
House Restores Local Education Control in Revising No Child Left Behind - walterbell
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/us/house-restores-local-education-control-in-revising-no-child-left-behind.html
======
noahmbarr
3 thoughts here:

1) There's a lot going on in No Child Left Behind, but one of the interesting
ideas is to segment up the student population by gender, income level,
minority group, etc and define failure via measurement of inadequate scores in
any subgroup.

2) I'm not convinced most states should be spending the time or resources
setting their own individual educational programs. With the global economy we
are in, it's not like the needs of students in Washington state are that
different than Oregon or North Carolina. This infrastructure overlap provides
a lot of job security for administrators.

3) Lastly, its hard to strike the right balance between the benefits of
longitudinal testing, not spending too much time testing students instead of
teaching them, and lastly not teaching students to pass the test (instead of
try in learn the underlying concepts).

Suffice to say, there's a lot going with these bills and their subsequent
iterations.

~~~
stdbrouw
> I'm not convinced most states should be spending the time or resources
> setting their own individual educational programs. With the global economy
> we are in, it's not like the needs of students in Washington state are that
> different than Oregon or North Carolina.

But this is true of state law as well: in principle, there's really no reason
why you'd need to have different laws in different states, but it turns out
the ability to respond more quickly to challenges and to try out ten different
solutions in ten different states is really useful. It's not like we've
discovered the perfect curriculum yet, either. And it's not even clear we know
what we want or need: ask 10 companies and 10 universities what they expect
out of a high school student and you'll get 20 different answers.

~~~
smrq
> to try out ten different solutions in ten different states

Interesting, I never quite thought about it in these terms. If you squint at
it right, it's almost like A/B testing laws.

~~~
pjungwir
This is why the states are sometimes called "laboratories of democracy."

~~~
user9001
too bad everyone of them is a control group.

