ED 100 Introduction to Education |
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Overview: How have we tried to reform education? NCLB and its successes and failures
We've spent the last couple weeks talking about some of the challenges of educating all students in a pluralistic society. Clearly, there are multiple challenges and multiple paths toward dealing with them. Your federal government has also offered a solution path - it comes in the form of the re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education act and is, colloquially referred to as, the No Child Left Behind legislation. At one level, who can argue with a slogan like that? Of course nobody wants to leave children behind. Some have argued that the feds overstepped their bounds trampling all over the constituional provision that education is the province of the state - local control, and all that. So... in recognition of this, the feds put together the NCLB legislation with a great deal of wiggle room - telling states, if you want our money, here's the standards and kinds of policies you need to put into place. We won't tell you how to do it - just do it if you want our money. The result has been a flurry of activity across the last two years trying to respond in an effort to improve our nation's schools.
Readings:
We will first read some things related to NCLB from the US Department of Education website - stuff in support of NCLB that gives lots of details, a kind of overview that is important. To get started... read each of these pages and focus on the various components of the legislation and what it is designed to do. Keep in mind, this is all from the US Dept. of Ed... might they have an interest in portraying NCLB positively?
Discussions questions - each also appear in the corresponding Moodle forum:
Supplementary materials:
Here's some additional great stuff... check it out!