NCLB a Noble but Misguided Policy

 Some Useful Websites
Kids Count Data Center is a place where you can "access hundreds of measures of child well-being" from state data and data across states.
Coalition for Better Education is a site"Created to dignify the autonomy of our children and of their teachers."
Some Interseting Articles
It Is Time to Refocus on Education, R&D and Innovation If We Are to "Think Different"  from the Huffington Post, this article points to the importance of creative thinking. 

Talking to your child about technology is like having the sex talk. Except kids are helping to write the rules  is  a series of articles in the Laptop website about children and technology from a parents point of view.

I Don’t Need Your Network (or Your Computer, or Your Tech Plan, or Your…)   is from a blog by Will Richardson and points out what our children can expect from technology that we don't get.

Thoughts From Yrisarri
No Child Left Behind is a noble but misguided effort to level the playing field for all members of our society.  It is noble by its very mission.  To acknowledge that school has not paid dividends for a some of our citizens is the next step in the civll rights movement.  But the the cure for this problem targets all students in our schools instead of just those in need by gathering data from test results rather than taking constructivist action.

George Siemens recently stated in his blog that the term learning really has no meaning. 

....... our focus is not on some esoteric concept of learning. Instead, the intent is to orient ourselves to a complex set of phenomenon and to plan potential courses of action.

We are always learning, it is a function of our  brain’s reaction to its environment.  Siemens wants to replace the term learning with “sense making “  That should certainly be the mission of our schools in todays interconnected world where every kid will soon have access to all the information in the world on their phone.  I would add that that part of “sense making” is focusing our learning on environments appropriate to our cultural and societal needs as well as individual needs.

NCLB’s cure for what ails education is not based upon “sense making”  but as Dr. Deborah Waber says in an address at a Learning and the Brain conference, the cure is finding deficiencies in subject areas.  Therefore, reading scores are deficient because teachers and students are lazy. So instruction time is increased, tests are given, and failure is punished.   These deficits are seen as pervading all of our schools because there are students who do not succeed in all of our schools.  Instead we should be focusing our intervention on those students who need help by understanding the conditions that have caused them to be termed deficient.

Brain research is clear about the results of stress  on learning.  The data is also clear about who comes to school stressed.  NCLB seems to be based on the philosophy of the Education Equality Project .  They believe, and I agree, that "what happens in schools has a tremendous impact upon the achievement gap in our country".  What I don’t agree with is a one size fits all prescription.  That prescription has led to instructional practices that do lead to later success in life.  Joe Williams from the Education Equity Project in an interview in EdcationNext says,

We keep finding ourselves debating that key distinction with people who argue that the external forces in a child’s life represent obstacles too large for even great schools to overcome. While we are very sympathetic to the obstacles that impoverished children face to their physical, emotional, and educational development, and support policies to address these deficiencies, we believe that when conditions outside of the classroom are less than stellar, it is even more important that we get the schooling piece right

This philosophy seems to ignore the reality of many “deficit” children’s lives and rejects the brain research on stress and learning. Children from low income families are are at risk for educational achievement. Studies find that these children are more likely to experience violence than their middle and upper income peers. All indicators of stress are at higher levels for children from low income families. That puts them at risk for developing the affective skills needed for academic success. Executive capacity in our frontal lobes is responsible for development of self-regulation and if a child can not self-regulate learning becomes almost impossible. Impossible that is until we determine that they have a problem that needs medication.  Stress is cumulative and releases hormones into the brain that inhibit learning. A child’s language development is another predictor of academic success and students from low income families come to school with about 25% of the vocabulary of their peers from higher income families. The good news is that our brains are plastic!

So we can slow down!  Testing is not the answer  especially for our younger children.  It only causes more stress.   We can develop language rich environments with  projects and activities and teach young children to read and other academics when they are ready.  We do not have a reading deficit if we do not expect all children to learn the same thing at the same time no matter the cirucumstances!  We need to help students make sense of the vast body of knowledge at their fingertips rather than force feed information to them.   All kids come to school ready to learn, but we place them in competitive, stressful classrooms and tell them they have deficits before they have had time to make sense of the information they already have.  If we treat our youg chldren as individuals, when they reach the upper grades they will have the skills they need to begin making sense of the larger world!