I've finally found a poltical science professor I can agree with. His name is Ted Reuter and he refers to the No Child Left Behind act as "Disastrous". Reuter's beefs with NCLB are:
It focuses on punishment, negative labels, and threats. It places too little emphasis on the social causes of poor school performance. It does nothing to improve the curriculum, reduce class size, decrease school size, increase parental involvement, create after-school programs, diminish school violence, lessen absenteeism, or increase funding.
Amen
4 comments:
I agree with you both completely... "You can't fatten a pig by weighing it"
I've been consumed lately thinking about how NCLB attempts to make every school system in the nation adhere to "their" way or the highway. Local control today is a joke but it's the only way to address the individual needs that each community in our county needs. What works in small town America won't necessarily work in New York City. Some of the items that NCLB mandates simply aren't needed in many localities.
Our SPED teachers have been running amok changing ARDS to have our SPED students take harder tests. These tests are sometimes waaay too hard for the student and only measure their ability to flunk a test and become frustrated. Our school has a higher proportion of SPED students than the MS down the road with similar demographics. We will not meet NCLB standards because of this but they probably will. After three years, our school could be "re-organized". All programs in place to help our SPED kids will be disrupted. The assessment will actually hurt rather than improve. The design is flawed. Welcome to the "AMC Tracer" of education reform.
One thing still amazes me is that a school can lose its academic rating due to the results of small groups. One local school in my area lost its high rating because 3 (THREE) students in a minority group did not do well! Overall the school did very well, but 3 did not so the school's rating slipped.
HEY AMERICA! Teaching is not making bricks! The students don't start out the same and they don't end up the same.
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