I think it's pretty clear that NCLB has some issues......to say the least. Conservatives and Liberals alike could make huge lists of the errors in the law (which is a little ironic since Conservatives and Liberals alike worked to create and pass the law - it seems as though bipartisan support has turned into bipartisan opposition). But my question isn't really about what is wrong, but rather - how do we fix it? It doesn't seem like anyone has created that great solution yet......or at least I haven't heard about it. And the fact that the government has yet to reform the bill makes me think that they aren't so sure about how to fix it either.
If I could fix just one thing about this law (or at least the way it has been implemented), it would be the way that children's knowledge is assessed. I know - that's not really a small thing - in fact it is a pretty huge and daunting task. But I think that it really encompasses a lot of the problems with the law.
Standardized tests (as they exist now) are, in my opinion, poor measures of progress and learning for a whole host of reasons that we have already discussed in class. But I think that it is possible to make them different.
In my Using Technology in Education class, we were discussing this new kind of assessment that is being used in Minnesota. Click here to check out some example questions. I think that these questions are great. They are multiple choice and objective, so they can be graded by computers. Yet they don't just test specific knowledge. They focus on a students' ability to problem solve more than their ability to memorize specific information. I hope that this style of assessment continues to become more and more popular.
Improving standardized tests will not fix this broken law, but it sure would get us a few steps closer to fixing the system.
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