NEW YORK - .... The administration’s stance has caught by surprise those educators and officials who had hoped that Obama’s calls during the campaign for an overhaul of the No Child Left Behind law would mean a reduced federal role and less reliance on standardized testing....
There has been an outpouring of complaints....
Much of the grumbling is from educators who say they supported Obama’s candidacy.
“I am a public school teacher who vehemently wanted to vote for a president who would save us from No Child Left Behind,’’ Diane Aoki of Kealakekua, Hawaii, wrote to the Department of Education. But requiring a linking of test scores to teacher evaluations, Aoki said, means “the potential is there for the test frenzy to get worse than it is under No Child Left Behind.’’
Yeah, that's not the "change" we wanted.
Holding out billions of dollars as a potential windfall, the Obama administration is persuading state after state to rewrite education laws to open the door to more charter schools and expand the use of student test scores for judging teachers.
The American people are finally awakening to this fraud president, folks.
That aggressive use of economic stimulus money by Education Secretary Arne Duncan is provoking heated new debates over the uses of standardized testing and the proper federal role in education....
Many educators and advocates support the administration’s push....
Peter Cunningham, an Education Department spokesman, said, “There’s a healthy debate around this grand application, which is what we were hoping for.’’
“We’re mindful of all the criticisms about federal overreaching, about too much testing, of all the complaints about No Child Left Behind,’’ Cunningham said. “These complaints come up all the time in conversations about all our programs, not just this one, with education officials across the country. The context that No Child has generated is the context that we have to live with.’’
Not everyone is upset with the administration’s tactics.
“We like the way the administration is using Race to the Top to send a message about its priorities,’’ said Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform. “We like that it’s gotten states to take a close look at their laws and practices, and whether they continue to make sense.’’
Diane Ravitch, an education historian at New York University, disagreed. “The Department of Education should respect the requirements of federalism and look to states to offer their best ideas rather than mandating policies that the current administration likes,’’ Ravitch said in comments filed with the department.Yes, and the MORE LOCAL the BETTER!!!!
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