No Child Left Behind Self-Destructs?

Interesting critique of NCLB that I found on the Huffington Post, courtesy of Digg.com: Things Fall Apart: No Child Left Behind Self-Destructs by Gerald Bracey.

Bracey strips away the rhetoric and finds the privatization and anti-union roots of the act. He also notes that it is failing at both its stated and unstated goals. Here are some highlights.

On NCLB intent:

NCLB would funnel large sums of public funds into the private sector through vouchers, transfer much control of public education to private companies, and to reduce or destroy the influence of two Democratic power bases, the teachers unions. Congress killed the voucher provisions, substituting "Supplemental Educational Services" (SES) through which mostly private firms currently gobble up about $2 billion a year. SES consists mostly of tutoring programs or small group instruction that must occur outside the normal school day.

On the failure of the AYP metric:

First off, she had seen NCLB label as failures schools that she thought were terrific. That can happen because of how NCLB judges schools. The law requires schools to report test scores by many subcategories of students: by grade, ethnicity, special education status, English Language Learner status, etc. Most schools have 37 subcategories. If for two years any one subcategory in a school fails to make an arbitrary, predetermined gain in test scores called "Adequate Yearly Progress," (AYP), the law declares that the whole school has failed and requires it to offer all students the option to transfer to a "successful" school. It is absurd to call a school with one lagging sub-category "failing." It's like saying a pennant-winning baseball team is actually a loser because its stolen-base production is below average.

The author has a website, Education Disinformation Detection and Reporting Agency where he posts some intersting reports on the state of public education and hands out Rotten Apples awards—a counterpoint to the "Golden Apples" awards. Interesting reading.