The NCLB scam

Connie, your stats may or may not be more correct than mine. I did not 'make up' those stats as you accuse me, and went with the slightly lower one (90%) because I could back that one up. However, when you keep applying modern ideological standards to the past you are casting a shade on the truth. I have not disagreed with you that slaves and women were not given the same opportunities as the men. This is not cause for present anger, though. This is the way things were at that time. If women or blacks were denied an education today it would be a scandal of epic proportions. I don't believe it is fair to apply such a moral/social standard on the past. It was what it was. I do understand that you are wanting to get the big, inclusive picture, but that needs to be tempered by a cogent understanding of just who was considered a full citizen. Today, all people, regardless of race, creed, sex, are considered equal and deserving of equal opportunity. It was just not so in the 1700s, even though there were inklings of a growing moral/social awareness of the rights of women and slaves. So, I don't think you can fairly claim that yesterday's milieu of minority groups has the exact same claim to be counted as today's and judged by today's standards. We went through a civil war and the suffragette movement in order to get where we are today. Lots of blood, sweat and tears spilled in order to get here. I homeschool, too. My local district terms my children 'proficient' in reading, writing and math if they score in the 33 percentile on state tests. That is not only disingenuous, but downright immoral. NCLB, which allows local districts to set their own standards, is the same as letting the fox guard the hen house. If students today were proficient in Greek, Latin, the Classics, etc., I would certainly term them as educated as our forefathers. However, that is certainly not the case. Our best students may have a broad spectrum of knowledge, but not a deep one. We have many jack of all trades and masters of none, to our detriment. There are plenty of high school tests from the 30s and 40s floating around the internet, which when compared to today's proficiency tests make our students look like grade-schoolers. Isn't the question we're both asking: How do we provide a quality education to as many people as possible? I aver that NCLB has failed. And, the longer we keep segmenting our students into racial and ethnic categories (as a way of explaining the failure of the schools to educate them), the worse off they will be. Children are not handicapped by race, they are handicapped by low expectations and corrupt bureaucracies. There are too many exceptions to the 'rule' to keep spouting race as a reason for failure.

Connie, this reminds me of the many discussions and arguments I've had over the years over affirmative action statutes and regulations. The analogy is with quotas: the law does not mandate quotas, but it does allow them, and they became the default method of "compliance" amongst employers who were more interested in loopholes than in actual, merit-based, color- and gender-blind hiring practices. NCLB does not mandate "teaching to the test". But once you've investigated enough (my wife is a public school teacher, for over 30 years; we both know alot of teachers in a variety of places), you find that the default method is in fact teaching to the test, because the practical effect of NCLB is this: School admins are now afraid of lost funding. Parents have been told that there is a valid, objective measure of the performance of schools. NCLB mandates that test results are the primary measurement of school performance and a top criterion for funding decisions. Please forgive the sarcasm, but what the heck else would you expect a large bureaucracy to do when you hand their nuts to the hands of the laymen, and let them squeeze at will on the flimsiest pretext? My sarcasm is based on the measurable fact that children progress at different rates, and there is no more rational basis for using large-group test scores to judge a school than there is to look at a child and call him or her "average". Whether you care to blame NCLB or not, the reality is that arbitrary measurements are being used to enforce and administer the provisions of NCLB. Those measurements can be objectively proven to be false on any number of levels and in any number of ways. Take what I wrote in the first post on this thread: More pseudo-science concocted in the name of political expediency: if this year's batch of 8th graders score better than last year's batch, guess what? You've improved your school!!! Sarcasm aside, let me set up the analogy for you. Jonny is an ordinary kid, about mid-range in all development areas for his age. He likes school, but doesn't work harder at it than he has to. He scores an 80 out of 100 in his 8th grade achievement assessment in 2005. Sally is a prodigy. She played the piano at age 5. She reads music and her independent reading level is 3 years beyond her chronological age. With the same teachers as Jonny, in 2006 she scored a 98 out of 100. Did the teachers in that school suddenly get better, or can we just be reasonable and say objectively that Sally is a better student than Jonny? The real crime is not the law, but the rhetoric around the law that leads Jonny's parents to expect him to score as high as Sally, and encourage them to complain when he doesn't. My analogy is very simplistic; I concede that it requires fleshing out in some important ways.

Connie, It's a fair question, but I can't agree that it's the right question. Please bear with me for a moment. The first problem is in the politicization of public education. Philadelphia is a prime example: the state "took over" five years ago because of "budget concerns", in an atmosphere of several decades of political sabotaging of sincere attempts to do things like stabilize the funding source for schools (property taxes being just about the least equitable method around), formalize the professional criteria for teachers (it is about two steps behind Bar and CPA standards), and establish objective standards for everything from special ed (the statutes cover both challenged and gifted children) to the value of "enrichment" programs like music, theater and art. To be fair, I'd have to mention the continuing deterioration of special ed, that being my wife's area of expertise. It's gone from strict guidelines and targeted programs (and measurable success within each one) to a hodge-podge where emotional support kids are lumped in with the learning support kids, to the detriment of both. It started well before NCLB entered the picture. Um, and don't get me started on the whole unfunded mandate situation. Grinding teeth would be only the beginning. :) There are two things we should be working on. 1) Teaching that self-esteem is internal and independent. Students should be shown the value in trying their best and being proud of the results, whatever they might be, and parents should be educated in their children's particular variations in the map of child development. It's one thing to be disappointed in a lazy genius; it's quite another thing to push an average-range child to think that only genius-range grades are acceptable. 2) Recognize the depth and complexity of teaching, and set standards for teachers that reflect them. A balance is necessary; instead, "standards" have see-sawed between topical experts (who sometimes are terrible teachers) to over-trained child development experts who either don't know the material well enough, or think that being able to "diagnose" a child is enough. It's a complex subject. There are numerous holes to fill just in my attempt here to answer you. However, there are more complete answers out there, and they are individual schools that deliver the services their students need, offer enriched programs to challenge the gifted and make real strides in lifting challenged kids to proficiency that actually means something, like being competitively skilled for jobs, or having permanent solutions to their reasons for being challenged (chemical or trauma induced damage to short-term memory, impulse control, emotional control, the list goes on). My wife has been teaching special ed for over 30 years, and there is a long list of former students who come to see her with proud stories of being self-sufficient and happy in what they do and where they live. They were crack babies, severely abused children, children of children. You can't measure some successes with statistics, and that is the real failure of NCLB.