McCain's Your Guy!

If teachers want NCLB gutted, then McCain's the man who's going to do it, says Richard Whitmire (McCain's Your Guy!).

And it's true.  But teachers know, somewhere, that getting rid of NCLB won't make everything better.  And it certainly won't generate a slew of new funding for schools. 

Comments

[john thompson]

Maybe it is silly for me to make a serious reply to such a cheeky Commentary, but Whitmire wrote:

President Obama is sitting in the Oval Office, and his secretary of education reports in with this recommendation: Mr. President, because 54 percent of black 4th graders scored below basic on reading in 2007 (actual fact), we think it would be wise to do away with accountability-by-the-numbers. Who needs to hear that kind of bad news?

Maybe you can imagine Obama agreeing; I see him sacking the secretary.

Here's an alternative scenario: Mr. President, those deplorable numbers are AFTER we spent billions of NCLB money, and reality may be worse because the law created so much deceit. If you continue down the same path, the results will be the same. So let's trust the disinfectant of honest numbers and tackle the problem directly. The numbers people at Gates and Broad won't like it, but they can understand numbers, and the evidence says that NCLB-type accountability has failed.

This is greater than the Race to the Moon, and we need your leadership, Mr. President. But if JFK invited the engineers to continually fabricate data for PR, we would have never made it off the launch pad.

[The Crimson Avenger]

John, if NCLB has failed, what would you tell the new president to put in its place? More specifically, what independent gauge of performance would you recommend? I'm not talking about subjective measures of performance like grades or portfolios - the public no longer trusts that kind of self-reporting.

Or would you just eliminate all the accountability and keep the money?