Originally posted by Cyrinne
How do we hold me accountable for doing my job?
I dunno. I don't think the President has a clue either. When asked, he consistently answers, "One thing I know, is we know more now because we're testing."

It makes its own sort of sense to me to have a national standard so we have some ability to make comparisons, but I'm in no position to suggest a way to transform that information into useful policy. The most obvious first step to me would be to see some information on dollars per child vs test outcomes, then go and see what's being done where the best test outcomes are scored, then the worst, and someplace maybe where we seem to be spending less but getting on towards the upper 50% of test results. Heck, I don't even know what is or isn't being done.

Looking over what I can find about NCLB, one thing that is troubling to me is that actually these sorts of things have nothing to do with the program. It seems that basically, if you don't meet rising standards year by year you just get your federal funding cut, which not coincidentally meshes well with the conservative belief that the Feds didn't belong in the school funding business to begin with. Still, with some alteration it could serve the purpose intended.

That's the problem though with control through federal taxation and then punitive witholding. It's nothing more than a workaround for the fact that there really isn't a defined roll for the federal government in education, legally speaking.

So, overall, a real conversation killer, that. *cough*