Karin Chenoweth writes in the Washington Post this morning exactly what needs to be said about the ‘No Child Left Behind’ (NCLB) law. The oft-ballyhooed line that teachers must now ‘teach to the test’ and fail to do anything original or creative in their teaching may be true, but teachers teaching to a test is better than the pre-NCLB situation where most teachers didn’t bother to teach anything at all. It’s a curious bit of revisionist history to pretend our schools were any better before NCLB than they are today. They weren’t. We need a wholesale redesign of how we educate people in this country, and NCLB was a [very small] step in the right direction. My only major complaint about NCLB is that it does far too little.
- Why ‘No Child’ Was Needed (Washington Post; free registration may be required).
