Friday, September 26, 2014

Every Child Left Behind

Core Values: Love is everything, the more we love the happier we become. Money is an important tools that helps you achieve success

Since the foundation of the current system is broken, putting a band aid on it doesn't help.  We can not "fix" this system.  I want to believe No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was an attempt to fix the broken, but I honestly think it was specifically designed to make our kids even dumber and shove HOW questions down their throats to create an even more pacified and unmotivated workforce.

When I was in post Grad at Oregon we had to take a class on school law.  The Constitution states that all education funding and direction is at the discretion of the state.  The Fed has nothing to do with it.  To summarize, NCLB is  Federal Law stating every child will meet a minimum score or else the school is "marked for improvement".  If marked for improvement the school then gets a small amount of Federal funding, but not until that point.

If you are marked for improvement too many years, guess who steps in, the Fed.  Now the Fed get's to start directing education and what will they do? They will essentialy build robots out of our youth.

Because schools aren't given money to implement NCLB and funding is always short, what are the first programs to get cut?  The ones that NCLB doesn't test, art, music, shop, etc.

It get's worse.  Essentially NCLB says that each state must show progress year after year.  If you are a state like Iowa or Wisconsin that started this system with really high test scores you now have the bar set very high and you still need to exceed it every year.  That sounds awesome except when you fail to exceed all of a sudden you have the most successful schools in the country "Marked for improvement." Whereas if you a a state like Tennessee, where the teaching of Intelligent Design is encouraged, and you have the lowest score starting out, the bar is very low and easy to eek by.  The result being the brightest schools are being punished and suppressed until the worst catch up.

It's not No Child Left Behind, it's pushing down the brightest.  Furthermore, if you are one of these top or even middle states, you are now motivated to barely, just by the least possible margin, raise your bar because you are ultimately penalized for raising it too much to fast.  There is a natural learning curve where we gain vast amounts of info very quickly on a new subject and as time goes on we pick get into the minute details.

NCLB wants to take the natural learning curve and turn it into a straight line.  This is not possible and I think the crafters of this bill, headed by President George W. Bush, knew this.

Most, if not all, teachers hated this entire idea because they saw the flaws from the beginning, but it was pushed through, then 9/11 happened and everyone stopped paying attention to education.

There have been mixed results from NCLB with math test scores increasing slightly.  Meanwhile kids in China can do calculus by 5th grade.  My point being, the system is flawed.  It's using inadequate standardized tests to measure content and curriculum that is designed to keep kids unmotivated and even suppressed.  This truly is Every Child Left Behind.

This is why The New Education System, right now I'm calling it Phiolo, which is a greek play on words of philos, love and olo, all, does not want government money and will not be subject to any government regulations or laws. We will not be suppressed, we will thrive as our system is built out of love.

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