There are no winners in NCLB law

How NCLB is dumbing down education. This piece appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer this past Monday 3/26/2007. It is worth a quick look.
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Stop Shouting or I Pick Epistemology

Is there a significant difference in making an ontological statement and an epistemological statement. Susan Buck-Morss (2003) presents the following examples of the problem raised. Consider the following statements:

Because the United States does not violate human rights, it is a civilized nation.
Because [...]

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Schools as Exceptional Space

In a stunning article in Educational Theory, Tyson E. Lewis (2006) argues that contemporary schooling in the United States, through policies of zero-tolerance, lockdown, and No Child Left Behind policies, separates and isolates students from the body politic by creating ambiguities that emerge from the complexities of disciplinary procedures and high-stakes assessment policies prevalent in [...]

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World’s Smallest Political Quiz

I recently found the site Advocates for Self-Government where I took the “World’s Smallest Political Quiz.” It is worth the two to three minutes to take this quiz and really see where you stand as a thinking citizen. I found the whole thing eye-opening. Perhaps you will too.
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Confronting the Real? NCLB and Avoidance

Slavoj Žižek (2002) writes, “The problem with the twentieth-century ‘passion for the Real’ was not that was a passion for the Real, but that it was a fake passion whose ruthless pursuit of the Real behind appearances was the ultimate stratagem to avoid confronting the Real.”  Žižek is, in part, referring to notions of tensions [...]

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Shoelaces? Trivializing the Holocaust

Educating Alice posted a story regarding the Holocaust and Shoelaces. This story is important enough to read in its entirety.
I want to add my 2 cents here. I agree that we must teach kids to think about hard topics in a rigorous manner. Collecting 6,000,000 centimeters of shoelaces tied together is symbolic drivel, an act [...]

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Are Schools Preparing Children for the Future?

The link leads you to a post by Treavor on his blog that is absolutely worth the look. The video clip from YouTube poses some interesting and disturbing questions that need to be addressed in the United States but, because of the hegemonic views of the current administration, the diffidence paid to global capitalism, and [...]

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The Relationship of Formative and Summative Assessment: Reductionist Technocracy or Virtual Education

In a post on the NCTE blog, Barbara Cambridge writes in part:
I am encouraged that we are beginning to distinguish between formative and summative assessment, not to affirm one over the other but to accent that each serves a particular purpose, formative primarily to improve teaching and learning and summative primarily to answer accountability needs.
At [...]

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When Technocracy is Substituted for Learning

I want to focus on the regulation or regulatory function of the American academic standards movement. It is precisely the regulatory function of that movement that requires closure, the encapsulation of the model itself. In this short piece, I want to examine the connected concepts of standards-driven instruction and data-driven instruction in American [...]

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Civil War Memory: Out With the Standard History Textbook and In With…

What a breath of fresh air. The idea of using literature and/or trade books for teaching history is not new but many people have a hard time actually doing it. Here is a story of a teacher with the courage to make the switch. Bravo! I am sure his students will [...]

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Top Ten Signs You’re a Fundamentalist Christian

Posted on Craig’s List. I think this is worth at least a quick read.
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Violence and NCLB

Nel Noddings once wrote, “Education should be emancipatory, not predatory.” Colman McCarthy (2006) writes, “Tests represent fear-based learning, not desire-based learning.” Here then is the problem: If the current trend in American education is, in fact, fear-based and, thereby predatory, how can we think about moving the classroom in the direction [...]

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Test-Driven Teaching Isn’t Character-Driven

If you have questions about high-stakes testing mandated by No Child Left Behind then this article from the Philadelphia Inquirer may just help you think about the NCLB mandates in a different way. While it represents anecdotal evidence from one teacher, that evidence is mounting and cannot be overlooked in the overall discussion of [...]

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NCLB and Images of Teachers and Teaching

In a recent article in the Harvard Educational Review, Cochran-Smith & Lytle (2006) offer a well reasoned critique of NCLB. They analyze both the language of the act itself as well as the language of the tools used to implement the act published by the U.S. Department of Education. Cochran-Smith & Lytle explore [...]

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NCLB and Highly Qualified Teachers

Over the next few weeks I want to explore some of the implications of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) especially as NCLB impacts attitudes directly engaged with teaching and the image of teachers in general. NCLB is deeply problematic at many levels, not the least of which are the many tensions that [...]

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Lies, More Lies, and Damned Lies–Oh Yes, No Child Left Behind?

More results from NCLB are in and, not surprisingly, the results point to an administration that overtly chooses to place a positive spin on those results even when no such connection can be asserted. The administration, and specifically President Bush, has been singing the praises of the NCLB legislation as the most recent scores [...]

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High-Stakes Testing Doesn’t Increase Student Achievement

Reported by the NEA (National Education Association) with regard to a study prepared by Nichols, Glass, and Berliner, the NEA states the following:
Using several analyses of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test data from 25 states, a link between pressures associated with high-stakes testing and student achievement could not be established. The results [...]

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Time Well Spent? I Doubt It!

I have often argued that engaged teaching and learning must be so much fun that children do not know what they are doing is good for them. This idea turns on the notion that teaching and learning must be ENGAGED. To be engaged teaching and learning must be rigorous, must be of value to students, [...]

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