Free Free Set them Free

Perhaps Sting was right all along and we were just not listening to him.  Reading the articles related to NCLB makes it very difficult to take the objective/what can we do to fix things approach. While I am entering posts at the last minute I have spent every spare minute over the last week trying to understand how we have arrived where we have with this issue. I appreciate the posts entered on this same issue by several classmates.  Even when we are able to put NCLB in some historical context,what are we suppose to actually do in the classroom to change things? We are still going to have these tests and the results are still going to be a giant factor in our employment, especially our early employment. I also find it very interesting that we originally began this entire education reform endeavor to help students who were at risk and somehow we have completley revamped the way we are teaching the ones who were doing fine or even better than fine. While it is a nice thought and a very kind act to invite students from the failing schools over into the classrooms with students that are not failing how practical is it? Are we really best serving the youth of America by mixing students who we know are at different levels and then attempting to teach them either the same or split our teaching time into basically teaching two classes? This does not seem best for the student who is excelling or the student who is not. It is not a matter of fair it is more an issue of what are we doing to education? 

For those of you that are working with NCLB I am sure it comes as no surpise that I am pulling a giant majority or articles that are bashing and not much else. While this information is in fact all true and very easy to relate to after spending any amount of time in education I am not finding many about the solutions or ideas. I did come across several pieces that spoke to the fact that teachers are going to have to use their voices to communicate these issues to the public but beyond that I found no solutions that seemed viable to me.

 It is worth mentioning that some very influential people  including Warren Buffet have alluded to the fact that many of our problems in the country including ones currently facing education are most likely going to be remedied via the corporate world. I find this particularly interesting in light of where we are going with philanthropy in education. Organizations such as Learning to Give, although I think it has been renamed are actually being brought to the classroom reflecting the philantropic culture that is fast pushing through both pop culture and mainstream politics. In posts to come I hope to have some information on what particularly the big foundations like the Gates Foundation are doing in thier efforts to support and help sustain public education. As educators I think is is worth our knowing. In the meantime perhaps we could become free agents!

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