Failing our Nation

[danalwyn]

So, there are a number of things I could talk about today. I've been sort of politics-heavy lately, but these are times in which politics begins to dominate the American lifestyle, where the choices made at the highest levels are accelerating a global fall into darkness, or madness, or whatever metaphor you prefer.

So today, I'm going to talk about standards.

In 2002, George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind act into law. There are several principles laid into this law, but the primary one was an attempt to drive education away from a perceived attention to student self-esteem, and back into the business of creating competitive workers. With the changing of the global economy, several people posited that it would become necessary to create students who would match the well-learned products of Asian education systems, students who could dot their is and cross their ts.

The heart of NCLB is universal standards, enforced on a regular basis by repeated testing. It is the embodiment of the philosophy of self-reliance at the heart of many conservatives, the idea that effort and presentation only count for so much, and that at the end, results matter. In a world that is increasingly global, where decisions are made at levels and in countries that workers may never visit, it is results that matter. Students should be made to understand this. They should understand that, in real life, they do not get any free passes, that either they can perform the tasks required, or they will fail. This is the core philosophy and motivation behind the attempts to make education more individualistic, to conform to a version of Thoreau's vision. We must be harsh, because the real world will have no mercy, and that lesson has to be learned now.

For instance, if a student embarked on a project with eighteen goals, just hypothetically of course, and only managed to achieve clear success in eight of them, that student would fail. A 44% success rate on completing a project, is essentially a fail. It means that your planning, your execution, and your management were so bad that you were not able to achieve even half of what you were supposed to do. In the high-stakes world of modern education, that just does not cut it anymore.

Which means, Mr. Bush, that you fail. The Congress of the United States of America, the representatives of those people for whom you work, set a series of eighteen objectives for you to achieve in Iraq by the time of your progress report. You have failed eight of them outright, and achieved only mixed results in two others. Eight out of eighteen is not satisfactory; it is not an A. It is not even a C-. You have failed, you have been unable to match up to the standards that the American people have set through their legal representatives, you have not passed the bar. Later on you can make any excuse you want, you can blame the Democrats (I have no doubt that you will blame them for using voodoo to hex al-Maliki's government), you can blame terrorists, you can even blame the Communists for all I care. You can decide to learn from this affair, or decide not to learn from it, but the fact remains that you have failed.

You took the test, and you failed your own soldiers, and the people of Iraq. Such performance reflects poorly on yourself and on the nation. You should not get a conditional pass. Social promotion no longer applies.

Now get the hell out of the way and let the professionals clean up the mess you made.

Comments

[tx-cronopio.livejournal.com]

From your lips, etc...