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A new web site has been launched in support of No Child Left Behind. Sponsored by the Business Coalition for Student Achievement, Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, The Education Trust, The Links, National Center for Educational Accountability, and National Council of La Raza, the web site, NCLB Works, can be found at www.nclbworks.org. The organizations that came together said that they view “the No Child Left Behind Act as one of the critical tools needed to transform U.S. education.” Each of the organizations has its own recommendations to improve No Child Left Behind as it goes through the reauthorization process, but they all agreed that “NCLB provides parents, teachers and communities with the information they need to help children meet high standards and prepares American students to achieve in school and succeed in an increasingly competitive workplace.”
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Watch for a new report from MassInsight that will lay out a very concrete plan for how to improve the schools that have seemed most resistant to improvement. Check the web site www.massinsight.org.
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States Not Doing Their Job
The National Council on Teacher Quality recently issued a blistering report saying that states have not done what is necessary to ensure that all students have qualified, effective teachers. Guaranteeing good teachers is a much-neglected aim of No Child Left Behind, and the feds have been dilatory about enforcing it. The NCTQ doesn’t address the federal neglect in this report, however. Rather it places blame squarely on the states, which are governmental entities that, among other things, issue teacher licenses. The report says, for example, that most states permit students to enter teacher preparation programs without demonstrating mastery of basic skills and knowledge; they permit teachers to enter the profession without demonstrating the knowledge and skills necessary to be an effective teacher; they permit teachers to gain tenure protections before they have demonstrated that they are effective; and they do not use measures of teacher effectiveness as part of teacher evaluations. The report includes state-by-state report cards, and it didn’t grade on a curve—no state got an A, and B’s were a lot less common than D’s and F’s.
Latinos Put Education at the Top of the Agenda
A new poll shows that Hispanic voters consider education a more important issue than the war in Iraq and healthcare. The poll, which was co-sponsored by National Council of La Raza and Strong American Schools, interviewed 1,000 Hispanic voters in the United States. Forty-one percent of those polled noted education as their top concern, followed by healthcare and the Iraq War which each had 26 percent of responses. Jobs and immigration also ranked among the top five concerns. According to National Council of La Raza, other key findings in this poll include:
- Latino voters consider the high dropout rate among Latino students to be the greatest educational problem for the Latino community in the U.S.
- Half of those surveyed declared that they considered the quality of public schools to be “mediocre” or “poor.”
- While teachers received generally positive ratings, more than 80% of the Latino electorate feels that one way to improve public education in America is to hire more teachers with expertise in the subjects they will teach.
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