The Legacy, cont'd

MANIFESTO

As far as education goes, the oligarchic Bushies have gotten their way:

Almost 30,000 schools in the United States failed to make adequate yearly progress under the No Child Left Behind Act in the 2007-08 school year ...

Half those schools missed their achievement goals for two or more years, putting almost one in five of the nation’s public schools in some stage of a federally mandated process designed to improve student achievement. The number facing sanctions represents a 13 percent increase for states with comparable data over the 2006-07 school year.

Thus schools have been eviscerated with the outrageous demands of NCLB, which include testing special education students as if they were regular ed. students. A great number of these schools are "failing" because of this unreasonable requirement.

The rising number of schools failing to make AYP under the law is inevitable, its critics say, because of what they see as the law’s unrealistic requirement that student achievement rise on a pace so that all students are proficient in reading and math by the end of the 2013-14 school year.

President George W. Bush and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings have been steadfast defenders of the proficiency goal, but President-elect Barack Obama and Congress may revise or extend the goal as they work on renewing the NCLB law, as they’re scheduled to do in the upcoming congressional session.

Indeed, it looks as if Obama wants to alter NCLB in some fashion. Certainly, his statement that "teachers should not be forced to spend the academic year preparing students to fill in bubbles on standardized tests" is encouraging, but he also obviously knows that money to alleviate the ostensible problem probably won't be available.