Deducation: Repeal the No Child Left Behind Act

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is, perhaps outside of the PATRIOT Act, potentially the most damaging and far reaching legacy of the Bush administration. It applies misguided notions of how kids learn and how to teach them to further a conservative agenda that will guarantee our students will graduate with little more than a mass of irrelevant, testable, and ultimately wrong "facts" and have not the least clue how to think. It believes in tests, it tests the wrong things, it rewards those who score highly on these wrong-headed tests. The damage it has done, and continues to do, to our nation's children is incalculable. It may take generations to undo this.

Our educational system is being killed: it's almost dead. Deducation, I call it. Mind-numbing, teaching to invalid tests, memorization of facts that won't be facts tomorrow, stifling all ability to think critically, taking all teaching decisions out of the hands of teachers, funneling educational funds into the best white schools, leaving behind all children except upper class whites. Repeal the NCLB today and put education back in the hands of people who know what they are doing.