USN: The Education Secretary Talks About NCLB

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The Education Secretary Talks About NCLB
Spellings shares her thoughts on how that law can be improved when it is renewed
By Eddy Ramírez
Posted November 5, 2007

As the U.S. secretary of education, Margaret Spellings oversees the implementation of the No Child Left Behind law. In a recent interview, she defended the original law's focus on reading and math assessments but expressed support for an improved bill that makes better distinctions between chronically failing schools and schools that just need more help with particular groups of students. A believer that "what gets measured gets done," she remains confident that schools can bring all students to grade-level proficiency by 2014 but says progress is not being made fast enough.


Some folks have criticized the law for not setting clear expectations about what children should learn. The pressure to meet federal proficiency requirements may in fact be driving some states to lower their standards. Is it time to set a single set of national standards?

For us to take x number of years to have a federal debate about intelligent design just seems like a real bad idea to me, particularly when we have a speedometer that says, "We're going too slow; we need to pick up the pace." The president has already called for us to start to report
[the results of the National Assessment of Education Progress] to parents. Let's tell the parents of Mississippi that while their state test says 80-some percent of their kids are proficient, this is how they are doing on the NAEP test. Let the good people of Mississippi take that into account and say, "You know what? We probably need to raise the bar." And they are raising the bar.... I don't think the way to do it is a one-size-fits-all national standard that morphs into a national curriculum that morphs into national textbooks. It's the wrong way to go, and it's a giant time-waster.


full article: http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/2007/11/05/the-education-secretary-talks-about-nclb_print.htm