Please open the link from NPE Action and, if you agree that John King is overreaching, write a letter to your member of Congress.
King will testify before the Senate Committee that led the revision of NCLB and eliminated the federal punishments. King is trying through regulation to restore them.
Please let your members of Congress hear from you!
Here are the members of the Senate HELP Committee.
http://www.help.senate.gov/about/members
Most of the Democratic members (especially Warren, Sanders, Murphy, and Bennett) are accountability hawks. Write them anyway.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I am sure charter school champion Senator Booker would love to hear from me, but I am going to pass. Did the ESSA supporters think reauthorization of the standardized testing machine would lead to light at the end of the tunnel?
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I wrote my senators this morning and already got a form reply from Chris Murphy in which my concerns were not addressed. The email did, however, heap praises on the ESSA. I sent a follow-up email telling whoever whose job it is to respond to emails to reread my initial email. I feel like we are talking to a brick wall when it comes to accountability.
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Chris Murphy wrote an amendment to ESSA that would have preserved the worst features of ESSA, making John King the arbiter of accountability in every school. Fortunately, Murphy’s amendment was defeated. It would have kept NCLB alive.
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I got the same kind of email from my senator, Dick Durbin. Just blah blah on how great ESSA is and how he appreciates hearing from me.
I sent an email back stating that his response did not address my concerns and if he was not going to respond correctly, not to respond at all.
In fact, when I wrote to him against the amendments added to this, I got the same ‘blah blah ain’t I great that I voted for this’ response.
Do they get so many emails and letters that they don’t bother to read them? Brick wall is right.
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So I have a friend and former colleague who is a principal in a charter school. She’s a minority and says she’s thankful we had NCLB because it woke everyone up and almost implied that white people deserved it.
What sayeth one to such a statement? I did not know.
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Involved,
The correlations between socio-economic status and academic achievement are well documented. No Child Left Behind sanctions included closing of schools deemed “low performing” on the basis of standardized test scores. I find it surprising that your friend may not have been aware of ways educational opportunities are largely distributed along social class lines in this country. Anyone who woke up to this reality because of No Child Left Behind was asleep at the wheel.
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Tell the former colleague that he/she did not read the law very carefully. Then ask if he/she thinks that NCLB and the latest ESSA has made any difference in the education of our children of all colors and economic means in the last 10 years.
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Some people just refuse to change their minds no matter what.
Perhaps a few hints from a slim, inexpensive paperback published in 2004.
MANY CHILDREN LEFT BEHIND: How the No Child Left Behind Act is Damaging Our Children and Our Schools (2004). Deborah Meier and George Wood, editors.
Just the following, from the contribution by Alfie Kohn, “NCLB and the Effort to Privatize Public Education,” pp. 86-87, where he poses three questions for those that claim NCLB would provide help where needed:
[start]
1. How many schools will NCLB-required testing reveal to be troubled that were not previously identified as such? For the last year or so, I have challenged defenders of the law to name a single school anywhere in the country whose inadequacy was a secret until yet another wave of standardized test results was released. So far I have had no takers.
2. Of the many schools and districts that are obviously struggling, how many have received the resources they need, at least without a court order? If conservatives are sincere in saying they want more testing in order to determine where help is needed, what has their track record been in providing that help? The answer is painfully obvious, of course: Many of the same people who justify more standardized tests for information-gathering purposes have also claimed that more money doesn’t produce improvement. The Bush administration’s proposed budgets have fallen far short of what states would need just to implement NCLB itself, and those who point this out are dismissed as malcontents. (Thus Bennett and Finn: “Democrats are now saying that Republicans are not spending enough. But that is what they always say—enough is never sufficient for them when it comes to education spending.”)
3. What have the results of high-stakes testing been to this point? To the best of my knowledge, no positive effects have ever been demonstrated, unless you count higher scores on those same tests. More low-income and minority students are dropping out, more teachers (often the best ones) are leaving the profession, and more mind-numbing test preparation is displacing genuine instruction. Why would anyone believe that annual do-or-die testing managed by the federal government will lead to anything different? Moreover, the engine of this legislation is punishment. NCLB is designed to humiliate and hurt the schools that, according to its own standards, most need help. Families at those schools are given a green light to abandon them—and, specifically,, to transfer to other schools that don’t want them and probably can’t handle them. Thus, it quickly becomes clear, is an excellent way to sandbag the “successful” schools, too.
[end]
Consider how prescient the above remarks have turned out to be.
Good luck.
😎
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We learned nothing from NCLB that was not well known before.
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was the “soft bigotry of low expectations” a political sound bite?
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Involved Mom, of course “the soft bigotry of low expectations” was a sound bite, and an effective one. Standards alone are insufficient to improve achievement.
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so Michael Gerson had a large hand in what has happened to our public schools?
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“A lot of Nothing”
Nothing studied
Nothing learned
Students bloodied
Public spurned
Congress is
As Congress does
Words mean nothing,
Just because
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“Leader” is
As “leader” does
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