In her new book, In Defense of Our Children: When Politics, Profits and Education Collide, Elaine Garan describes how high-stakes testing and government ditaks on curriculum materals (specifically for teaching reading) are severely damaging public education.
Garan argues that the No Child Left Behind Act is a tool for the coporate takeover of public schools that has also created serious conflicts of interests for certain educational researchers.
Garan lays bare problems with the National Reading Panel (NRP) report, with a critique that complements excellent research on the same topic by Gerald Coles. She also illustrates how the NCLB requirement that any “instructional materials” purchased with program funds must be “based on scientifically based reading research” (NCLB Sect. 1202(b)(7)(iii)) damages reading instruction.
In his review of the book in Teachers College Record, Gary Ranter concludes:
Garan has performed a valuable service by challenging the purported “scientific basis” for the commercial reading programs that the government requires states and localities to adopt to receive funding under NCLB’s Reading First initiative. And she is right to urge parents and teachers to learn more about the new NCLB “reforms,” to organize, and to advocate at the state and local levels against “corporate takeovers” of public education and “deskilling of teachers” (p. 150).
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There is hope out there.NCLB is going down. It is dead. The body is still twitching but the patient is dead. More and more states and districts are challenging it on the basis of its legality and the fact that it is unconstitutional. When I wrote In Defense of Our Children, the future was considerably more dim than it is now.
For all of you in Reading First schools who are suffering and are ready to give up, hang in there. NCLB is DEAD– it is terminally wounded and will be DEAD soon. I have followed NCLB since its inception and have chronicaled the backlash. This is going to the Supreme Court and there it will be challenged on the basis that NCLB is illegal AND it is unconstitutional.
Surprisingly or maybe not surprisingly, those who are the most outraged (as in Utah) are the Republicans who have had an awakening and see it as an intrusion on state and local control of schools. So hang in there. NCLB is dead. I do not say this idly and it is not wishful thinking. NCLB is dead. Elaine Garan