Excerpt
TOM BEARDEN (Newshour): Amid bipartisan praise, President Bush signed No Child Left Behind into law in 2002. The sweeping education reform sought to make sure more public schools and more students performed up to expectations.
But, almost 10 years later, President Obama said today, the law wasn't working.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The goals behind No Child Left Behind were admirable, and President Bush deserves credit for that. Higher standards are the right goal. Accountability is the right goal. Closing the achievement gap is the right goal. And we've got to stay focused on those goals.
But experience has taught us that, in its implementation, No Child Left Behind had some serious flaws that are hurting our children, instead of helping them.
TOM BEARDEN: The president said the law's heavy reliance on annual testing led educators to teach to the test and de-emphasize history and science, in the quest to improve reading and math scores.
Despite that effort, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has warned that more than 80 percent of the nation's schools risk being labeled failures under the law by 2014. So, the president today announced waivers for states if they offer their own plans that meet federal standards.
BARACK OBAMA: We can't let another generation of young people fall behind because we didn't have the courage to recognize what doesn't work, admit it, and replace it with something that does.
TOM BEARDEN: Mr. Obama insisted he is not weakening the law, but helping states set higher standards. And he said congressional delay in addressing the issue had forced his hand.
BARACK OBAMA: Our kids only get one shot at a decent education. They cannot afford to wait any longer. So, given that Congress cannot act, I am acting.
COMMENT: The reason states did what they did, is because the law effects the federal education funds available to them. The current implementation of the law is typical one-shoe-fits-all approach, which often does NOT work.
More excerpts
JACK DALE, Fairfax County, Va., Public Schools: Well, I think the goals, as Kati just said, are lofty and appropriate.
What you see in the classroom is this obsession with testing, instead of an obsession with learning. And because we have been so much around the testing side of it, we haven't paid attention to kids actually learning and all of the different things besides just learning to read and do computations with mathematics, but learning how to think critically, how to problem-solve, how to work with other kids and that kind of thing.
So the feedback I get repeatedly from parents is way too much focus on testing. So that's one of the challenges right there. The other challenge was moving up the bar every year to assume that, in a given instant, 100 percent of the kids would always pass the test. And we had this focus on a one-shot piece of testing, as opposed to change that I think we should have is one where you can focus on kids: Did you learn? Did you not? If you didn't learn it, then how can you relearn it and then demonstrate your competence?
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JACK DALE: And then we have local community members who want yet something different. So, one of the things I want to see in this flexibility is, for us, particularly in the community I serve, is, I can't just focus on reading and math. I have got to focus on a lot richer set of skills for kids in critical thinking and problem-solving, complex problems of the world.
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KATI HAYCOCK, Education Trust: That's not changing in -- but what is changing is the balance between federal and state is righter, I think, this time.
What essentially the federal government is suggesting is that we still have a need to move our country ahead quickly in education, both for all kids and for the kids who have been behind. But we're going to set the goals here, keep that tight, but keep looser how you get there.
And so what I think this is likely to do, although it won't happen overnight, is begin get more ownership from states and fewer conflicts between federal and state ideas about what should be done, which should make it easier for reform-minded educators to move ahead.
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