John Stossel: Stupid in America
Its ridiculous how many people I get into debates with over this and vehemently try to refute my arguments that the NCLB and regulation of schooling is important, because people will never be “responsible” enough for their own education and learning. Statists also often feel like that their societies reputation is harmed by “idiots” who know very little about the world and other countries. I don’t know why nobody seems to care that a lot of the things public schools “force” you to learn, are of no value to them if its not relevant to their career path.
NCLB was a response to the persistent gap in test scores between certain population groups. The liberal mantra is that children are tabula rasa and any gaps in test scores must be attributable to environment, lack of funding, poor parenting, etc.
So, we’ll make schooling mandatory, increase funding, standardize curriculum, administer uniform tests, and the gap should disappear: equality of inputs yields equality of outcomes, right?
Such myths are particularly stubborn for a number of reasons.
as someone who has been recently indoctrinated with the liberal view on education, I think that (if there was any love to start with for NCLB) love for NCLB has totally dried up and this is because the theory (now?) is that people are SO different that standard testing wouldn’t work. If anything students are treated as culture-bearers rather than tabula rasa.
Standardized testing has never worked. I hate it, taking those tests were annoying as shit. I didn’t really care for them. The ‘Response to Literature’ section had a lot of Liberal propaganda on it, like responding to Persuasive Essays doing with Global Warming.
That’s true, and the scores are based on how you do compared with everyone else, not objectively. So as long as you are better than average (whatever average is) you can be considered “smart”. Good guessing can also be a decisive factor in succeeding in a test too.
I have yet to meet anyone who is in favor of NCLB, even among those who believe the federal government should have a role in education. Maybe I’m just lucky…