I found this on Daily Kos in a user diary. If you are fan of football, this will put NCLB in understandable terms.
NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND - FOOTBALL VERSION, author unknown,
(suggested by Bruce Patterson, Central Michigan University)
1. All teams must make the state playoffs and all MUST win the championship. If a team does
not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable. If after two years they have not won the championship their footballs and equipment will be taken away UNTIL they do win the championship.
2. All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time, even if they do not have the same conditions or opportunities to practice on their own. NO exceptions will be made for lack of interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities of themselves or their parents. ALL KIDS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL!
3. Talented players will be asked to work out on their own, without instruction. This is because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren't interested in football, have limited athletic ability or whose parents don't like football.
4. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th, and 11th game.
This will create a New Age of Sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimum goals. If no child gets ahead, then no
child gets left behind. If parents do not like this new law, they are encouraged to vote for vouchers and support private schools that can screen out the non-athletes and prevent their children from having to go to school with bad football players.
This is a great analogy! Sports are not for everyone just like No Child Left Behind is not for everyone.
ReplyDeleteEveryone learns differently. From what I have learned, No Child Left Behind tries to make students learn the same way and at the same pace. This pace might be too slow or too fast for some students.
I really wish that our current presidential candidates would talk more about No Child Left Behind and what they propose to do about it in the future. What do you think?
I agree that it needs to be addressed. Obama, Edwards, and Clinton all talked about reforming NCLB in their stump speeches.
ReplyDeleteIt would be a great analogy if it kept things in proportion. NCLB is not, as the blog claims, supposed to prepare children to win the championship. It's supposed to prepare children to qualify for the team. Way-big difference. Currently too many schools are not bothering to prepare children to qualify for the team.
ReplyDeleteThe other day a young woman came over to our house for some math tutoring. She had graduated with good grades from the local high school and is probably gifted, but she had never been taught the fundamental concepts she was supposed to learn. She couldn't subtract 0.5 from 6. While this distressed the adults in the room, it totally amazed my home-schooled eight year-old, who could do all the problems on the woman's college homework assignment in her head. I finally had to distract the child with cartoons before the poor woman died of embarrassment.
While NCLB is a step in the wrong direction, it only got passed because public schools weren't doing their job in the first place. To quote from today's AP article http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080520/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/failing_schools
Educators look at that goal and say, 'These people must be kidding,'" Petrilli said.
Even if educators have that view, parents don't, says Kerri Briggs, the Education Department's assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education.
"They would like their kids to be on grade level now and not 50 years from now, not 20 years from now, but this year," Briggs said.