Back to Leave No Child Behind

Cicerone Imposter_ I do believe that you are. like most of the people who have written on this thread, ignoring the problems which contributed to the formation of NCLB. My previous post indicated that the basic problems relating to a. test scores b. funding c. voucher plans must be addressed before any real critique can be made of NCLB.

The article you quote gives evidence that many high schools are "dropout factories" and that many African-mericans and Latino students are among the drop outs.

Is this surprising? As I noted, there is a median score. Half of the students fall below the median. Most people know which students will make up a large part of the group below the median.

We have been involved for years trying to find a solution which will put many more hard working African-Americans and Latinos in the top half of the medians.
We have not, alas, fully examined the possiblities inherent in vouchers or the voucher system.

You are correct, spendin. Let's try vouchers.
I am very much afraid that Cicerone Imposter does not know what he is talking abut on this issue.

Let's review the salient points we must understand in order to truly comprehend the need for NCLB.

l. No matter what is done, half of the student population will test below the median score by definition.

2. If minority students are dropping out in large numbers, the cause is not PRIMARILY because of the schools and what they are doing, the major reason is tied up with the culture of the ghetto.

3. Testing is the last of a triad--Test; teach; retest. The first testing is diagnostic; Then comes the crucial teaching acts; then a retest to see what the students have learned.

4. More funding is NOT the answer. A glance at the tragic experience in the Kansas City Schools reveals that Massive amounts of funding will not make up for a culture which is basically anti-school.

5. Schools are ruined by the needs of a very small group-the Special handicapped child and the extremely disruptive. Voucher schools which would be set up to educate all children except the extremely needy and the massively disruptive would, I am sure, be able to make the achievement levels much higher even in the ghettos, since it is the values and behaviors displayed by the extremely handicapped and the wildly delinquent which make learning impossible.

6. Autistic children; those whose IQ's are between 60 and 75; and those who are so disruptive as to make learning in any regular class impossible must be educated in facilities separate from the normal children. This last point will be strongly resisted by the forces of Political Correctness who are willing to destroy any chance at education for 95% of the students in the class in order to allow the special students to remain in a regular class. Teachers who now teach in classes into which some of these special students have been "mainstreamed" know that this "mainstreaming" destroys the possibilityffor any real education to take place.

A well planned vouc`her system is necessary.

I am very much afraid that the "balanced" information given by Cicerone Imposter is filled with holes on the side antgagonistic to the voucher system.

l. The point that states that most schools that provide voucher based education are religious thus violating the church/state barrier is a strawman. Voucher schools can and have been set up by secular organizations especially in schools abandoned by parochial schools. The advantage of the voucher system set up by secular organizations is that they can defy the usual union restrictions which foolishly say that all teachers are the same and should be paid the same except for seniority.

2. The claim that voucher schools take money away from schools which are already underfunded is laughable. People who are not familiar with education do not know that if you lose a student or ten students or fifty students or a hundred students, you lose some funding but you also do not have to pay teachers to serve the nonexistent children--those who transferred out.

3. Voucher schools are not accountable??? I do believe that each school, be it parochial or private, is accountable to state regulations. Accountablity is leveraged by the parents whose children attend the school. Parents whose children are not succeeding will not allow their children to keep attending those schools.

4. Public Schools have to take everybody. Voucher schools do not have to do so. Exactly. That is why voucher schools should and must be set up to take care of students with special needs--eg mentally handicapped---severely disruptive. At this time the students in the public schools find themselves in settings where, because of mainstreaming, they lose a great part of the attention of the teacher who must take care of students with greater needs--the mentally handicapped and the severely disruptive.

A good voucher system will tgake all students but in separate venues. They don't even need to be in different buildings just as long as teachers can meet special needs in special surroundings.

It is indeed difficult to comply with the demands placed on the schools by the No Child Left Behind regulations in the public school settings but it can be done in voucher systems. That may very well be one of the unspoken objectives of NCLB--the need for more diversity and choice in our educational systems.

Atkins:-

You are obviously still a bit wet behind the ears.I know what that feels like.When you have been at the game a little longer you will find that utopian stuff about hope shredding your life.

I gather you have large class sizes.In that event your "hopefully" may be correct English but I fear it is a pipe-dream.

It is a well established principle here in the Yucky that the cash for the education budget performs a sort of tumbling strain with the politicians at the top and the kids at the bottom and the administrators and teachers and dinner-ladies in between.Would it were not but it seems impossible to achieve any other arrangement human nature being what it is.
This is why a fair proportion of the kids would burn the school down if they had the chance.

Current studies show that there are many people who have started out in other fields who are interested in teaching.
Current studies also show that many people leave the profession after five years or so because of terrible teaching conditions. The voucher plans would help to solve the problem. If is clear to anyone who has ever taught that a class that has no severe disruptive students and/or no students who are autistic or severely mentally handicapped, are much more satisfying to teach.

Mills 75- I am very much afraid that you have been misinformed. It is my opinion that your ideas on education do not conform to the evidence.
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Why are we held responsible for students' academic preparation over which we had no control?

foxfyre is correct about Teachers Unions. Let's be honest. In everyone of the three cities in which I have worked in Education, the teachers Unions come to the table with 200 or 300 demands in September( literally). By crunch time, they have shown their "good faith" by tossing out 90% of their initial demands( the items tossed out usually include "lowered class sizes, curriculum upgrades and other benefits in the classroom" Guess what remains typically?

Benefits- Salary. Medical Insurance, Sick days, etc.

No one should be suprised at this since good unions do exactly that= they look after the most pressing needs of their constitutents.

I am very much afraid that Mills 75's comment about changing the students who do not want to learn may be a bit idealistic. I think it can be done but changing students who are mainly motivated by the ideas of their peers is almost impossible. That is precisely why the "hard cases" should not be allowed to poison the atmosphere of any classes.


I would ask Mills 75, foxfyre and cicerone imposter to answer this question:

Exactly why are Asian students( Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, East Indians) so successful in school? Not all of them go to private schools. Not all of them go to schools in affluent neighborhoods?

When the Harvard Class of 1995 paraded its Phi Beta Kappa honorees in a ceremony, a full 19% of the honorees were Asian while only 9% of the total graduating class was Asian.

The answer is culture--the culture of the home and of high expectations---not the culture which feels that the Summum Bonum is a slam dunk.

Until Cultures are changed, minority success in American Schools will lag behind drastically.

Culture is not amenable to the fixes of funding or smaller class sizes. It must come from the people themselves.

I cannot see how the NCLB requirements are beyond the ability of any child of normal intelligence. Unless you believe few children are of normal intelligence, it would seem that to meet the NCLB standards, a teacher has to teach. If the teachers are unable to teach the children what the children are supposed to know, no amount of additional funding is going to change that.

chiczaira writes

Quote:

Culture is not amenable to the fixes of funding or smaller class sizes. It must come from the people themselves.

The schools can help but the laws have to change. Teachers need to be able to bounce the disruptive child off to the principal's office and, if the principal can't get through a thick skull, the child needs to be bounced right out of the school so the rest of the kids can learn.

As an aside and prime motivator, I would also make a highschool diploma or being age 19 a pre-requisite for obtaining an unrestricted driver's license.

Oh, please, tell me you guys are putting us on?

The actual aptitude tests themselves are in no way indicative of any ability other than the absolutely most basic ability to... pass a certain kind of test.

You know what I believe NCLB really is? It has two functions:

#1, to allow the military unfettered access to your child's records for recruitment purposes. THere is ample evidence of this happening across the country.

#2, to weaken our school systems and garner support for the 'voucher' plan, in order to bring about much more private schooling, which works to the Republican advantage in three ways:

First, privatizing schools brings more money into the private sector, which is the wet dream of all republicans, apparently.

Second, once that is accomplished enough the push can be made to eliminate public schools altogether. Why? To get rid of those troublesome Taxes the rich are forced to pay to educate the poor children, which we all know is anathema to Republicans;

Third and most importantly, private schools will encourage the mixing of religion in with every aspect of teaching, a stated goal of the Republican cause.

None of this is positive for the children in America in the slightest.

Cycloptichorn

A teacher spending 4-6 years "studying" education(?) isn't proof of expertise.

Quote:

Contrast this with a post made by plainoldme on April 12.

It sure seems the Dems favor damned few choices beyond abortion.

Cyclop -- I agree with you on vouchers and the total distruction of the public system of education.

This mania for testing is utter nonsense. There is no prescription beyond testing and the testing itself has been revealed to be a fraud. A few folks with entrepreneurial styles were looking for new ways to make money and sold a few Congressmen a bill of goods in the form of tests for competancy. The problem is the manner in which these tests were composed initially. The companies simply hired people without credentials or experience to write these tests. Allegedly, the best test in the nation is the MA test, which was completely overhauled by removing some of the leading teachers in the state from their classrooms for two years while they made a test that made sense.

But, there are still awful tests about and one of them in the MA Licensure Test. I took the general test and the English teaching test. However, I thought the test itself was ridiculous. The question on sonnet forms was so easy that even a person who had never heard the word sonnet could figure out the desired correct answer.

My daughter (graduated from Smith where she was on the Dean's list every other semester) has taken the general test as well as the French and Spanish test. She found the French test particularly obnoxious. The examples she gave me were idiotic. "Simone de Beauvoir was famous because:
1.) She has a long term affair with Jean-Paul Sartre.
2.) She came to America and met Nelson Algren and wrote a book about him.
3.) She wrote one of the early books on feminism.
4.) She was a Marxist."

Right! Like so many "tests," the victor is the person who knows how to take tests.

I find it very interesting that when a child is out of the norm, either too intelligent or too disadvantaged, they are failed by the public school system. We've turned to a lot of different solutions for this problem, such as magnet schooling, etc., but the worst has to be drugging our kids up (I am a big opponent of putting kids on drugs to help them study. I can't tell you how many of my friends are practically addicted to Adderal in College, b/c it really does focus ya. Scary).

Our school system needs to be revamped from the ground up. The practice of trying to make everyone into the same, median student has to end immediately. The process of judging a school by how close they can get to that median student is the worst possible idea; it only exacerbates what is already a poor situation.

The only ones who survive the system unscathed and prosper are... the average students. This has lead to average results in our society, I believe.



Cheers

Cycloptichorn

To those of you that are teaching--I have a question which is, in my mind, a critical question.

Have you ever, at lunch with your colleagues or in some meeting, heard a frustrated teacher complain that he or she could do so much with the group she had if it had not been for two or three students in the group, which, in the estimation of the teacher, made learning impossible?

Chic - I don't consider myself to be a heroine - but I'm confused as to why you're taking such a sarcastic tone.