And Brendan is simply wrong in claiming that “standardized tests are enormously expensive.” Caroline Hoxby has calculated that testing costs, on average, $5.81 per pupil, or less than one-tenth of one percent of school spending. See http://www.nber.org/digest/sep02/w8855.html .

Lastly, total federal spending amounts to just 8% of school spending, including federal contributions to special ed, ELL, Title I, etc… If the financial (or educational) burden of complying with NCLB were so great, states could opt out. The fact that they don’t suggests that they receive more than they spend.

This is an important piece of truthtelling as the death of NCLB has already been hearkened as the next silver bullet to save American Education.

I don’t know if I can add anything to get this discussion back to a more intellectual level–but I do think that we seriously need to stick to “just the facts ma’am,” and stay away from the conspiracy theories about vouchers and the old fall back, “why don’t you spend a few days in a public school.” In fact I have spent more than a few days–as a substitute teacher. The things that I saw convinced me of the unevenness of the skills and ability of teachers from building to building, of the factors that build a learning environment and of basic respect for students, parents and the community in which they live.

Each year that passes without substantive reform (and recall that the United States leads the world in our commitment of financial resources to education) is a year in the life of a child, a year that cannot be replaced, a year that is increasingly difficult to remediate as time goes one. We don’t have time for all this denial of the problems.

The evidence doesn’t begin and end with NAEP, although NAEP equates pretty readily with international exams of proficiency. See for instance this 2006 American Institutes for Research study of the literacy skills of American college students that finds More than 75 percent of students at 2-year colleges and more than 50 percent of students at 4-year colleges do not score at the proficient level of literacy, meaning that they lack the skills to perform complex literacy tasks, such as summarizing the arguments of newspaper editorials:

http://www.air.org/news/documents/Release200601pew.htm

tft-

I’m not sure what you define as a privatized school, but the total percentage of American students who attend them would be extremely modest regardless of how you define it.

I brought up NAEP (and now AIR) simply to make the point that we have severe education problems that existed before NCLB, and that NCLB has partially made more transparent (so far). The state of Florida has had success with a comprehensive education reform that included the grading of schools (among a lot of other things) and their percentage of students scoring basic or better went from 53 percent in 1998 to 70 in 2007.

As for the below basic problem, with which I sympathize, in my district we just instituted ULSS and have decided that the first level of intervention (not tier!) is the classroom. In other words, the kids who need intervention services “funded” by NCLB, just get their teacher.

But we could just opt out, right?

You come from Arizona?

If you want to really frustrate a group of teachers, tell them to get the NAEP scores up. They’ll run you out of town on a rail.