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Education accountability and the Obama administration |
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From Economic Policy Institute: The Obama administration and Congress must decide what to do about re-authorization of the school accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), now two years overdue. This new EPI Policy Memo analyzes the failures of NCLB's accountability rules, and sketches out new directions that could renew a commitment to accountability in a way that avoids NCLB's distortion of American public education. Federal education accountability policy is fundamentally flawed because it creates incentives for educators and other policy makers to: • Ignore some critical curricular elements in favor of focusing all effort on raising the test scores of disadvantaged students in basic math and reading skills alone. This myopic focus widens the “achievement gap” in critical thinking, citizenship development, and other essential areas of education. These two flaws conflict with President-elect Obama’s stated goals of broadening the curriculum and of investing in early childhood, family support, and after-school programs.
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