September 11, 2007
Now NCLB Causes Strokes Too?
I was going to post yesterday on the front pager in New York's Hometown Newspaper about the girl who suffered a stroke at a school in Queens but sat there - literally, for more than an hour - because there was some edict at the school that deans are banned from dialing 9-1-1.
I was going to ask dear readers to decide who was worse: the jackass well-intentioned person who came up with the rule, or the jackasses well-intentioned people who followed it?
But then, today, the story took on a whole new twist. While I'm sitting in an Amtrak lounge, I see on CNN that the teachers union in New York is now blaming the whole thing on NCLB. (The argument is that the school didn't want to look bad on paper, so it discouraged police calls that would increase crime stats for the school.)
OK, I suppose that was predictable.
But couldn't it work the other way too?
Couldn't this be an argument AGAINST the local flexibility that groups like the NEA and AFT are seeking?
If the people in schools like this one can't be trusted to call 9-1-1 in order to save a child's life, we are supposed to believe that the same dudes can be trusted to measure and report their own progress???
I think Dianne Piche nailed it in her testimony yesterday at the NCLB hearing. From today's NY Times:
"It strikes me as not unlike allowing my teenage son and his friends to score their own driver’s license tests."
Nobody flunks. Kumbaya.
