Finally!! But...

Nation & World | Obama asks Congress for education bill by Sept. | Seattle Times Newspaper
Urging Congress to send him a new education law by fall, President Barack Obama focused Monday on the big concerns of parents and lawmakers alike: how student progress is measured and how schools that fall short are labeled.

Finally, someone in power recognizes what a mess No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has created in our country. President Obama cites new estimates showing that "four out of five schools may be tagged as failures this year under provisions of the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law." Really!?!? I get that we can improve upon what we do; if I didn't I wouldn't be teaching. But 80% of us are failing? I find this hard to believe. Were schools really so bad ten years ago that we had to turn education on it's data-driven head to be good at what we were doing? I graduated from high school in 1999, and I think I had a great K-12 education. I learned the core curriculum well enough to earn a number of scholarships and score highly on the ACT; I developed a value for the arts; I was a three-sport athlete; and I learned many valuable skills in my vocational agriculture classes. Programs were not cut because they didn't produce high test scores, and I wasn't forced into a 7-period day with no electives and class sizes pushing 30+. Were some students left behind? Absolutely not, especially not as many as we are leaving behind today. Sure there were some who did not excel in the core curriculum, but these students had numerous other programs, including a great vocational school, in which to participate and gain valuable experiences that I know served them well once they too graduated even if there were no tests for them to demonstrate their success.
No child left behind? Gimme a break! You can place a name like that on a mandate, but that alone doesn't make it come true. In my humble opinion we are leaving more children behind today than we were 10-15 years ago. Sure, a name like that appeals to every teacher who hears it, but it is completely unrealistic to expect 100% proficiency in every level of every content area. And further, it is criminal to withhold funding from schools who are not. Are we finally moving out from under this NCLB mushroom cloud? I hope so.
But wait! What do we have to look forward to? Race to the Top (R2T)! Another handily acronym-ed program that comes from every teacher's Bag o' Cliches. To be honest, I don't really know which, NCLB or R2T, scares me more. I see the same standards-based assessment programs (albeit a different "common" set of standards), the same support for charter schools (choice), the same data driven dependence on test scores, and the same focus on non-performing schools. But, now we can also look forward to "revising teacher evaluation, compensation, and retention policies to encourage and reward effectiveness" according to the White House. I'm not completely opposed to the idea of merit pay, but it needs to be based on more than test scores and I just don't see that happening here.
Diane Ravitch seems to be the only person talking that is making any sense arguing, screaming, that "the latest vision of education reform is deeply flawed." She continues, "the Obama administration is promoting the privatization of large segments of American education and undermining the profession of teaching." Why does it feel like no one is listening to us, begging them to just let us do what we do? Just let me teach! My teachers did it, and they did a damn good job of it, catchy acronym-ed mandate or not.