So, instead of “test and punish,” has anyone suggested hiring more trained special education teachers and remedial reading experts to, you know, teach reading (appropriately) to kids having problems? How about more psychologists, counselors, and social workers to help kids who have social-emotional problems, whose families may be in crisis, kids and families living in poverty? All things that can affect children’s whole lives, not just their learning.
The No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law twenty years ago on January 8, 2022, has come to be known as America’s test-and-punish education law, designed by politicians, not educators, and based on manipulation of big data collected from all the states’ standardized test scores
“Test-and-punish” has become a cliche, whose meaning we rarely consider carefully. Unlike the politicians who designed the law, educators who know something about learning and the psychology of education have always known that the law’s operational philosophy couldn’t work. Fear and punishment always interfere with real learning.
The federal government has reduced the imposition of federal punishments when a school’s test scores fail to rise, but states are still required to rate and rank their public schools and to devise turnaround plans for the so-called “failing” schools. And, despite that some test-and-punish policies were never federally required by No Child Left Behind (NCLB), many…
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Politicians Are Poody Heads 