Death to Nickleby!

I'm going to be a fangirl. Seriously. I have every intention of becoming the press conference and policy junkie that I've always wanted to be, but didn't have the stomach for. I have been fascinated by politics for a long time; maybe I can be that without crying as much. (Or at least without bad-crying instead of good-crying.)

So I was curious how things would be looking for higher ed, in the new Administration (on account of how budgets at the CSU are currently crippled and we're THIS CLOSE to falling apart), so I went to the whitehouse.gov page. You should try this; it is very different from how it was. There are actual bios of everyone involved in the administration. There are detailed agendas. At the bottom of the page? You can skim down the list of topics on the agenda and find anything you want. They're actually telling us what they're up to. Really.

Well, my other pet education dream, in addition to getting higher ed funding and thus not winding up on the street when the lecturers are all purged, is the death and dismemberment of Nickleby (NCLB, No Child Left Behind). Or, if not the death in name and drawing and quartering of its effigy, then death in content: the reform of it until it no longer resembles the bubble-filling, teaching-to-the-testing, running out good teachersing, killing public schoolsing, taking money from schools that can't afford books because they couldn't afford the books to teach their students well enough that they could pass the testsing self... into something that actually doesn't harm the children who're being "left behind" more than help them.

(....I was going to go into elementary school teaching; virtually all of my family are K-12 teachers. I Believe In Public Schools. So Nickleby is a very, very sore spot. Of all the things Bush has done, I actually may find Nickleby the most insulting, and I know that's saying a lot.)

Ahem.

Well! What do I see when I open up the page for the education agenda?

Reform No Child Left Behind: Obama and Biden will reform NCLB, which starts by funding the law. Obama and Biden believe teachers should not be forced to spend the academic year preparing students to fill in bubbles on standardized tests. They will improve the assessments used to track student progress to measure readiness for college and the workplace and improve student learning in a timely, individualized manner. Obama and Biden will also improve NCLB's accountability system so that we are supporting schools that need improvement, rather than punishing them.

!!!!!!!

....!!!!!!!!!

And a !!!!!!!!!!!!! for good measure!

(Also? Supporting Head Start and transitional bilingual ed. Dude.)

::sings and does a little dance right back to the kitchen.::

Unrelatedly, for my Love and possibly others: I am baking. This makes me a ginger baker.