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Monday, June 27, 2005
NCLB Pro and Con
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Two takes on the Harvard Civil Rights Project study and surrounding debate:
Gerald Bracey, an education researcher and NCLB critic who fills the e-mail inboxes of school reporters around the nation, had this to say:
Yesterday Patti Ghezzi asked if Emperor NCLB was buck naked. I’d say he’s wearing precisely the clothes he was intended to wear. The clothes say that the Emperor wants to elminate the wihte-minority achievement gap. They disguise the true purpose of the law which is to chip away at the enormous potential market that is elementary and secondary education and transfer as much money as possible to the private sector. By the way, I said this in a Newsday article in January 2001—a year before the plan, then without the name ripped off from the Children’s Defense Fund’s slogan, became a law.
And from the Achievement Alliance, a pro-NCLB group:
The primary complaint of the report is that NCLB’s system of “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) has a “disparate impact” on and thus “penalizes” large school districts and districts with diverse student populations. We disagree strenuously with the report’s conclusions that the law is somehow unfair to poor and minority children. NCLB was designed to identify schools and school districts with achievement gaps between poor and non-poor and minority and majority students and to target interventions and resources to help close those gaps.
Is NCLB helping to - as the cliche goes - “close the achievement gap”?
