At Last, Public Support for NCLB

[Bob Schaeffer <bobschaeffer@earthlink.net>]

The final paragraphs demonstrate how out-of-touch the White House NCLB 
diehards can be.

FIRST LADY DEFENDS CRITICIZED "NO CHILD" TESTS
USA Today -- July 23, 2008
By Greg Toppo

Washington -- No Child Left Behind can't catch a break lately on the 
campaign trail. Barack Obama last week slammed its "broken promises" and 
John McCain called it "a good beginning" that "has to be fixed."

Ask first lady Laura Bush and she'll tell you that, come what may, the 
2002 education law, championed by President Bush, will be a lasting part 
of her husband's legacy.

Its requirement for annual testing in reading and math for virtually all 
children in grades three through eight has led critics to charge that it 
focuses too much on testing, but Mrs. Bush says she doesn't buy it.

"We would never go to a doctor and say, 'I'm sick, you can't try to 
diagnose me … you can't use any kind of test," she says.

She calls the annual testing — and its consequences — "the most 
important piece" of the law. "That's what lets us know that we're not 
just shuffling kids through school and that poor kids aren't being the 
ones who make it to the fifth grade and can't read, or make it to the 
ninth grade and drop out." It would be "embarrassing and a tragedy if we 
don't address those problems."

In a wide-ranging interview last week, Mrs. Bush also flatly rejected 
complaints that the education law, which is up for reauthorization, has 
narrowed public schools' focus, forcing them to jettison rich subject 
matter such as arts, history and sciences, in favor of explicit reading 
and math instruction. She says state and local school boards, not the 
federal government, still lay out what teachers teach.

"Maybe there's a lot of pressure on teachers from administrators and 
from school districts to have really high scores, and so they feel like 
that's what they spend their time doing," she says, "but if the test, 
which it should be, is actually over the curriculum, then you're 
teaching students what your state and what you and what your school 
district want them to know and then that's what the test is. So I just 
don't buy that 'teaching to the test.' "

She also says it's a "tragedy" that Democrats in Congress have 
effectively killed the Bush administration's $1 billion-a-year Reading 
First program. Several Democrats say it's ineffective and riddled with 
conflicts of interest, but Mrs. Bush ascribes some motivation for the 
budget cut to Democrats' desire to kill a program the president likes.

"I think it's embarrassing, frankly, to have zeroed out money that was 
directed at first through third (grade) in reading," she says. Pointing 
to moderately positive test scores, she adds, "If you can't judge it on 
that as being effective, then I don't know how they — the Congress, I 
mean — think we should evaluate whether or not it's effective."

Mrs. Bush spent about an hour last Wednesday chatting about education 
with a group of teachers selected to spend the upcoming school year as 
"Teaching Ambassadors" to the U.S. Education Department. A former 
teacher who taught briefly in Texas schools in the late 1960s before 
becoming a librarian, she told the group that when she first began her 
career, she had "no earthly idea how to teach second-graders to read."

Forty years later, as her daughter Jenna, 26, begins teaching at a 
Baltimore charter school, Mrs. Bush says teacher preparation has come a 
long way.

Though Jenna doesn't hold a Maryland teacher certificate, she's being 
mentored by a master teacher — "It's been so valuable to her," Mrs. Bush 
says — and benefits from a system that quickly assesses children on a 
weekly basis and closely follows state academic standards.

Asked what she says to teachers who complain about No Child Left Behind, 
she says, "I don't hear that from very many teachers."

She adds, "When I talk to teachers they're nearly always very happy. 
They're happy to be teachers. I really think really good teachers are 
called to be teachers. It's not easy and most of the teachers that I 
meet around the country are very satisfied with the life they've chosen 
for themselves, which is not an easy life — and it's not a really 
high-paid job, as you know, but the satisfaction that teachers get when 
they really reach kids, I think, makes it one of the jobs where people 
are very, very happy, very satisfied with their career choice — and I 
see that everywhere."


http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2008-07-22-laurabush-nochild_N.htm