Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Questions for the Obama administration

I am, too.

The way I remember NCLB being billed back in the early days was with the goal of improving the education system overall and increasing teacher and school accountability. If my memory is correct, then I think it has failed miserably.

Honestly, I'm not convinced it has even helped the kids at the back of the pack. For that, I would need to see some hard evidence. I don't see the anecdotal evidence in our system.

BTW, I also distinctly remember disliking the goals of NCLB from the start. That hasn't changed for me. As you say, the goal should be a good one if you're going to try to achieve it...

You can search for "gifted" under the education tab and vote for the gifted ones, if interested ... or NCLB. I submitted mine!

I do not see how a handful of people in a Washington building are smarter than tens of thousands of educators who work with the kids every day.

Well, I agree to a point. But I have problems with that notion, too, since we all know that teachers and principals are not perfect!

I do think there should be some attempt to get basic minimum standards in place on some sort of larger scale. (Though I'm absolutely open to discussion about what "larger scale" constitutes.) The problems as I see with making this work (off the top of my head) are:

1) What standards?
2) Who should meet the standards?
3) How do we determine if the standards are being met?
4) What happens if the standards are not met?
5) Who oversees the process and has authority?

These are just the start, but they're the heart of the matter.

So I guess I'm not clear: are you arguing against all national/state standards, Austin? Should every school be answerable only to itself? Or are you suggesting there is some other body besides elected officials to whom schools should be answerable?

Its better to fail small than fail big.


We already have accreditation bodies for different levels of schooling. These are overseen by experts, as determined by their peers, in education, just like any other field.

Teachers' colleges, schools, and curriculum are all vetted at some level and were vetted long before we had national involvement.

We have SAT, AP, ACT, and IB all without some Federal statute.

As for accountability, the local school boards are accountable to the local voters and levy and spend tax money accordingly. This makes them flexible and responsive and the politics stays out of most decision making.

Between the accreditors, test standing, and voters - that is how we know if the school is doing their job.

Where can the Feds help?

By requiring important information to be transparent across all schools - testing done at the same time in the same way with the results and supporting demographic data archived publicly - that way schools can be measured. I am not saying its perfect, but until you can measure, you won't know anything.

Here's some evidence: http://www.educationsector.org/research/research_show.htm?doc_id=373044

And some more evidence, at least for the children of parents on this board...
http://www.edexcellence.net/doc/20080618_high_achievers.pdf

Here is how NCLB has failed my son. When he was 2 we started looking for a house to buy. We looked at all the school districts in our area that had houses that we could afford. There was only one district in our area that had a comprehensive gifted program. We looked for houses in that district and found one. Then he started school, and because the district has a lot of children that are failing behind, they had to cut all the extras to get the worst schools up to par.

The first things on the chopping block... art, music, PE, and the gifted and talented program.

I totally agree that the school that are failing need to be held accountable, but at this point once kids hit third grade there classes become teaching for "the test". There are pumped full of sound bites and work sheet. There are some good teachers still, that actually teach, but the drive for the school to do well on the almighty test is what drives the schools. And good programs that help kids have different avenues of learning are the victim.

My sons principal wanted him to be diagnosed with something so he would be special ed and would therefore bring the school extra money, and then they would be able to afford the extra programs.... our story is not unique.

Does it really put that much of a financial or staffing burden on a district to educate the high academic ability kids?! According to Teaching Gifted Children in the Regular Classroom, it doesn't. I can tell you that our district is spending more time and resources on meetings, letters, phone calls, etc. dealing with my advocating for DS than if they would just let him do an online math course in place of the regular math a few times a week... Plus, you'd think a district would be motivated to keep kids like DS in the district who are a shoe-in for getting "advanced" on the standardized tests, thus more $$.