Good and bad US government trends of this decade so far

[RedImperator]

Good:

-No Child Left Behind. The problem with it is that 90% of the students at my school didn't care about the state exams because they knew they could pass the test blindfolded, and that there would be no reward for any score that exceeds the passing point. Nonetheless, NCLB is a positive trend

NCLB is a disaster. It sets progress goals as percentage increases (so a school that goes from 20 to 30% proficiency is making Adequate Yearly Progress, while a school that goes from 80 to 83% is failing), makes no allowances for special ed or ESL students, takes money away from schools that are already in trouble, has led to the gutting of art, music, vocational and even social studies programs to make room for cram courses, it simultaneously overcentralizes curriculum planning in states while providing no coherent national curriculum guidelines, it's led to schools ignoring gifted and struggling students (and even most of the average ones) in favor of a small sliver who can be brought from "below proficiency" to "proficiency", the whole mess is woefully underfunded, and by 2014, every school district in America will be "failing" because the act demands 100% proficiency by that year. It hasn't come anywhere near achieving any of its stated goals except one (breaking down performance metrics by race and income, one of the few diamonds hiding in this giant turd), and it's doing real damage to the education system in the process. It's a genuine simpleminded Made In Texas mess from our simpleminded C- Commander-in-Chief. The country desperately needs genuine education reform, and we've squandered eight years on this piece of shit.

We could also improve NCLB by giving teachers merit pay based on whether their students underperform or overperform expectations (calculated based on students older achievement and aptitude scores).

That would be an even worse idea. Even assuming standardized test performance is a fair assessment of individual teacher performance (as if you can boil down the art of teaching to a three hour multiple choice test), all this would result in is teachers turning their classes in to NCLB cram courses so they can afford to pay their mortgages next year. That's not education, that's training seals. You may as well pay teachers based on how well their students jump through flaming hoops and balance fish on their noses.

But I've known some kids who have failed HSAs, or have had trouble passing, and I saw that there were positive benefits of NCLB. For example, there was a guy in my English class who managed to gets Bs and Cs in his english classes, but failed the HSAs because he had very weak writing skills. Ideally, teachers would diagnose this and not pass a kid through their English classes until they're proficient, but in reality teachers often give enough "free credit" so that students can pass their classes even if they are not proficient with the material. And it's not like the teachers aren't trying their hardest, it's just that they have troublemakers and malicious students to focus on too.

But when a student passes the HSA, the student is given resources to help them to pass the HSA, and the problem is diagnosed and treated. Without NCLB, a student could just go through High School without any deliberate effort to fix those problems.

Except that's not what happens unless the faculty and administration think you're worth the investment. The schools--especially the poor ones--are struggling just to meet AYP, so they let the weakest students crash and burn while they focus their attention on the handful who failed the first time but are close enough to pass the second. In my internship, I watched a school that didn't have two nickels to rub together, a 50% dropout rate between 9th and 10th grade, and hundreds of students who desperately needed all the help they could get, spend the time and money to run a Saturday cram course for a few dozen students so they wouldn't get their funding cut, while everyone else was left to twist in the wind.

[The Dark]

Does anyone remember Hurricanes prior to Katrina? We take this shit seriously now, all it took was tons of media coverage and the near loss of a major American city.

It existed for a short period after Andrew, but there was a lull in major storms after that hurricane. Hell, Andrew bankrupted 11 insurance companies and almost sank 30 more. 80% of South Florida's farms were destroyed. The National Hurricane Center's radar was destroyed, and its windows were shattered by debris punching through the hurricane shutters. Homestead Air Force Base was destroyed, with 97% of its facilities unusable. The primary difference is that very few people were reclaiming flooded homes. Despite the 18-foot storm surge, most homes were flat-out demolished, rather than flooded.

I still remember Pappy Bush being blasted for his lack of planning on Andrew. It took four days to get relief supplies into South Florida, and the Army denied a request from Lawton Chiles for an engineering battalion to aid the state. They stated they were required by law to bid the relief operation to private companies before getting involved. That jackass Stickney at FEMA was almost as competent as Brown. They didn't even send a damage assessment team until the Secretary of Transportation told them they needed to.

[Darth Wong]

Lowering of Capital Gains tax from 25% to 15%, encouraging investment among middle-income folks (of course, this mostly helps wealthy people, but it still is beneficial to those of us not making $250K+/year

Yeah, the top mutual funds are doing just great, and that money went into the great speculation bubbles of the last decade. Maybe the largest bubbles ever, and crept us dangerously toward financial devestation.

Was that because of the capital gains tax reduction, or because of other factors? The capital gains tax reduction only applies if you own stock for at least a year; otherwise it's treated as regular income.

I have trouble seeing how opening a wide gap between investment taxation and income taxation is a good thing. It means that people whose income is derived primarily from productive work are taxed much more heavily than people whose income is derived primarily from speculation and ownership. What you call "encouraging investment" could just as easily be referred to as "discouraging honest work".

[ArmorPierce]

The lowering of Capital Gains Tax with the "Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003" definitely was not a good thing. It is aimed to assist the wealthy primarily allowing them to actually have a lower tax burden than lower income individuals. Due to it, it allowed cop outs where high tax bracket individuals that were owners of a business were able to have a lower tax burden by making their business into corporation versus a sole proprietorship.

[CaptainZoidberg]

NCLB is a disaster. It sets progress goals as percentage increases (so a school that goes from 20 to 30% proficiency is making Adequate Yearly Progress, while a school that goes from 80 to 83% is failing)

I'll admit that I've only experienced the student's perspective on NCLB, so I am not able to really give an informed opinion on any of the administrative details of the policy.

makes no allowances for special ed or ESL students

Indeed that it something that needs to be fixed. On a slightly unrelated note, a problem I've seen with a lot of the college ranking systems is the emphasis on critical reading scores, which of course penalizes schools that have great international diversity.

takes money away from schools that are already in trouble

Well, yes. But the important thing to note is that NCLB provides a solid metric for judging which schools are failing.

has led to the gutting of art, music, vocational and even social studies programs to make room for cram courses

At my school the impact was that there was less diversity in courses, and in turn they were able to teach "very slow" algebra. Although the policy hurt me, I knew that it was the right thing to do because we were giving the slower kids the extra time they needed to learn algebra.

it simultaneously overcentralizes curriculum planning in states while providing no coherent national curriculum guidelines, it's led to schools ignoring gifted and struggling students (and even most of the average ones) in favor of a small sliver who can be brought from "below proficiency" to "proficiency"

Kids who are good at their schoolwork don't care about the NCLB in the first place. They're focusing on the AP tests, and in general the schools are still putting a lot of emphasis on those because getting a lot of kids to pass the AP tests is sort of a measure of a school's quality. Although I do think that schools should get federal funding based on how many kids do well on AP tests.

the whole mess is woefully underfunded, and by 2014, every school district in America will be "failing" because the act demands 100% proficiency by that year. It hasn't come anywhere near achieving any of its stated goals except one (breaking down performance metrics by race and income, one of the few diamonds hiding in this giant turd), and it's doing real damage to the education system in the process.

Yes, I agree that there should be a relative standard for what schools should be achieving, and goals that are more realistic.

It's a genuine simpleminded Made In Texas mess from our simpleminded C- Commander-in-Chief.

Bush's IQ is probably between 120 and 130 based on his SATs and ASVAB scores (the data is widely available). Psychologists would consider that above average of almost mentally gifted, not simpleminded.

The country desperately needs genuine education reform, and we've squandered eight years on this piece of shit.

Can I ask exactly what you'd propose as that reform?

That would be an even worse idea. Even assuming standardized test performance is a fair assessment of individual teacher performance (as if you can boil down the art of teaching to a three hour multiple choice test)

Yes, you can boil it down to a 3 hour test. If you take a calculus class, you should be able to solve problems that require you to take integrals and derivatives. If you take a biology class, you should be able to tell what mitochondria are.

I knew teachers in my High School that couldn't get very many of their students to pass the AP tests. They made excuses about how their students weren't smart enough or how the test was bunk, but the fact was that they were bad teachers and should have been fired.

all this would result in is teachers turning their classes in to NCLB cram courses so they can afford to pay their mortgages next year.

You keep calling them "NCLB cram courses", but what makes you think that you can "cram" for the tests more than you could cram for any other test. I took the tests myself in High School, and they weren't just straight memorization questions. They tested the concepts. A student who knew biology would pass through it easily. But a student who didn't understand biology would fail.

That's not education, that's training seals. You may as well pay teachers based on how well their students jump through flaming hoops and balance fish on their noses.

The difference between the tests under NCLB and the tests teachers give to kids in their class is standards. All classes teach to the test, it's just that No Child Left Behind tests are of better quality than the tests that most teachers give, and provide objective feedback to both students and teachers.

Except that's not what happens unless the faculty and administration think you're worth the investment. The schools--especially the poor ones--are struggling just to meet AYP, so they let the weakest students crash and burn while they focus their attention on the handful who failed the first time but are close enough to pass the second. In my internship, I watched a school that didn't have two nickels to rub together, a 50% dropout rate between 9th and 10th grade, and hundreds of students who desperately needed all the help they could get, spend the time and money to run a Saturday cram course for a few dozen students so they wouldn't get their funding cut, while everyone else was left to twist in the wind.

That's a valid criticism. I wouldn't be opposed to some measure that correlates scores on something like Raven's Progressive Matrices to future HSA scores, and then judges whether a student passes or fails based on whether they under-perform or over-perform other students with their aptitude test scores or older achievement test scores.

But here's the big picture: I don't think that No Child Left Behind is perfect, but it is a step in the right direction because it creates objective standards and accountability for schools.

From my experience in High School, the number one problem was a culture of failure. Students were encouraged to do less work then they could handle. Teachers weren't given any incentive to strive for greatness (the crappy teacher that doesn't get any student to pass an AP test gets the same pay as the an amazing teacher that gets great work out of their students). And worst of all, students were encouraged not to overextend themselves by taking classes that they might not succeed at.

Creating objective standards for judging student and teacher performance is the first step towards merit pay for teachers and tougher standards for students.

[RedImperator]

NCLB is a disaster. It sets progress goals as percentage increases (so a school that goes from 20 to 30% proficiency is making Adequate Yearly Progress, while a school that goes from 80 to 83% is failing)

I'll admit that I've only experienced the student's perspective on NCLB, so I am not able to really give an informed opinion on any of the administrative details of the policy.

makes no allowances for special ed or ESL students

Indeed that it something that needs to be fixed. On a slightly unrelated note, a problem I've seen with a lot of the college ranking systems is the emphasis on critical reading scores, which of course penalizes schools that have great international diversity.

takes money away from schools that are already in trouble

Well, yes. But the important thing to note is that NCLB provides a solid metric for judging which schools are failing.

So, let's review: you agree that there's a problem with how NCLB deals with special ed and ESL students, you agree (or at least, you don't disagree) that NCLB, as it is currently structured, can rate good schools as "failing" and terrible schools as making AYP, you don't disagree NCLB sets no national standards (so comparisons between states are essentially worthless), and you agree its final targets are unrealistic and unattainable. How, then, does NCLB provide a "solid metric" for judging the success and failure of anything?

has led to the gutting of art, music, vocational and even social studies programs to make room for cram courses

At my school the impact was that there was less diversity in courses, and in turn they were able to teach "very slow" algebra. Although the policy hurt me, I knew that it was the right thing to do because we were giving the slower kids the extra time they needed to learn algebra.

it simultaneously overcentralizes curriculum planning in states while providing no coherent national curriculum guidelines, it's led to schools ignoring gifted and struggling students (and even most of the average ones) in favor of a small sliver who can be brought from "below proficiency" to "proficiency"

Kids who are good at their schoolwork don't care about the NCLB in the first place. They're focusing on the AP tests, and in general the schools are still putting a lot of emphasis on those because getting a lot of kids to pass the AP tests is sort of a measure of a school's quality.

Do you not see the connection here? I'm not talking about getting gifted (and average) kids help on NCLB, I'm talking about more challenging and enriching course offerings and programs which get the ax to make room for NCLB prep. Often, the programs for the worst-off kids get gutted or cut too, because the ROI isn't enough to justify the effort; not when NCLB has put everyone's job on the line.

Although I do think that schools should get federal funding based on how many kids do well on AP tests.

Are you aware that many schools offer little or no AP classes, and that others are cutting AP to make room for NCLB prep? The schools that offer a robust selection of AP courses are usually (with some admirable exceptions) well-funded suburban districts that don't need Federal money.

Bush's IQ is probably between 120 and 130 based on his SATs and ASVAB scores (the data is widely available). Psychologists would consider that above average of almost mentally gifted, not simpleminded.

He's an incurious doctrinaire who's fucked up everything he's ever touched. I don't care if his IQ is eleventy squillion; he's a God damn idiot and NCLB reflects his one-size-fits-all worldview.

Can I ask exactly what you'd propose as that reform?

I don't have time to list it all here and I haven't fully settled on all the details, but it would involve serious administrative restructuring, abandoning the property tax funding model, rebuilding vocational education, making career training a priority for non-college bound students, going to an undergraduate model for college-bound students in 10th, 11th, and 12th grades, firing about two-thirds of the useless administrative deadweight that's given the United States the lowest ratio of teachers to non-teaching school employees in the world, and implementing some form of professional peer evaluation to asses teacher performance. That's not everything, but it's the major components.

That would be an even worse idea. Even assuming standardized test performance is a fair assessment of individual teacher performance (as if you can boil down the art of teaching to a three hour multiple choice test)

Yes, you can boil it down to a 3 hour test. If you take a calculus class, you should be able to solve problems that require you to take integrals and derivatives. If you take a biology class, you should be able to tell what mitochondria are.

I knew teachers in my High School that couldn't get very many of their students to pass the AP tests. They made excuses about how their students weren't smart enough or how the test was bunk, but the fact was that they were bad teachers and should have been fired.

And when a third of your classes don't show up on any given day, when another third are functionally illiterate, when half your class time is spent controlling miscreants and more is wasted by administrative hoop jumps, when your good students have shitty home lives and any given day might turn into fuckups, when you have little support from the parents and less from the administration, when you offer bullshit grade-padding assignments and extra credit and you're not allowed to give a quarterly grade below 60 and half of your class still fails, and the kids wipe their asses with the standardized tests because the state didn't even have the sense to make them required for graduation, then are you arguing that the tests are a fair assessment of teacher performance? I'm all for merit pay and I'm all for firing shitty teachers, but not only does using test performance as the metric not measure skill, it will drive teachers away from problem classes and districts even faster than they're already leaving.

You keep calling them "NCLB cram courses", but what makes you think that you can "cram" for the tests more than you could cram for any other test. I took the tests myself in High School, and they weren't just straight memorization questions. They tested the concepts. A student who knew biology would pass through it easily. But a student who didn't understand biology would fail.

First, not every test is well-designed. The states all write their own tests; you're generalizing your experiences to everyone, but plenty of states have shitty tests. Second, you damn well can "cram" for standardized tests, or else companies like Kaplan would be out of business. You spend an entire semester or even a full year on test-taking strategies, drilling the skills you know will be on the test, and practice tests. Great for padding your statistics, worthless for actual education.

The difference between the tests under NCLB and the tests teachers give to kids in their class is standards. All classes teach to the test, it's just that No Child Left Behind tests are of better quality than the tests that most teachers give, and provide objective feedback to both students and teachers.

First, the bolded statement is easily the most facile thing I've heard all week, and I follow politics religiously. Second, the rest of this argument is just flat wrong. Maybe in some states the NCLB tests are better; bully for them. In other states, they're garbage. Furthermore, NCLB as it's currently structured doesn't accurately measure anything, because no account is taken of outside factors. For fuck's sake, NCLB doesn't even take into account students who don't show up on test day. As for providing feedback, what use is a single aggregate score for the entire school that comes back in the middle of summer for judging individual teacher and student performance (this last criticism doesn't apply, obviously, to schools that make passing the NCLB a graduation requirement, but far from all the states do that).

That's a valid criticism. I wouldn't be opposed to some measure that correlates scores on something like Raven's Progressive Matrices to future HSA scores, and then judges whether a student passes or fails based on whether they under-perform or over-perform other students with their aptitude test scores or older achievement test scores.

I don't know anything about Raven's Progressive Matrices, but if they're a fair way of predicting future achievement (a big "if"; how do you account for outside factors which too often have a crushing impact on academic performance in the cities?), this would me a much saner way of measuring progress. It would also require some serious administrative legwork to implement and would be vulnerable to cheating on the other end ("Make sure the little rascals don't score too high; we need them to overperform in a few years").

But here's the big picture: I don't think that No Child Left Behind is perfect, but it is a step in the right direction because it creates objective standards and accountability for schools.

Do you honestly think that before NCLB, nobody ever thought of using standardized tests to measure performance? I took my first Early Warning Test (the pre-pre-exam New Jersey used to administer to eighth graders before they took their tenth grade pre-HSPT and 11th grade HSPT graduation exam and, if necessary, their 12th grade HSPT re-test) back when George Bush was still bumblefucking around Texas running the Rangers into the ground. All NCLB did was mandate every state do it, and it didn't even include a graduation requirement; my home state was ahead of the NCLB curve in 1993, at the very latest. As for the accountability, by your own admission, the whole thing is a buggered-up mess; do you realize that by not correcting for special ed students, which can make up a quarter of a big city school district's students, the act has a built-in bias against the districts that need the most help? Not to mention the crowning idiocy of taking money away from struggling schools. Because you know, losing resources is exactly what attracts the top-notch faculty you need to foster achievement in tough schools.

From my experience in High School, the number one problem was a culture of failure. Students were encouraged to do less work then they could handle. Teachers weren't given any incentive to strive for greatness (the crappy teacher that doesn't get any student to pass an AP test gets the same pay as the an amazing teacher that gets great work out of their students). And worst of all, students were encouraged not to overextend themselves by taking classes that they might not succeed at.

What the hell does NCLB have to do with any of this?

Creating objective standards for judging student and teacher performance is the first step towards merit pay for teachers and tougher standards for students.

Too bad NCLB is so fucked up it will never lead to either of these things. It doesn't rate teachers, it rates entire schools and punishes collectively for failure. It doesn't encourage tougher standards for students, it encourages getting the bare minimum number of students to NCLB's mediocre standards and gutting everything else (literally the bare minimum--a school's reward for making more than AYP is having the next year's quota raised; this is, literally, the same kind of thinking Soviet factory managers had to put up with). It doesn't actually set any standards at all, just mandates the states do it, and by 2014 all 50 are going to dumb the tests down to the point the only requirement for passing is holding the pencil pointy-end down. Regardless of your opinion of using standardized tests to measure student performance, NCLB's implementation is so terrible that it does active harm to its stated goals. It's a titanic clusterfuck which is actually making education worse in this country. The fact that it had noble goals doesn't matter. Noble goals don't count for shit in public policy.

[CaptainZoidberg]

So, let's review: you agree that there's a problem with how NCLB deals with special ed and ESL students, you agree (or at least, you don't disagree) that NCLB, as it is currently structured, can rate good schools as "failing" and terrible schools as making AYP, you don't disagree NCLB sets no national standards (so comparisons between states are essentially worthless), and you agree its final targets are unrealistic and unattainable. How, then, does NCLB provide a "solid metric" for judging the success and failure of anything?

Well, before the HSAs an average student, who wouldn't end up taking the AP tests or SAT subject tests has no good ways to judge their progress against other students across their state (it would be nicer if it was the nation, as you already stated). But now, with the HSAs, they can actually know if their A in Biology means that they're getting a sufficient background in Biology.

While I never found the basic classes in High School to be challenging, I know that if I did I'd have liked to have some state or national level standardized tests on which to compare my performance.

it simultaneously overcentralizes curriculum planning in states while providing no coherent national curriculum guidelines, it's led to schools ignoring gifted and struggling students (and even most of the average ones) in favor of a small sliver who can be brought from "below proficiency" to "proficiency"

That's precisely what I believe needs fixing.

Do you not see the connection here? I'm not talking about getting gifted (and average) kids help on NCLB, I'm talking about more challenging and enriching course offerings and programs which get the ax to make room for NCLB prep. Often, the programs for the worst-off kids get gutted or cut too, because the ROI isn't enough to justify the effort; not when NCLB has put everyone's job on the line.

Teaching all non-special needs students the basics of algebra should take precedent over teaching things like art and music to a small elite.

Are you aware that many schools offer little or no AP classes, and that others are cutting AP to make room for NCLB prep? The schools that offer a robust selection of AP courses are usually (with some admirable exceptions) well-funded suburban districts that don't need Federal money.

Which is why we need to offer schools financial incentives for improving AP performance, relative to the strength of their incoming student body.

He's an incurious doctrinaire who's fucked up everything he's ever touched. I don't care if his IQ is eleventy squillion; he's a God damn idiot and NCLB reflects his one-size-fits-all worldview.

I'll agree that Bush is guilty of being dogmatic and closed minded, but words like "idiot" actually have a real technical meaning.

I don't have time to list it all here and I haven't fully settled on all the details, but it would involve serious administrative restructuring, abandoning the property tax funding model, rebuilding vocational education, making career training a priority for non-college bound students, going to an undergraduate model for college-bound students in 10th, 11th, and 12th grades, firing about two-thirds of the useless administrative deadweight that's given the United States the lowest ratio of teachers to non-teaching school employees in the world, and implementing some form of professional peer evaluation to asses teacher performance. That's not everything, but it's the major components.

Those all sound like solid ideas (although I'm afraid of labeling students college bound or non college bound too early on).

And when a third of your classes don't show up on any given day, when another third are functionally illiterate, when half your class time is spent controlling miscreants and more is wasted by administrative hoop jumps, when your good students have shitty home lives and any given day might turn into fuckups, when you have little support from the parents and less from the administration, when you offer bullshit grade-padding assignments and extra credit and you're not allowed to give a quarterly grade below 60 and half of your class still fails, and the kids wipe their asses with the standardized tests because the state didn't even have the sense to make them required for graduation, then are you arguing that the tests are a fair assessment of teacher performance? I'm all for merit pay and I'm all for firing shitty teachers, but not only does using test performance as the metric not measure skill, it will drive teachers away from problem classes and districts even faster than they're already leaving.

Well, what I'd do is create a series of metrics of incoming students like family income, scores on Raven's Progressive Matrices, and prior achievement scores, and then use collected data to predict how students will do based on those measures.

If a teacher's students overperforms what another similar group of students would perform with an average teacher, than the teacher gets a bonus. If the students greatly underperform those expectations, then the federal government offers the teacher extra classes to help them improve. And then if they fail to show improvement without some valid excuse, then they're terminated.

But I agree that just giving them merit pay based purely on test scores is moronic and will only lead to very rich teachers at wealthy schools.

First, not every test is well-designed. The states all write their own tests; you're generalizing your experiences to everyone, but plenty of states have shitty tests. Second, you damn well can "cram" for standardized tests, or else companies like Kaplan would be out of business. You spend an entire semester or even a full year on test-taking strategies, drilling the skills you know will be on the test, and practice tests. Great for padding your statistics, worthless for actual education.

There's a perception that you can cram for the tests, but that's just a perception. For example, look at this question from Maryland's Algebra HSA:

http://mdk12.org/scripts/hsa_practice_t ... /&subj=alg

If a student understands the concepts of mean, median, and mode - they'll get it right. Otherwise, they'll get it wrong.

You can say that teaching them what mean, median, and mode are is just "cramming", but if you're teaching them the concepts and it's working, you're teaching them the concepts.

Is there anyway that you could help a student to get that question right without teaching them the relevant material?

First, the bolded statement is easily the most facile thing I've heard all week, and I follow politics religiously. Second, the rest of this argument is just flat wrong. Maybe in some states the NCLB tests are better; bully for them. In other states, they're garbage. Furthermore, NCLB as it's currently structured doesn't accurately measure anything, because no account is taken of outside factors. For fuck's sake, NCLB doesn't even take into account students who don't show up on test day. As for providing feedback, what use is a single aggregate score for the entire school that comes back in the middle of summer for judging individual teacher and student performance (this last criticism doesn't apply, obviously, to schools that make passing the NCLB a graduation requirement, but far from all the states do that).

My school gradually phased in the HSAs (what we called our NCLB tests), where they were not a requirement for first year students, but were a requirement later on.

I would say that the HSAs had a generally positive impact on me at least. In the biology classes, the teachers were required by the curriculum to give tests that reflected the HSAs, instead of just random stuff that the teacher decided he/she wanted to test. Having an objective test made the grading in classes more meaningful, and it was more difficult for teachers to just give huge curves to make everyone get undeserved high marks.

I don't know anything about Raven's Progressive Matrices, but if they're a fair way of predicting future achievement (a big "if"; how do you account for outside factors which too often have a crushing impact on academic performance in the cities?), this would me a much saner way of measuring progress. It would also require some serious administrative legwork to implement and would be vulnerable to cheating on the other end ("Make sure the little rascals don't score too high; we need them to overperform in a few years").

I think that it would be a good idea to use multiple variables to predict future achievement. And there would also need to be strong involvement from the higher ups to prevent the administration from cheating the system.

Do you honestly think that before NCLB, nobody ever thought of using standardized tests to measure performance? I took my first Early Warning Test (the pre-pre-exam New Jersey used to administer to eighth graders before they took their tenth grade pre-HSPT and 11th grade HSPT graduation exam and, if necessary, their 12th grade HSPT re-test) back when George Bush was still bumblefucking around Texas running the Rangers into the ground. All NCLB did was mandate every state do it, and it didn't even include a graduation requirement; my home state was ahead of the NCLB curve in 1993, at the very latest. As for the accountability, by your own admission, the whole thing is a buggered-up mess; do you realize that by not correcting for special ed students, which can make up a quarter of a big city school district's students, the act has a built-in bias against the districts that need the most help? Not to mention the crowning idiocy of taking money away from struggling schools. Because you know, losing resources is exactly what attracts the top-notch faculty you need to foster achievement in tough schools.

I will agree that NCLB needs to be reformed to take into account the strength of the student body entering any given class.

Too bad NCLB is so fucked up it will never lead to either of these things. It doesn't rate teachers, it rates entire schools and punishes collectively for failure. It doesn't encourage tougher standards for students, it encourages getting the bare minimum number of students to NCLB's mediocre standards and gutting everything else (literally the bare minimum--a school's reward for making more than AYP is having the next year's quota raised; this is, literally, the same kind of thinking Soviet factory managers had to put up with). It doesn't actually set any standards at all, just mandates the states do it, and by 2014 all 50 are going to dumb the tests down to the point the only requirement for passing is holding the pencil pointy-end down. Regardless of your opinion of using standardized tests to measure student performance, NCLB's implementation is so terrible that it does active harm to its stated goals. It's a titanic clusterfuck which is actually making education worse in this country. The fact that it had noble goals doesn't matter. Noble goals don't count for shit in public policy.

Indeed, it would be a good idea to reform NCLB so that it provides results for individual teachers and records data for students (for building future prediction curves).