Leave No Child Behind

Susan Goodkin, an advocate for gifted students in California, has an editorial in the Washington Post today pointing out that NCLB is forcing teachers to teach to the lowest common denominator instead of developing programs to effectively teach some of the most gifted students.

The drafters of this legislation didn't have to be rocket scientists to foresee that it would harm high-performing students. The act's laudable goal was to bring every child up to "proficiency" in language arts and math, as measured by standardized tests, by 2014. But to reach this goal, the act imposes increasingly draconian penalties on schools that fail to make "adequate yearly progress" toward bringing low-scoring students up to proficiency. While administrators and teachers can lose their jobs for failing to improve the test scores of low-performing students, they face no penalties for failing to meet the needs of high-scoring students.

There's little doubt in my mind that NCLB is bad law, however, I believe that it has opened up some discussion about the education of our children. The test scores are going to provide millions of data points for educators to study and find out what methods work and what methods don't work. My solution would be to give all the money the federal government spends on education back to families with children in the form of school vouchers. This too would provide millions of data points for educators to study to find out what methods work and don't work.
Paul Glastris at Political Animal advocates value-added testing. Value-added testing is probably a less worse way to do things than NCLB. In value-added the tests results indicate whether a teacher or school improved the student's test scores. However, it is harder to implement because of the nature of students to leave schools in the middle of the year and not go to the same school for several years at a time.

The most interesting thing about Glastris' comments is the fact that he's decrying NCLB for not focusing on the gifted students, however, he's more likely to be in favor of punishing high achievers in our society by increasing their taxes in favor of the low achievers who would receive the funds through some kind of government payout.

I'm sure if one were to rewrite Goodkin's editorial substituting the word taxes for education, Glastris would be beside himself. Democrats' main problem with NCLB is that it might punish their big consituency of teacher's unions. They will use any argument to show that NCLB is bad policy, even arguments that dispell their notions when it comes to taxation.

UPDATE: Glastris may be switching sides after all.

And as a matter of morality, if one has to choose between helping the low-performers or the high-performers in an impoverished school, why is the former the obvious moral choice?

Now let's replace one word:

And as a matter of morality, if one has to choose between helping the low-performers or the high-performers in an impoverished neighborhood, why is the former the obvious moral choice?

I still think he would have a major problem with that second sentence, but at least he's getting there.

UPDATE 2: Matt Yglesias brings his liberal point of view to the table:

that will to some extent involve shortchanging the best and the brightest. Insofar as we're serious about taking the most talented as far as they can go, that will involve shortchanging equity. The former strikes me as more desirable than the latter, especially for people who want to think of themselves as being on the left.

Yglesias has always had equality for all has his primary policy goal. Someone else had this as their goal before too, they were known as Communists.