Jettison "No Child Left Behind"

The Obama Administration needs to jettison the absurd, pedagogically useless policy of "No Child Left Behind."

Teachers throughout the K-12 system I've spoken too, especially those who teach kindergarten through sixth grade, routinely criticize this system because rather than ensuring that children are performing well, it saddles teachers with constantly prepping their students for exams.

And studies have shown that tests are predictive of very little. They don't predict anything except how well students perform on exams. They don't accurately reflect what kids have learned. They certainly don't predict what they will be capable of learning in the future. And they place an inordinate burden on students.

For example, in one school in Redondo Beach, CA, Kindergarteners are required to produce a book report. Yes, that's right, five year olds. A book report. Teachers recommend that parents keep their children out of kindergarten until age 6 because of this requirement.

How about let's make certain the children actually just learn through activities that have nothing to do with exams? Plenty of smart people in our society achieved many things without being tested or required to do one to two hours of homework a night as a first-grader. But that's what happens in Pacific Palisades' Marquez school, CA, to make sure their students fulfill the NCLB requirements.

These exams are also culturally biased. Pegged for certain ways of approaching problems, like exams. And privileging certain types of thought.

In the Math Ph.D. program at UCLA, all the pure math majors pride themselves on getting perfect scores on their Verbal GRE's, as well as obviously perfect scores on th Math portion and the Subject exam. Why? Because, as I was informed by a friend, those exams privilege a certain type of thinking. So that even if one doesn't know the vocabulary, or the stories to analyze, one knows how to think in order to assess which answer is correct.

This particular friend was embarrassed because he had broken the record by missing three questions.

Jettison NCLB. And let teachers start teaching again, not just being test monitors.