Today begins a comprehensive journey to let readers know where the different candidates stand on educational policies. We'll highlight three areas of focus: No Child Left Behind, Learning and Teaching, and Innovation.
Since many Progressive Educators in the Open Source Community believe that the educational mandate entitled No Child Left Behind, while a good sentiment to let no child flounder in sinking public schools, the reality has been less than ideal. In fact, many people call the bill "No Child Left Untested." Please remember that No Child Left Behind is fully a bipartisan effort that has been the death-knell to innovative teaching and creative learning. Sort of like everything touched by the current president's administration and this Congress. No one is excused from blame in this shambles of a law and what it has wrought
Why is NCLB so bad? It's not just that it is underfunded. The bill needs to be scrapped, completely. It does not work and it is harmful to the very children that it was intended to help. The poor, the black, and the brown. Simply put, teachers spend far too much of their time focusing on what will be on the state and nationally mandated testing and too little time on actually teaching children to think and how best to learn. Currently, we spend a fair amount of time teaching students what to learn rather than how to learn; that goes for public and private schools alike. Put it this way, if the Stanley Kaplan Testing Company was so widely wonderful and innovative, why aren't their methods not in practice at the major universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford) in the country?
What are my credentials on educational reform, innovation, and No Child Left Behind? I was the chief architect in turning the Andre Agassi School around after it was mired in controversy (from 2004 - 2006). Although we did a great deal in the two years that we were at the school, more can be done, especially given how much money the Agassi Foundation, the Federal government, as well as the State of Nevada is spending on the school. The Agassi public relations machine obscures some of the hard facts about the school and what needs to be done to help Andres Big idea.
Also, I would definitely look to the pre- (so called) Excellence Movement that swept the country during the Reagan regime as a place to look for answers. Short History Lesson: The Civil Rights Seventies, which can be likened to a Second United States Reconstruction, made some headway in dismantling the problems that were posed by democracy in this country. Young and idealistic teachers buoyed by M.L. King, Malcolm X, and the Kennedy brothers, gave their careers and even their lives to dismantle newly desegregated schools throughout the land. Yep, that's in this country. Many of these teachers have recently retired or are nearing retirement age.
So, what changed? In California and beyond, Proposition 13 destabilized the efforts of real teaching and learning, de-funding and thereby de-neutering the short gains that were made in education.
Can any of the presidential candidates restore the hope that education was supposed to engender for all Americans? Probably not, but by adding your name to a growing chorus of outrage about what is being done to the United States Public Schools, you can fight to overturn years and years worth of worthless teaching and death defying learning in our nations schools. When children feel disrespected, seen and not heard, and cast to the side, then they tend to lash inward or outward. This is certainly no justification for the wrongs that a deranged few have perpetrated on K-12 and higher education, but it is a chorus of mistrust that must be heard and confronted with compassion, dignity, and real solutions--rather than longer school days and tests every year. Namaste, Brian
