Without doing an analysis, many of the other countries have a longer school year than we do.

Having taught in classrooms under NCLB, the desired purpose was almost immediately lost in the one size fits all students approach to reading. While phonics is an excellent tool for ESL students, it isn’t the only approach that can be used with native language young readers.

You want a child to increase their word recognition and speed? Have their parents turn the closed caption function on the TV and turn off the sound. No time to sound out the words there.

Best practices went out the window with NCLB.

And you are absolutely right – these areas have been traditionally “women’s work.”

Summers, just now with George “I create Dem strategy every morning with Rahm/Carville/Begala” Stephanopolis, said that Obama inherited a trillion dollar deficit as created by a Republican President and a Republican Congress….

Apparently Larry didnt notice the Dems winning Congress in 2006.

Sickening lie, repeated enough, will become truth in the public’s mind.

Now George is attacking McConnell with vigor, right after kissing Summers’ ring for 20 minutes.

sickening to allow George to create talking points for Obama with Rahm and then cross examine the GOP about those talking points.

“There are lots of other ways to educate youth that this society chooses to ignore because it would lead to a questioning population that had more on its mind than being consumers.”

THAT is the biggest problem with NCLB and this diversionary tactic of blaming the failure of education on bad teachers only tries to hide this truth. NCLB is geared toward proficiency on tests, nothing more. But these tests are the worst indicators of learning possible. Why? Because they do not involve critical thinking in any way. Multiple choice for machine grading, a few short answers and one small essay. A child never need form a complete thought, come to a conclusion, create a hypothesis. NCLB is creating a form of intellectual slavery: students who no longer need to think.

Case in point, when I taught at a public high school in Los Angeles, standards were coming down full force. At a district-wide meeting, some Liberal Arts teachers softly objected to the fact that to fit in all the standards, they would have to abandon teaching very important lessons. Well, I was brazen enough (I was new to this school) to warn my principal that I was going to say something he might not like (administrators are by nature cowards…I mean politicians) and that he had every right to disavow my comments.

I stood up and said that as an English teacher, my students deserved to learn more than these useless skills required to pass a test. I pointed out that Liberal Arts has a humanizing effect on students and teaches them how to think and question. In my low income school, the novel I forced my students to read might be the only book they ever finish in their lives. The discussion to follow would require complex thoughts. High school is the time when many students are developing their own opinions of the world and beginning to form their code of ethics, independent thinking and intellectual curiosity that would serve them for the rest of their lives. By stripping them of access to the thoughts in great literature and history, we were depriving our students of their right to think, to decide, to question. In short, we were creating a society of drones.

The answer was the test only required short readings so that is what would be taught. I left teaching shortly thereafter. NCLB, by focusing on the achievement of the very lowest, and thereby ignoring all higher forms of learning, is ensuring our nation is the least educated of any civilized nation. By cutting special programs for the gifted, so the lower achievers don’t feel “bad”, we are crushing those who could excel. The old saying, “if you want to find the brightest student in the room, they’ll be cleaning the hamster cage” is very true indeed.

We need to WAKE UP and stop blaming teachers. Sure, there are underqualified teachers, but I must admit, they are in the same proportion to incompetents at any company. In fact, the most incompetent teachers I worked with were long-timers with MA’s or part-time administrators or coaches. The problem is not the teaching force. So many teachers seem to be failing because they are set up to fail. Most of their time is spent on discipline in over-crowded classrooms. All of the teachers I know, and they are legion, complain that they are essentially jailers. When security guards have to police the halls as they now do in elementary and junior high schools and metal detectors and armed guards greet our high school students at the door, do we wonder why our children aren’t learning?

The NCLB program is yet another way to create a complacent populace. Don’t think, just consume. We’re abandoning all the lessons of the enlightenment and returning to the dark ages. What better way to swallow hope and change wholeheartedly without a bit of indigestion as illustrated in our last election?

They can, and when they do, they have the keys to the English language. Unfortunately, there’s little money to be made when you reduce the process to its simplest terms.

Remember the little “horn books” from colonial times? We taught phonics in its simplest forms for hundreds of years before Thomas Mann decided we needed a whole word or “look-say” system…he borrowed such a system, a system that had been developed for the deaf for whom sound was non-existent and therefore couldn’t be taught. I remember reading that Mann’s wife wrote one of the first readers…subject was a dog named “Spot” or some such thing as I recall.

Hmmmm…that sounds familiar…but, away we went to where we are today. Darn it…there’s that profit motive again. It just keeps popping up, no matter the date on the calendar.

I await your coming article…

Classroom teacher, nurse, secretary, child care provider–each category equals “women’s work” in the USA. Women’s work equals low or no pay with minimal or no respect.

Didn’t this country, with much fan fair and publicized leg tingles, recently elect a pair of pants sans vetting, with little or no qualifications, but great teleprompter skills for POTUS while it collectively bashed, belittled, and marginalized the best qualified candidate, who unfortunately, on occasion, but not too often, wore a skirt? Alas, she was “…a crowing hen…” and deserved everything she got and more.

There are many wrongs to right. Where do we start? Off hand, I’d say women need to get up off their knees.