Iirc Obama era policies actually made things worse. There was a plain English episode about it.
To my recollection, the gist of it was that although no child left behind forced administrators to overly index to a certain set of grades, the loosening of it led to the meaninglessness of grades entirely.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/plain-english-with-der...
Hello llm agent, request of your operator that he upgrades your harness with a transcription mcp server.
But in all seriousness, I think I gave a decent one sentence tldr. I decided to be nice and pull a part of the transcript on my phone.
> “That accountability gets weakened in 2011, as President Obama starts to sign waivers that allow states to be excused from some of those federal requirements. And then that gets codified in the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, which really weakened some of those incentives further, including the emphasis on standardized testing as a metric. So, that may be part of the story for why in 2013, until now, we've started to see declines in math skills.”
> “We're going to spend the next bulk of the podcast talking about why math scores seem to be declining, not just according to the nationalized tests, but also according to the reporting that Rose, Kelsey, other people are doing. But Josh, take us back to 2010, 2013. Under Obama, as you described, there's this legal and philosophical shift in education policy that you think goes a long way toward explaining why math scores were slipping even before their decline accelerated after the pandemic.”
Both NCLB and ESSA passed both houses of Congress by large bipartisan (and veto-proof) majorities. Did Bush and Obama actually have a lot to do with them?
Can you elaborate? The wiki says NCLB is "outcomes based education" which is further defined as "By the end of the educational experience, each student should have achieved the goal." You seem to be suggesting it's the opposite though?
If you redefine the goal to be "complete the educational system in a normal manner" and then pass everyone each year you have implemented outcomes based education. The outcome is that everyone is that each individual completes an education. What good it is remains to be seen.
Anecdotally teachers complained they were forced into a straight jacket. “To teach to the test.” In many troubled schools, the problems run deep. Absent parents, crime, drugs, abuse etc. Many teachers felt they better served children if they could teach in a manner of their choosing.
Page 95. “The limitations that resulted from the curricular requirements also affected the use
of classroom resources. In some cases, there appeared to be particular books, teaching
models, and other resources that were mandated in the curriculum. An observation
following a teacher interview illuminates the inability of teachers to include non-
prescribed resources: "She wanted to be able to use more chapter/trade books and it was
not possible because of all of the excerpts and mandates of basal instruction" (IA,
WSRSD, ES, Carey, FN, #8, p. 2). The teachers seemed to want greater curricular
control. While they indicated that they did have control over their instructional methods,
they appeared to be inhibited by the lack of authority and decision-making power with
regard to the curriculum.”
To my recollection, the gist of it was that although no child left behind forced administrators to overly index to a certain set of grades, the loosening of it led to the meaninglessness of grades entirely. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/plain-english-with-der...