Obama's War on Schools

Barack Obama was supposed to get rid of Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation, yet what he has proposed hasn’t given many good results either. Obama’s approach called Race to the Top has been much worse than NCLB. The reforms he is proposing still wouldn’t solve the more serious problems NCLB has caused. NCLB’s theory was that schools would improve a lot if every child in 3^rd to 8^th grade were tested every year and then the results were made public. If results didn’t improve in the mathematical and reading areas by 2014 then there would be firing of staff and closing of the school. What people have seen is that those results aren’t happening and 2014 is getting close so what NCLB is leading to is the destruction of public education. Teachers have to focus on the skills of test taking instead of any other area of study which only makes students become less and less interested in school so test scores are going down. On the other hand what Obama is doing with his Race to the Top is that teachers are evaluated by the test results of the students. If there are low testing scores then that is what determines if a teacher will get fired. Unlike NCLB that directed its attention to test scores, Race to the Top solely relies on teachers and blames them for what good or bad students do. But what this doesn’t take into account is how some students may be sick and miss school which results in bad test scores and this in no way is the teachers fault. It keeps putting more and more pressure on the teachers so they don’t have time for innovation and creativity and kills many of the student’s interest in school. Teachers are becoming aggravated because they feel their profession is being attacked. Instead of putting so much pressure and blaming teachers for the results that students have, they should give more funding to them which will actually help out in improving test scores. Closing down schools will affect everyone’s public education and sooner or later there will be none. Click here to view article.