Obama wants to revise the No Child Left Behind education law

NCLB is not a perfect piece of legislation. So President Obama want to drop the most "egregious" aspects and replace them with new measures:

1- Drop the requirement that students be proficient in Math and English by 2014

2- replace it with all student will be "college or career ready" by 2020.

Huh??

How can a student be "college ready" without graduating from high school able to do 12th grade math and English?!?

Oh, I get it. One can measure proficiency. How do you measure "college readiness". The old magician's trick of misdirection.

Now I get it.

Comments

[Sean]

Maybe someone here can help me understand this question...

If we want to teach all of our high school students on GLOBAL level and everyone needs to be an engineer, scientist or doctor, then who will build our houses, fix our cars, repair our roads and all the other infrastructure

Maybe our "dumb" engineers will fix cars and the "slow" ones will build our bridges?

Sean

[Karen L. Alldredge]

Afer watching 2MIllion Minutes, an insight that might be helpful to recognize is that the US is a country of free thinkers and daydreamers -'Creatives' that give the engineers and scientists wonderful problems to solve. That is why the brilliant acamdemics from other countries love the US.
Without the opportunity to dream and create problems to solve, advanced science and math are of no particular value.

[Singh Ashish K]

Hi Bob,

Yesterday I read the cover article of Time magazine April 19,2010. It clearly reflects the importance of education. The concern all over America and also the World is degradation of Values, the basic unit of education.

Education is beyond a social system. It is a thought, a trigger that changes the world. Gandhi's autobiography ends with seeking "Ahimsa in mind, word and deed". It is just one Value that he followed all his life and could fight the mighty British empire. My favorite Hollywood movie is "Seven", the 1995 Oscar winner for best film. It so nicely shows how not giving enough thought to our daily chores we end up ruining our lives.

Sole purpose of education is to prevent degradation of Values and enable basic Values like Love, Peace, Knowledge, Strength, Health, Happiness and Truth in thought, word and deed. I completely agree with your take on the Teacher Union's in US. A good teacher is one who is most selfless. On the other hand a good learner is one who takes the best from bad instances. Time magazine showed how Fryer having flunked a College Calculus test finished his Degree in 2.5 years.

So it is just a small trigger that makes a man do great things. And the only purpose of education is to give thoughts a right direction. I am working on an online tool where anyone can design courses based on essential triggers of health and growth. This could also mean using the tool to design a curriculum for self or my child. Nothing may change but the intention is to ensure that education is not limited to schooling. Please refer to my site (http://www.ule.in/goals) if interested. I would love to share the details if you could provide me with a contact email id.

Regards,
Ashish.

[Matthew K. Tabor]

Misdirection is part of it - and we're trading one unrealistic goal for another. Not only is "college readiness" difficult to define, but we'll see higher education standards continue to plummet as the Obama administration and colleges/universities waddle aimlessly toward the mythical readiness goal. They want all students to be college-ready by 2020? Check the numbers of students taking basic remedial classes in the California system - we can't even ensure that the current college students are ready.

The most effective way to progress toward the 2020 goal is to dumb down higher education - and that's exactly what's going to happen.