Trib: Ending wasteful experiment

In his morning editorial in the Lewiston Tribune, Opinion Editor Marty Trillhaase bids good riddance to No Child Left Behind:

When No Child Left Behind was being launched, it wasn’t all that hard to find teachers who viewed it as a not-too-subtle plot to destroy public schools. Over the top? Hysterical? Paranoid? Sure. But educators felt shut out of former President George W. Bush’s 2002 response to faltering inner-city schools, which imposed:

• An impossible goal - 100 percent of students be proficient in reading, math and English language arts by 2014.
• An overly punitive system - Schools that failed to attain adequate yearly progress toward the proficiency goal would be labeled failures and face steadily escalating punishment, from bad publicity to a wholesale replacement of the teaching and administrative staff.
• A testing minefield - Students would be subjected to testing in grades 3 though 8 and then again once in high school. It pressured schools to “teach to the test.” It also tempted some to game the system. More here.