Today’s Chicago Sun Times has two editorials bashing the No Child Left Behind Act. This one is by Neil Steinberg, an obnoxious Keith Olbermann wannabe. Mr. Steinberg posits that the act is a monumental exercise in cooking the books, teachers spending valuable class time drilling children on the testing material, fudging the results, and dumping the lowest scores to keep the schools off the dreaded probation list.
Mr. Steinberg is not a reporter nor is he even fit to write an editorial. He is just a uninformed, uneducated, crass and crude opinion scribe. He has a monumental chip on his shoulder. He does not let facts get in the way of the truth as he wants it to be.
First, if the federal government is bearing the load of school funding and bearing the criticism for low performance, they have a right to expect some accountability. Mr. Steinberg opines the feds should not be involved in education. Good, eliminate the Department of Education then. Of course he would be against that. The Department should just be there to provide government jobs, not oversight.
Mr. Steinberg, I do not know what socially engineered school you went to, but teachers are supposed to teach, they should be held accountable, and are supposed to comply with laws. Just like the rest of us. They are not supposed to coach students on test material. If they do their jobs there is no need or use for them to coach children on the tests. Of course that is too much to ask of teachers. If they teach the material and the students and parents do their jobs, then there should be no problem. Maybe, Mr. Steinberg, the schools should just make the test a take home assignment and give the kiddies all year to turn them in.
Mr. Steinberg also reports that in many cases the test results of under performing schools are falsified. If that is the case, then those responsible should be arrested, indicted, and convicted of criminal fraud. Of course principals and teachers are like reporters. They are immune from such things. They commit crimes and get to keep their jobs. Mr. Steinberg knows all about being immune from personal responsibility for his criminal acts. He also knows all about the excuses to keep out of jail; Blames booze for beating his wife.
The editorial writer drags out three students who are suffering from No Child Left Behind. One complains about school over crowding, one is a student who never studied in high school and received straight As. Now he complains that he has no study skills and cannot succeed at Loyola University because he has no study skills. The last is a former drop out. The complaint here is there is no program for drop outs.
If the municipalities give lip service to education and build no schools, you will have over crowding. If teachers and principles do not comply with the law and fraudulently manipulate test scores, they should be fired, indicted and jailed. If parents do not do their part, and their participation is crucial to education, then no program will succeed. Students have to participate, learn, and study. That is their job. Teachers must teach. Principles must administer. If people just did their jobs, there would be no need for this act that only educators and certain pseudo-journalists find so onerous.
No Child Left Behind is nothing more than the government demanding accountability and demanding that certain important curriculum be imposed; reading, math, and science. It appears that no one in education wants to do their jobs- educators or parents. Even the students do not want to participate. I guess in the perfect world of the Sun Times and Mr. Steinberg, we should just send the kiddies off to the multi-billion dollar day care that education has become, teach them nothing, graduate them, and then guarantee them a college degree.