Maine Voices: Make public education work for future
May 6th, 2008 Posted in In The News | No Comments »
More than anything else, what is missing from today’s political discussion is the belief that we can solve our biggest problems. We don’t dream big enough, we don’t propose bold enough, and we don’t reach far enough.
It is perhaps not surprising then that the Press Herald dedicated an editorial last week to supporting a very minor change in No Child Left Behind about how states calculate their school dropout rate. But any discussion of reauthorization of NCLB must begin with the fact that the law has failed Maine students and that it must be repealed and then rewritten to better serve students here and across the country.
As a member and chair of the Legislature’s Education Committee in the 1990s, I worked to create educational standards and establish high expectations to ensure that every high-school graduate in Maine would have certain skills and abilities as a thinker and learner upon graduation.
Unfortunately, NCLB swept into Maine shortly thereafter and compromised our effort at the state level. Rather than statewide standards that were focused on developing skills among our students, teachers and administrators now had to worry about a one-size-fits-all national directive to force their students to become good test-takers. The alternative was to have their school labeled “failing” and face the consequences.
