QOD

Filed in National by on April 18, 2009

Was/is “No Child Left Behind” a vehicle that’s tertiary goal was to get the public to start throwing their support towards school vouchers?

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  1. Unstable Isotope says:
    April 18, 2009 at 8:27 am

    I’m not sure. This was a bi-partisan measure, so I’m sure that Republican thinking was included in the measure. I think there’s a part about “failing schools” and the vouchers come in there to get students out of them.

  2. Dana says:
    April 18, 2009 at 8:59 am

    No Child Left Behind was simply a measure to “do something” about a public education system that is seen as failing, without actually addressing the problems that beset public education. Why? Because addressing the problems of public education would mean identifying the problems with public education, and no one wants to do that, because that would point the finger of blame not at teachers but at parents!

    No one complained about the quality of public education when I was in school, in the 1960s and early 1970s. (Mt Sterling High School, Class of 1971). Where I went to school, there was only one teacher who had his masters, the teachers weren’t all that well paid, we were in an old WPA/CCC 1937 building with no air conditioning, there were no computers, the teachers had to fight for time over one mimeograph machine in the office, and we had one principal and two ladies working in the office.

    The school was integrated, but we didn’t have some idiotic “diversity” education or “self-esteem” courses; sex education was left to the parents and the streets. The teachers taught the three Rs, taught history and science, taught the basic things that our schools were supposed to teach all along, and hadn’t yet assumed duties that were really not meant to be part of the education curriculum.

    What parents did, as they are supposed to do, was send their children to school prepared to learn. If you acted up in school, you got punished, including on some occasions getting your ass beat. And if you got punished in school, you did your best to make sure your parents didn’t hear about it, or you’d get it again, probably worse, when you got home.

    Today, if a school dares to discipline a child, his single mother and her unemployed live-in boyfriend wind up rubbing their hands in glee at the thought of how much they’re going to win in the lawsuit.

    Today’s teachers are overwhelmed: they have to spend so much time trying to establish order that they have less opportunity to actually teach. And as the schools have assumed the duty for instruction on things that should be parental duties, less time is available for teaching the things that students should be taught in schools.

  3. anon says:
    April 18, 2009 at 9:02 am

    No Child Left Behind was simply a measure to “do something” about a public education system ..

    The fact that it was seen as disruptive to unions was just a side benefit.

  4. jason330 says:
    April 18, 2009 at 9:40 am

    Where I went to school, there was only one teacher who had his masters, the teachers weren’t all that well paid, we were in an old WPA/CCC 1937 building with no air conditioning, there were no computers, the teachers had to fight for time over one mimeograph machine in the office, and we had one principal and two ladies working in the office.

    We didn’t have a playground. We poked at bee hives with sticks..AND WE LIKED IT! WE LOVED IT!.

    We stared at the sun until we went blind and WE LOVED IT.

  5. Unstable Isotope says:
    April 18, 2009 at 9:49 am

    I don’t think No Child Left Behind is good law at all. It just has a whole lot of ways of labeling schools as failing. Personally, I don’t think education reform will go very far until the widely disparate funding of schools is addressed.

    LOL@Jason

  6. Rebecca says:
    April 18, 2009 at 9:56 am

    Was this some conspiracy to push the school voucher program? Maybe, but I suspect that it was just more of BushCo’s window dressing to make it SEEM like they cared when they truly didn’t. Schools were not important to them. Their main focus was to steal as much as they could from U.S. Taxpayers for their base, The Haves and Have Mores, and then get outta town. As we are seeing, they were hugely successful by this measurement.

  7. Perry says:
    April 18, 2009 at 10:46 am

    When a highly touted program at the outset is underfunded, one has to wonder, like all talk and little action. So the pro-voucher theory makes sense.

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