented, concerned professionals I spent 23 years with. To name a few – Jack Ensworth who embraced every child, instilling an awe and wonderment for learning and exploration of all life, human and otherwise. Clayton Smith, who in his kindly and gentleman’s way inspired his students with reading, learning and calligraphy, a gift they can use forever. Cherie Crane, who gave the gifts of knowledge, art and elegance to all of her students. Florence Bradley, small but mighty in her teaching skills. And I could go on and on about all of the exceptional teaching staff here.
In today’s schools, the No Child Left Behind Program can eliminate the beauty of learning with a lockstep obedient emphasis on never-ending (like the war) test-taking. A child’s intuitive and sensitive appreciation of discovery and finding out can be totally crushed by testing, testing and more testing. Tests should be merely another tool in education, not the be-all and end-all of schooling! Children learn in their own way and constant testing can destroy all that is inspiring for children to learn and develop. School is not a military assembly line to enforce non-democratic authoritarian objectives such as complete obedience, and uniformity of all students and teachers.
The No Child Left Behind Program, as I see it, has covert goals designed to destroy the public school system, perhaps to direct all public education dollars into a privatized, obedience training, non-questioning military like endeavor to produce masses of obedient robots, who will not question walking off to unjust wars, or walking off a cliff, with nary a thought in their minds to question and wonder – Why? Hitler’s educated, obedient, goose-stepping youngsters marched into an ugly oblivion for themselves and their victims. In Japan, many highly educated students commit suicide if they fail tests.
Proposals for merit programs based on never-ending testing should be junked. And, as I see it, the No Child Left Behind Program should have been flunked out long ago.
Alice Keiser Greth
This article appears in Oct 23-29, 2008.
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So as long as we run the kids through and they feel good about themselves that is success??? Why care if they learn!!
I took a hell of a lot of tests in my day and never found them to be anything but illuminating. To expect some left wing educator, thoroughly brain washed by their own left wing education, to care or even comprehend where a particular child sits in relation to it’s peers is so far fetched it’s comparable to a very tired Labrador Retriever on a bus man’s holiday.
Obamas over educated, brain washed, obedient, goose stepping socialist fascist zombie minions don’t have a clue because they don’t reside in the real world…
Alice resists testing because she resists evaluation and what that evaluation would reveal…Failure… Never question the fascist socialist left zombies…
I tutor at COCC, helping high school “graduates” who are trying to pass college level courses, but do not have the prerequisite knowledge and understanding that high school was supposed to have given them. These aren’t ignorant kids, just completely unprepared. None of the students I tutor should ever have graduated from high school. They should have stayed there until they demonstrated a working knowledge of everything they were taught. Maybe the testing required by No Child Left Behind is the wrong testing, but some comprehensive, standardized testing is mandatory. Maybe Ms. Greth should be looking for the beauty in students well prepared to live and work in society or to go on to college and not in the teachers who failed then in high school.
I also took a lot of test in school. Some were quite useful, and others were just a waste of time. Standardized tests mostly just test rote memory and not thinking skills. I believe the most important skill a child can learn in school (and this includes college) is the ability to think critically. This skill is quite difficult to test. Even before No Child left Behind, America has focused on learning facts. We need to teach our children to decide for themselves what these facts mean. Even if some of our elected “leaders” feel that everything is black and white, most of the real world is gray. I want to live in a world where thinking people can decipher shades of gray and not just call each other names based on one small thing.
There are clearly problems with the school system (well over half of graduates are unprepared for college freshman math and writing, and that may be a generous accounting), but what of the students and their families? Should the school system be held responsible for students whose families gave up literacy one, two, or three generations ago?
We must recognize and admit that we no longer bother to teach facts and impart the information which reasoning skills require to reach a conclusion. As for reasoning skills, I don’t think we’ve ever done a very good job doing that. One need only regard the continuous ad hominum attacks from the bulk of the posters to realize that facts are less important than a well turned epithet or vitriolic name or label–right, CT?
C.T.
What the ?!$#@! are you talking about? “Facist socialist left zombies?!” Take your medicine and simmer down.
Most teachers understand that evaluation is good, but don’t like standardized tests. The same teacher, doing the exact same thing can have subsequent classes that test dramatically differently. Is the teacher a worse teacher the year that she has a “lower performing” class? No. Of course not. That is why evaluations should be performed by an administrator, who can take other factors into consideration.
Also, please medicate yourself on November 4th. I don’t want your head to blow up. Who would rant and spew crazy talk then?
C.T.,
Are you still with us after last night? I don’t want to have to wait for your crazy rantings next week to find out.