2003 Howard Dean on NCLB... "every school in America by 2013 will be a failing school."

[madfloridian]

Looks like Congress is rather bogged down in fixing the No Child Left Behind disaster. That is scary, since by 2013 every student must have met the standards they keep changing. An impossible goal.

Howard Dean was very outspoken on this issue in 2003. He said "every school in America by 2013 will be a failing school."

He also said:

"The president's ultimate goal," said former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.), one of the Democrats who now harshly attacks NCLB, "is to make the public schools so awful, and starve them of money, just as he's starving all the other social programs, so that people give up on the public schools."
Bush's Education Fraud

In 2003 Dean urged Governors to reject federal funding for NCLB

MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean on Sunday urged states to reject federal No Child Left Behind funding, and said he would if still governor of Vermont.

''It's going to cost them more in property taxes and other taxes than they are going to get out of it,'' Dean told The Associated Press following a campaign stop.

Earlier in the day, he told a crowd of teachers and supporters at Merrimack High School that ''Vermont would have been the first state to turn down that money'' if he still was governor.

Dean criticized President Bush, saying his administration will lower the standards for good schools in New Hampshire, making them more like poorly performing schools in Texas. The Bush administration believes ''the way to help New Hampshire is to make it more like Texas,'' Dean told supporters in Manchester, adding that ''every school in America by 2013 will be a failing school.''

''Every group, including special education kids, has to be at 100 percent to pass the tests,'' Dean said. ''No school system in America can do that. That ensures that every school will be a failing school.''

Failing to fight failure

Failing to fight failure...One year later, the No Child Left Behind Act is not meeting its goals. With expectations too high and funds too low, it may do more harm than good.

..."The federal government can declare a school “failing” if its test scores do not rise five percent every year or if certain racial groups in the school do not improve five percent each year. Under the Act, the federal government can withhold funding from any school that does not meet its standards. But most successful states rarely increase their test scores by more than one percent each year. Loveless points out, though, that threats of punishment for failure may not be taken seriously, because “quite frankly, the federal government has never cut off a state.” If the threats were carried out, though, the results would be disastrous. The low-performing schools would receive less money, as opposed to more money. Moreover, the states are being told they must revamp their entire educational structure to match the federal government’s demands. If they do not execute certain provisions of the Act, they could lose millions.

So what can be done when states say they need more money, and the federal government says that they don’t? Unfortunately, the answer looks like nothing. The No Child Left Behind Act is a flawed and dangerously optimistic piece of legislation that simply cannot succeed anywhere near expectations. Worse, it actually has the potential to disrupt the successful programs that states have created by focusing on testing, and it ignores problems such as ballooning classroom size, under-funded English as a Second Language programs, and other basic needs. Even if the Bush administration poured billions more into NCLB to support its goals, the money and wishful thinking still wouldn’t help the education system evolve into a sound model for a decade. The Act is doomed to fail because it does not consider the needs of the states and the speed at which they can institute reform."

Bush's Education Fraud

"From the start, the NCLB debates have echoed the classic American ambivalence about how much schools alone can be expected to do in closing historic achievement gaps and overcoming social and cultural disadvantages. But it has also had political overtones all its own: the belief, by some on the right, that people like Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) signed on only to leverage more money from the federal government and would be happy to let the accountability system fade away; and the belief, in some circles on the left, that NCLB, like all accountability systems, was a conservative trick to show the schools as failures and open the door for vouchers. "The president's ultimate goal," said former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.), one of the Democrats who now harshly attacks NCLB, "is to make the public schools so awful, and starve them of money, just as he's starving all the other social programs, so that people give up on the public schools."

NCLB Outrages

"The standards are so ridiculous that every single public school in America will be deemed to be a school in need of improvement or a failing school by 2013," former Vermont governor Howard Dean said in a teleconference yesterday. He said the law, which he has pledged to dismantle, was "making education in America worse, not better."

..."As governor, Dean opposed No Child Left Behind and said Vermont would have to raise $80 million more from property taxes to implement it. Yesterday, he called the law an "intrusive mandate" and said Democratic candidates who voted for it were "co-opted" by Bush's agenda, which Dean says aims to "put public schools out of business."

Eugene W. Hickok, acting US deputy secretary of education, said Dean "doesn't get it" because he comes from a small, rural state without the challenges of a diverse student population.

NCLB atrocities

"Thursday marks the two-year anniversary of President Bush's landmark education reform legislation, the No Child Left Behind Act. The law required schools, teachers, and students, under threat of federal sanctions, to meet steadily rising standards of performance as measured by regular testing, the ultimate goal being "to close the achievement gap ... so that no child is left behind." All students are supposed to be performing at grade level by 2013."

When pigs fly this will happen, which sadly is what the bill is about....failure.

Proficiency by 2013

"NCLB requires public reporting on the extent to which schools are making "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) toward the goal of having all students proficient in reading and math by the 2013-14 school year."

There will never be a time when ALL will be proficient in reading and math, not when you set one standard for all....forgetting that children are not little robots.

They are different inside, they think in unique ways. It takes a variety of methods used by a skilled teacher to reach goals of any kind....not ones that just keep on getting out of reach.

I fully believe the program was geared to failure. So did many teachers I taught with...they figured it out early on. It does not take rocket science to figure that when you label all kids alike, set the same goals for them...you will have failure.