NCLB: The Next Generation

By Alain Jehlen More focus on standardized test scores and new ways to punish educators. That’s what the Obama Administration has proposed in a “Blueprint” for revising No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Firing entire staffs over low test scores, as happened in Rhode Island and other states, is one of the strategies endorsed by the [...]

Ravitch Blasts So-Called ‘Reforms’

By Alain Jehlen NEA Friend of Education award winner Diane Ravitch electrified the Representative Assembly Tuesday with an impassioned call for the defense of public education and the teaching profession. “The current ‘education reform’ movement is pushing bad ideas,” she said. “It wants to end tenure and seniority, to silence teachers’ unions, to privatize large [...]

Digging Into the Alphabet Soup of Education Policy

By Will Potter Can’t tell your RTTT from your AYP? Here is a quick primer to help decipher the alphabet soup of education policy. ESEA The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 was one of the key pillars of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. It created the Title I federal aid program [...]

Obama Finalizes Health Care Reform Law

by Tim Walker March 30, 2010 – President Barack Obama on Tuesday signed into law a package of changes to the landmark overhaul of the nation’s healthcare system he approved last week. The legislation signed today also contains sweeping reforms to the student loan industry. “This week we can rightly say the foundation on which [...]

NEA to Congress: Less Standardized Testing, More Help

By Alain Jehlen Less standardized testing, more help for struggling schools—These are the key ingredients of NEA’s 170-page recipe for improving the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which was delivered Friday to Congress. ESEA is the biggest source of federal funds for public schools and includes the Title I program for disadvantaged students. The [...]

NEA President: Mass Teacher Firings Not the Answer

By Cynthia McCabe and Ramona Parks-Kirby March 26, 2010 — Deploying the most drastic and punitive reform option to turn around low-performing schools, school districts are firing entire staffs, first in Central Falls, R.I., High Point, N.C., and now in Savannah, Ga. NEA President Dennis Van Roekel on Friday called this disturbing trend short-sighted and said [...]

New NAEP Reading Scores Flat

By Alain Jehlen New fourth and eighth grade reading scores released Wednesday show essentially no progress since the No Child Left Behind Act was signed into law in 2002. The scores are from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the only achievement test program that attempts to measure the academic skills of students throughout [...]

‘Blueprint’ Disappointing

The White House this weekend unveiled its proposal for reauthorizing the Bush adminstration’s No Child Left Behind law but the result is a disappointing outline for more of the same focus on testing. As a result, the NEA cannot support the plan as released, President Dennis Van Roekel said. The Obama administration’s “blueprint” for reauthorization adds to the [...]

Ravitch Lashes Teacher Bashers

A former important cheerleader for No Child Left Behind now says that she, and it, were wrong. Diane Ravitch, a leading education historian who was Assistant Secretary of Education under Pres. George H. W. Bush, says the test-driven accountability strategy of the law “has warped U.S. education in the pursuit of higher test scores, but [...]

NEA President to Congress: ‘Focus on kids, fix the tests’

By Alain Jehlen March 17, 2010 — NEA President Dennis Van Roekel today raised an alarm over the big jump in competitive grants in the Obama administration’s proposed education budget, saying it could compound the economic squeeze in many school districts. Van Roekel was testifying before the House Appropriations Committee. On the plus side, he [...]

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