The Goals Of Education is the title of a great article by Richard Rothstein and Rebecca Jacobsen that appeared in the December, 2006 issue of the Phi Delta Kappan.
I just happened to find it in some research I was doing. It gives a excellent historical perspective about what the purposes of schools have been in this country, and the effect of standardized testing on these original goals.
The article is particularly helpful to me by its description of the original intent of “civics” instruction, which is more in-line with what I teach in my Government class than what is typically done in most classrooms today.
Teaching in the UK, I haven’t really experienced NCLB aside from seeing some of it in practice in episodes of The Wire in season 4. What I saw there looked pretty realistic to me, although I’m not normally prone to relying on TV to give me the facts I need to discuss a point.
I often feel that in education today we’re being told to teach small compartments of skills and knowledge without any serious consideration of the big picture. It’s almost like assuming that showing a child how nine or ten jigsaw pieces fit together will teach them how to do the whole jigsaw. Sometimes that approach works, sometimes it doesn’t.
NCLB strikes me as a one size fits all policy, and usually the people that kind of approach fits are the ones who would excel anyway because of their existing circumstances and quality of life.