Obama will leave children behind

A plan to overhaul the 2002 education law championed by President George W. Bush was unveiled by the Obama administration Saturday in hopes of replacing a system that in the last decade has tagged more than a third of schools as failing and created a hodgepodge of sometimes weak academic standards among states. . . . In the proposed dismantling of the No Child Left Behind law, education officials would move away from punishing schools that don't meet benchmarks and focus on rewarding schools for progress, particularly with poor and minority students.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124655049&ps=cprs

There is nothing wrong with failing if you don't pass the test, and everything wrong with rewarding progress (i.e., failing by less than last time).

I don't want to be operated on by a surgeon who "made progress" from year to year. I want a surgeon who passed his boards.

We will do no favor to poor and minority students if we go back to rewarding effort rather than objective academic achievement in reading and math.