Universal Teaching for Conditional Education

The people who matter most in education are being neglected by the educational reforms and those people are the students; they are being neglected through No Child Left Behind and the idea of educational romanticism, and teachers unions also play a role in this neglect.

No Child left behind is seen as a huge detriment to education and neglects the students. Diane Ravitch sums up No Child Left Behind’s effect on education in her article “Obama’s War on School”. “NCLB mandated that 100 percent of students be proficient in reading and math by 2014. Any school not on track to meet this utopian goal—one never reached by any nation in the world—would face a series of sanctions, culminating in the firing of the staff and the closing of the school (Ravitch).” So No Child Left Behind has a goal that is impossible to meet and it closes down schools that fail to meet this goal. This creates a gap in education when schools are shut down that hurts education. “As 2014 nears, tens of thousands of schools have been stigmatized as failures, thousands of educators have been fired, and schools that were once the anchors of their communities are closing, replaced in many cases by privately managed schools. NCLB turns out to be a timetable for the destruction of public education (Ravitch).” No Child Left Behind simply hurts education when the schools are forced to shut down. The mandates of NCLB try to put the students on the same level and expect them to learn, this excludes students because only their performance is tracked and nothing else. NCLB only includes the student’s scores, and excludes the students in every other instance which include when scores are below expectation.

No Child Left Behind universalizes the students by trying putting the...

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...only “consequence” is a teaching rehabilitation called the “rubber room,” a place in which teachers are paid to sit and do nothing all day until they are deemed worthy enough to teach (Guggenheim). Teachers’ unions have created a system with no consequence to bad teaching except the harm on the student’s education. This turns a blind eye on the actual curriculum that the students are learning.

Works Cited

Murray, Charles “The Age of Educational Romanticism” The New Criterion 26.9 (May 2008):

35-42. Magazine.

Miller, Matt. “First, Kill All the School Boards” Atlantic Monthly Jan/Feb2008, Vol. 301 Issue 1.

92-97. Academic Search premier. Print. 11 November 2013

Director Davis Guggenheim. “Waiting for Superman.” Participant media 2010:

DVD.

Kaufman, Scott Barry. "American Education and the IQ Trap." The Dallas Morning News.

26 July 2013. Web. 09 Nov. 2013.