May 08 2008
Without NCLB we would have time to prepare our kids for the 21st century…
I’ve read some interesting stuff today and it’s wonderful that it’s thematic. McLeod talks about marketing interactions. You know the interactions that we have on a daily basis with our customers and other stakeholders (students, parents, and other folks in the communities that we serve). These interactions have the ability to build or chip away at the trust and goodwill that we would like to exchange with them – the very trust and goodwill that is at the foundation of their support of our endeavors with their children.
Our ability to have those great interactions has been hampered by NCLB. We have a push to make the score at all costs. We throw out every piece of the curriculum that isn’t directly measured by one of those tests. Our bulletin boards have to be correlated to the tests. Field trips have to be justified by objectives measured by the tests. Art, music and PE have been changed to support mechanisms to drill additional content in order to prepare students for the tests. No wonder we have poor marketing interactions with the community. They are not interested in making their children good test takers. They are interested in seeing their kids learn and maximize their potential.
Unfortunately education under NCLB has become a very expensive venture into policymaking that failed. Our nation will reap the consequences in ways that we can hardly imagine. So now that policymakers are willing to admit that they made a $6 billion dollar mistake will they allow educators to really educate our children? Warlick asks what we would find if we had our constraints lifted…I think we would find time. Without NCLB we would find that we actually had the time to learn about new technologies and design instructional sequences to teach children the literacies of the 21st century. The technology is there, the support professionals are in place, we just need to have the teachers freed from NCLB.
