It's no secret that the public education establishment hates the No Child Left Behind Act. It calls for all of the things educrats resist: standards, testing, accountability for performance and a requirement that teachers be "highly qualified" in the subject field they're teaching.I don't know about you, but my self-assessment says I'm darn swell.
Sadly, that last element has already been undermined by teachers' lobbies at the state level. A loophole in the original federal legislation left it to individual states to establish their own criteria for "high, objective, uniform state standards of evaluation" of teachers. As education expert Terry Moe of the Hoover Institute reports, rather than requiring competency testing or specific subject-matter degrees, states like Arkansas simply regard five years of experience as sufficient to satisfy the "highly qualified" standard. In New Hampshire, a teacher can meet the requirements by merely conducting a "self-assessment" with a supervisor and "partner," demonstrating once again that there's no education reform that educrats can't find a way to circumvent.
In addition to frontal assaults on No Child Left Behind by the teachers unions, there have been numerous, petty guerrilla attacks on the act. One recent example was in a school district in Lincoln, R.I., where assistant superintendent of schools Linda Newman and the district's elementary school principals decided to cancel the annual spelling bee, sponsored by Scripps Howard newspapers, for students in the fourth through eighth grades. According to these spoilsports, with only one child able to emerge as the ultimate winner, the spelling bee would violate the spirit of No Child Left Behind, since the rest of the contestants would necessarily be "left behind." Newman explained that the current fashion in public education circles emphasizes self-esteem, which is why activities that produce winners and losers, such as sports teams, are to be avoided.You can see why a loser like ole Linda would feel that way.
More hilarity by following the link, but it's this kind of thing that leaves me less than troubled when I read an article in the local paper that the schools in our state were near the bottom of the list in per capita spendng per pupil. I figure it's less money for the "professional educators" to blow on worthless drivel as an excuse for not teaching the basics. Number 1 on the spending list was Washington D.C. which merely confirmed the impression. And don't get me started on "computers in the classroom."
