Why trust states?
Lots of talks after the news broke that Reading First failed the midterm exam. The final prospect doesn’ look good either. I have more than once expressed my marvel over how everything education is politics in the US.
Among the 200+ news stories on this topic on Google News is this editorial, which I openned in random. After babbling about how much FR costs and how bad it is, the anonymous editor concluded:
ReviewJournal.com - Opinion - EDITORIAL: Another Washington success story
The Department of Education was created barely 30 years ago — it was Jimmy Carter’s sop to the teacher unions. Since then, the state of the American public school system has been in annual decline.
The country would be far better off if we stopped filtering education tax dollars through the beltway, blew up the entire federal Education Department along with No Child Left Behind, and instead let states and local districts take the lead in embarking upon aggressive reform.
When it comes to teaching kids to read, do state politicians or your county commisioners know secrets that the Feds didn’t? Why are they a better bet?
NAEP keeps reading data from 1972. Government-initiated reforms, Federal or State, did little to change student performance. Statistically significant, maybe. But practically children read at about the same level as 40 years ago. Is the Dept of Ed doing a good job? No, but is it better without it? There is hardly any evidence that state governments will do any better.
Every 3rd grader a reader by year 2000 was the #1 goal of the Dept of Ed when Bill Clinton was around, but it’s long forgotten. Bush’s NCLB set the same goal for 2014, and it’s not going to happen. Isn’t time to admit that policies and politicing ain’t the most effective way to teach kids to read?
May 5th, 2008 at 1:16 pm e
Here’s an editorial today from telegram.com
http://www.telegram.com/article/20080505/NEWS/805050317/1020
Article published May 5, 2008
May 5, 2008
The last chapter for federal ‘Reading First’ program
EDITORIAL FOOTNOTE
The latest chapter in the federal government’s Reading First program — part of No Child Left Behind — is a short one: It doesn’t work.
That’s the conclusion of the Department of Education, which found that the billion-dollar-a-year initiative has failed to raise reading levels of elementary school students. The DOE found reading achievement at funded schools was no better than in schools that were not funded.
Putting the federal government in charge of a reading program was a poor use of taxpayer funds from the start. Reading First spent millions on teaching pompously styled “Scientifically Based Reading Research.” Countless generations have learned to read under the guidance of teachers armed with little more than a phonics book and a healthy dose of patience. Even a 2006 DOE interim report mustered only faint praise for the program.
The negative assessment was greeted by one lawmaker with a call to restore funding for Reading First. We have a better idea. Stop wasting federal dollars on what local boards of education and parents should do for themselves. The next page for Reading First should read “The End.”
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