Yup. My husband teaches at a school that’s in a similar position. Their middle class kids are doing fine. Their African American boys from public housing are doing badly, despite all of the school’s efforts. There’s just so much going their lives that’s beyond the scope of teachers to deal with. When you’ve got a dad who’s out of the picture, a mom who refuses to return anybody’s phone calls, much less come to school or meet the teacher off-site for a conference, and you live in projects where drugs and gangs are the norm, there’s a limit to what even the best teachers can do to help you.
Everyone who states this is making the implicit assumption that “bad” schools are “bad” because they don’t receive enough money. What if a school does in fact receive enough money, but still churns out kids that can’t read their diplomas?
Should they receive even MORE money to correct the problem, even though money isn’t the problem to begin with?
Then we need to find out if money is the problem, and if it’s not, then we need to figure out what is, and do something about it. Even if the school is already getting more than enough money, you can’t expect to fix anything by taking money away.
Exactly. I bet if you asked teachers in failing schools whether they’d rather have more funding or students with decent, stable home lives, they’d pick stable home lives for the kids. But taking away money from the schools doesn’t make Suzie’s parents more responsible, any more than it makes Billy less autistic or Jose more proficient in English. The problem is bigger than the schools, and the schools can’t fix it by themselves.
I’d even argue that taking funding away *erodes *the stability of the average home life and the participation of the average parent (which is more closely correlated to school success than any other single factor). If your local school has to cut extracurriculars, art, drama and band because they can no longer fund them, who’s going to yank their students out and put them in private schools or homeschool them? The active, stable, participatory parents. When your school’s name is printed in red ink in the newspaper as a failing school, who’s not going to move into your school district? The families who care enough about their kids’ educations to be informed and make active decisions. So you’re left with the apathetic, the overworked, the overwhelmed and the ignorant. Great system. :rolleyes:
That’s a BIG reason my kids haven’t gone private. Because I believe in the importance of the public school system. But more and more of my neighbors are pulling their kids out of our “failing” school - which isn’t exactly helping the school median on test scores. And each “advantaged” kid that leaves makes private school more attractive to us…
NCLB rests on two fatally flawed concepts:
The first is that any two cohorts, if given equal opportunity, can perform equally on standardized tests. This has never been shown to be correct. Sanctioning underperforming schools composed of inherently less capable cohorts is ridiculous. “Hey kid–you can only do 5 pushups and the standard is 10. You’re gonna have to do them with a 50 lb weight on your back until you get up to Speed.”
The second is that the federal government can improve local education (beyond making sure that money gets doled out from wealthy communities to poorer ones who can then decide how best to spend it).
Letting bad schools die would be great idea, except that when a school goes down it takes a lot of kids with it. If they could neatly shutter a school and easily send all the kids off to better ones it would be a different story.
Ayup. I’ll crosspost my comments from another board, after saying that I’m delighted to see someone else recognizing the inherent statistical stupidity of NCLB.
School achievement and academic ability will fall along a normal distribution under normal circumstances, which is to say a bell curve (please let’s leave the book with the same name out of the discussion, or at least fork it). Some kids will be jawdroppingly dumb, some kids will be mindblowingly smart, and most kids will be in the middle of the range. That’s just the way the cosmos, and our species, work.
If grade level is set reasonably, it’ll be set in about the middle of the pack, where the average student performs. Everyone within a standard deviation of this point will be considered on grade level, and those further than one standard deviation will be above or below.
NCLB requires that 98% of students perform at grade level. There are, as I understand it, exactly three ways to accomplish this:
- Break the normal distribution. You do this by assessing students, figuring out who’s below grade level, and devoting all your resources to teaching them; kids above this level get little to nothing. For example, you might have a classroom of kids in which a third of the kids are ready to learn how to perform 1-digit addition (below grade level), a third of the kids are ready to learn how to perform 2-digit addition (on grade level), and a third of the kids are ready to learn how to perform multiplication (above grade level). You can break the distribution by spending the first half the year teaching EVERYONE how to do 1-digit addition, and the second half of the year teaching EVERYONE how to do 2-digit addition, and fuck the kids who already know how to do these things; they’ll learn nothing this year. But that’s okay, because they were already on grade level, and therefore present no NCLB problem.
- Set grade level at 3 standard deviations below the middle of the pack–that is, set it so low that 98% of the normal distribution lies above the grade level benchmark.
- Combine 1 and 2.
I believe that virtually every state is using option 3: they’re breaking the distribution by devoting inordinate resources to low-end students while neglecting high-end students (yay nation of mediocrity), and simultaneously they’re jiggering their tests and tweaking their stats to lower the actual grade level.
It’s idiotic. The law has its heart in the right place, but the moron who set up the accountability standards had no idea how statistics work.
My suggestions, which I’ve made elsewhere:
- Move teaching toward a profession with at least the respect (and commensurate pay and accountability) of nursing. It should no longer be a place where guidance counselors steer dummies; it should no longer have the stigma of the type of job you get until you earn your MRS degree. It should be treated as a rigorous intellectual occupation. NCLB to its credit has moved teaching somewhat in this direction by requiring higher standards of teachers–still not high enough, though, and lacking commensurate rewards for entering the profession, resulting in inadequate change.
- Base accountability on individual students. I have a student who entered my class this year 8 years old and unable to recognize the link between letters and sound; he spelled words like “mom” as “GL,” with the L backwards. Fortunately I’m not in a tested grade level, but next year he will be, and there’s no freakin’ way that kid is going to move from a kindergarten level to an end-of-third-grade level in 2 years; if he was capable of such a move, he wouldn’t be so far behind. (FTR, I have other kids who had the same teacher last year and who are little freakin’ geniuses; his problems aren’t due to poor teaching). We have the computing ability to track him over a year or two to set a baseline for his growth potential; we could then track whether his future teachers help him achieve his individual growth potential. Base accountability on student growth over a year, not on student expected achievements at the end of the year. (This would also even things out between students in districts with super-involved parents who hire tutors for this kids, and districts where lots of kids are raised by television: the teachers in the latter districts are currently punished for factors out of their control.)
Daniel
A bit unrelated, but relevant:
here in MA, the inner city schools cannot find enough qualified math and science teachers. the reasons are complex, but a big one is:
why would anyone with a technical degree, want to subject himself to disrespect, harassment, and often physical danger to teach? It isn’t the “Blackboard Jungle” anymore-schools now HAVE to keep people in their 20’s (in classes). they also cannot expel chronic troublemakers.
Until society improves, i don’t see this issue going away.
There would be a lot of controversy however - not all kids handle change well - any change. Neatly shutteringa school and sending the kids off to a better one isn’t going to be the best solution for an autistic kid who has taken three years to get comfortable walking through the door of THIS school. Switching classmates is another horror.