Good Words for President Bush
I don’t believe I’ve ever mentioned GWB at this blog. That’s because we are about ideas and not about people and I don’t recall any ideas coming out of the Bush Institute or the Bush Library that seem to warrant mention. However, we live in the same city and I see him from time to time and last week was the occasion to say good things about the president, so I pass along this tribute from the liberal blogger Matt Yglesias:
The good Bush begins with the oft-derided No Child Left Behind Act that passed with overwhelming bipartisan majorities near the beginning of Bush’s presidency. The bill pumped more federal money into K-12 schools while sensibly requiring them to do more to measure student learning. A particularly crucial aspect of NCLB that’s often driven backlash is that it requires demographic breakouts. Since socioeconomic factors are a major driver of educational outcomes, crude estimates of school performance tend to be dominated by compositional affects. In Texas, for example, poor kids do better than the national average for poor kids (and Latinos do better than the average for Latinos, African-Americans do better than the average for African-Americans) but the relatively small share of middle-class white kids in Texas public schools pushes their NAEP scores well below the national average. Education policy and the appropriate use of standardized tests remains controversial, but I’m confident we won’t go back to the pre-Bush standard.
As a former high school teacher, I hate No Child Left Behind. If you guarantee every child a high school diploma, it necessarily makes these diplomas worthless. This forces everyone into the university system (where many do not belong), or into the only-marginally-better-than-high-school community college system.
I feel rather neutral about Bush’s policies overall. He did infringe on a great deal of civil liberties with the Patriot Act, but he almost balances this out with some of his other policies.
Dick Cheney, however, might actually be Satan.
Don’t know enough about the NCLB act and its positive or negative impacts on the educational system. I have heard a lot of backlash though, particularly in terms of how it has caused schools to unconventionally focus on standardized test scores in fear of losing funding, which fundamentally deteriorates the school’s supposed primary focus: educating students. Standardized test scores unfortunately do little to nothing in teaching students applicable knowledge in various fields.
Not getting into GWB politics, but in regards to the NCLB act, I think it just greatly perpetuated a dysfunctional educational system in our country. We need to focus on other incentives for performance where students actually learn and not focus on standardized tests as a measure of success.
The last sentence says it all: “If you want to worry about Texas, worry about the stingy Medicaid and widespread lack of health insurance.”
In other words, if you’re poor in Texas you’ll have a better than national average ability to read your parents gravestone.
I do like the ability to break down the demographics, and focus attention on areas that need the most work.
I agree, I think NCLB introduced the concept of accountability for schools.
Although Standardized Testing has its fair share of controversy, it do think it serves a good basic measure, that said, diversity and creativity are important in schools. Surely we can do all those things.
I agree with Sandeep, indeed, the issues you raised aren’t mutually exclusive, rather, if experimented correctly,those issues build on each other!
Interesting, I didn’t know Texas poor populace preformed higher than the rest. What’s the reasoning behind this? What is Texas doing right?
Why does Texas have a higher poverty rate than the rest?