Bush education policy to miss goals: Harvard study

[tocqueville]

By Jason Szep
Wed Jun 14, 12:15 AM ET

BOSTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush's signature No Child Left Behind education policy is failing to close racial achievement gaps and will miss its goals by 2014 according to recent trends, a Harvard study said on Wednesday.

It said the policy has had no significant impact on improving reading and math achievement since it was introduced in 2001, contradicting White House claims and potentially adding to concerns over America's academic competitiveness.

Bush's No Child Left Behind Act was meant to introduce national standards to an education system where only two-thirds of teenagers graduate from high school, a proportion that slides to 50 percent for blacks and Hispanics.

The study released by Harvard University's Civil Rights Project said national average of achievement by U.S. students has been flat in reading since 2001 and the growth rate in math has remained the same as before the policy was introduced.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060614/pl_nm/bush_education_dc_2

[Selatius]

1. We'll never catch up to other industrialized countries at this rate

College tuition continues to rise faster than the wages of workers. If 90 percent of students decided not to drop out of high school, there simply would not be enough teachers to handle them all, especially in inner-city minority neighborhoods, and even if the number of teachers isn't the problem, we have a problem with qualified teachers competent enough to be able to teach the material.

This is simply unsustainable. Our country WILL lose its technological edge at this rate, and future generations will not do as well as our parents or grandparents did.

It seems the only ones who aren't left behind are the children of wealthy people, and if this continues for a long period of time, we'll just end up with a new form of feudal aristocracy lording over the "great unwashed."

[wakeme2008]

2. See what happens when non-Bushbots do the books....

A totally different picture comes out...