You know what would make them feel like winners? Actually WINNING something.
How much do they know about the practice of having the lesser-gifted students staying home on testing day? I first heard about it in the SWVA area, but I’d be unsurprised to hear about it going on in other places.
Someone is misinforming you. If the students miss the test, that is counted as a failing grade.
Smaller kids? Pussy. We threw badgers at each other!
So, should we start calling it Know Chylde Leffed Bee Hined now?
No special equipment is allowed for “special needs” students.
No consideration is given to students who do not speak English. The test is required even if it is her or his first day in an American classroom.
No special consideration is given to students who are autistic. If all of the city’s autistic students are taught in one school, tough luck for that school, huh?
If a school fails and the students are allowed to go elsewhere, how will the other schools accomodate them? Will they have to build new classrooms? Will the same teachers be transferred to the new school? What happens to that school when its scores drop?
It is easy to see that the NCLB Act was designed by people who are far removed from the realities of the classroom and who do not consider possible consequences.
I am all for accountability for teachers and everyone else involved in the students’ educations. I would like to see a complete revamping of the educational system with educators actually teaching (planning, lecturing, working one on one, leading discussions, grading) clerical staff doing the paper work (lunch tickets, absentee reports, hall passes, office forms, duplicating, etc.), and educational psychologists/defense experts handling discipline, behavior and guidance problems.
I would like to see administrators who are not interested only in how things look on paper at the central office and parents who are old enough to be over their own resentment of teachers having some authority over them.
In my twenty years in teaching, I never actually knowingly met anyone who was a member of a teachers’ union. I know that they are out there. Members of the American Federation of Teachers are probably more abundant in the Northeast and maybe in California. (I’m just guessing.) Most teachers are not members of a union. Most of the teachers that I worked with – both conservative and liberal – were members of the National Education Association, the Tennessee Education Association, the Middle Tennessee Education, and the Metropolitan Nashville Education Association. None of our dues went to political campaigns. If you wanted to donate to a campaign through one of these organizations, you had to donate extra and specify that it was for a PAC. I was never personally asked for PAC money.
If you look on NEA’s website, you will see that they have the welfare of the students at heart and not just protection of teachers’ rights. My bosses were also members.
Some of you speak as if you are experts on education when all you know is from the other side of the teacher’s desk. That gives you some insight, but that is just the surface.
Smiling Bandit, there are also arbitrary and irrational demands placed across the entire board. As in “all schools need to show a 2% improvement in their test scores from last year.” Which is great for the schools who are in the 25th percentile and have nowhere to go but up. But if you’re in the 99th percentile? You’d better score higher than 101% of all other schools!
And if you don’t meet demands like that, then basically all the students can go elsewhere, all the teachers are looked at as failing their students because they didn’t meet the minimum improvement level, and bureaucracy is able to step in at a stifling level to micromanage a school like a business, and completely destroy any remaining vestige that it’s a goodamned school. It will be a heaping bullshit factory where the only classes necessary are the ones tested, and the only curriculum will be what questions will appear on the test.
Granted, this is a hyporbolic worst case scenario. But while you won’t see “good” schools with a wholesale exodus and firing every teacher, you will find chipping away. You will find good teachers discouraged and their good teaching styles that actually (god forbid) inspire children reduced to reading a script. Schools can be (and some already have been) taken over by the state, and all teachers essentially need to reapply for their jobs.
As it is now, teachers are given packets. “Day X: This is what you need to cover in your class. If students asks ‘why is it that :blank:’, you respond quite literally by script. ‘Because, my fucking worthless booklet tells me that…’” Don’t expect to have your student taught in a creative way that will let them grasp a concept in a way they might understand that somebody who hasn’t worked in a classroom for 20 years couldn’t have forseen and scripted.
In congressional parlance, I added it as a rider. But not as an attack on a political party. As an attack on the act itself, hell yes. If you can’t tell a man from a policy (or as is very sadly the case in the past five years, a man from the nation he is meant to serve), I pity you, you diluted fuck.
Or, deluded. silly me. Typing a little quickly for the homonyms.
Nope. I’m referring to the practice of pulling funds from schools that fail because they never had enough funding to begin with.
Garshk, I’m flattered! Unfortunately, my girlfriend doesn’t approve of me dating. If that weren’t the case, though, I suspect I’d want to know whether you like white chocolate. 
May I remind you that this is a thread about spelling bees?
Yeah, I should have asked for the origin and root. Maybe had it used in a sentence. Something like “The plumber was deluded to believe that diluted dissolver would clear the drain.”
Or I’m just a :wally
Oh dear – I’m so late to this particular party that I’m hesitant to join in. It happens that I’m an attorney and my specialty is the No Child Left Behind Act. But the timing is dreadful, as this weekend coincides with the National Title I Conference in Atlanta – most important NCLB conference of the years, with 2800 participants. So I won’t be able to respond to many posts because I have very little free time before Wednesday (at which point I’m back in the office, clearing up backlog).
Let me clear up a few misconceptions.
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There is no way that NCLB would mandate cancelling the spelling bee. In fact, it’s a laughable non-sequitur. It’s pretty clear that, as smilingbandit suggested below, powers that be within this particular district didn’t want the bee to continue so latched onto NCLB as an excuse.
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None of the following point by Zoe is even remotely factually correct:
In fact, if Zoe had bothered to read either the statute, the regulations, or the U.S. Department of Education’s guidance on standards and assessments, it would have been abundantly clear to her that the law not only allows equipment - it requires it under the general term “appropriate accommodations.”
Wrong again. The statute requires states to development assessments for limited English proficient students of their English skills, and by letter, the Department of Education has allowed states to use that assessment instead of the language arts assessment for students who are new to the United States. States have varied in their commitment to providing assessments in other languages, but are allowed to do so - New York, for example, gives assessments in five languages. More to the point, states must give appropriate accommodations for limited English proficient students (which for the first few years a student is in the U.S., can include translation).
Wrong, wrong, triply wrong. There are elaborate regulations - still controversial, mainly because they’re highly complex - that provide separate standards for students with the most severe cognitive disabilities, and provide waivers under exactly the circumstances you’re describing - the urban district with a rehab hospital, the suburban district that’s developed an excellent program for autism-range disorders.
- This point actually has some truth to it:
This is more a concern on paper than in reality. Students aren’t exactly lining up out the street to move to other schools, other than in a few very densely populated urban areas, most of which already had choice systems in place prior to NCLB. Simply put, the logistics of sending your kid to a school across town are too difficult for many parents to want to bother. But it’s true, the Department has been highly inflexible about capacity constraints.
Some more general points on NCLB:
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It’s true that NCLB has concentrated the education establishment’s attention on the lowest-performing students. To some degree this is nothing new- is in fact, NCLB is merely the latest reauthorization of a law that goes back to the Johnson Administration, under the much simpler name of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act/ESEA. The basic idea of ESEA/NCLB is “compensatory education” - extra financial support for districts and schools with high levels of poverty, where the local tax base won’t support decent school funding. The problem, of course, has been in execution. The available evidence is that despite the billions spent thus far on ESEA, the achievement of students theoretically benefitting from the program has barely moved. At best, you can say that achievement didn’t get much worse, but that’s hardly a way for a program to make friends and influence people.
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At the same time that the U.S. has seen such meagre results from ESEA, concern over the overall education system’s quality keeps increasing. It began with the 1983 report A Nation At Risk, which drew together vast quantities of (highly imperfect, but better than no) data together to suggest that U.S. economic competitiveness was in peril unless education improved NOW. So that lead to the testing movement. Part of what that has revealed is that the gap between highest and lowest achieving students has, if anything, increased in the 40 years since LBJ signed the ESEA.
The problem is, as several have noted, that testing is itself highly imperfect. Designing valid criterion-referenced assessments for large student populations at each grade level is a fiendishly tricky undertaking, and very expensive if done well. But I’m convinced that not testing at all is even worse. Much of the time, the choice is between teaching to the test and barely teaching at all. That’s crude, but accurate in a lot of the country.
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NCLB has therefore tried to increase testing, increase funding for better testing, require higher teacher standards, force disaggregation of data so that differences between demographic groups can be diagnosed and addressed, find escape routes for students mired in effective schools, increase parent understanding of and control over their children’s education, and and and and and and…for well over 650 pages, which I will be happy to e-mail anyone who wants a copy. But the overarching goal was to decrease what has become known simply as The Gap: between rich and poor, black & hispanic and asian & white, disabled and nondisabled, English-speaking and non-English-speaking.
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It’s probably true that our education policy is boiling down to this: bright students don’t need our help. But as a nation we really can’t afford to move into a post-industrial world with a huge percent of our population lacking basic literacy and numeracy. So we’re going to focus on getting this group up to proficiency.
There will be costs, however. One of them may be students who are bright but whose families lack the means or inclination to support them. And that will be its own tragedy.
- I speak with a good number of educators who say to me some variant of “I can’t really say this out loud, but this law is forcing us to do what we should have been doing a long time ago.” There is also enormous truth to the phrase “soft bigotry of low expectations,” which is what was going in many, many classrooms before NCLB and the accountability movement.
The fact that it’s making so many so uncomfortable is a sign that it’s needed. Teaching will have to change, fundamentally, and schools will have to change, fundamentally, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
Amen sister (or brother)
I’m a special ed teacher attracting the snarls of my colleagues for refusing to condemn NCLB, and rants like the OP, blaming this bill for every bone-headed act ever committed by school staff, faculty and administration make me strain the muscles I use to roll my eyes. I won’t be surprised to read that NCLB causes cancer.
I fear NCLB makes some of us uncomfortable not only in the way it reminds us of the fact that we are answerable to all parents and to the communities in which we work, and not the other way around , but also in the way it alerts everyone else to this fact. We professionals seem to like working above and out of the reach of the common folk and parents who just don’t understand what education is all about “…from the other side of the teacher’s desk.” Ripping the curtain aside will always draw hysterics and snipes, but like oxymoron I’m optimistic about the future of public education in America.
Of course, I’d like to see schools focus on academics and get out of the business of socialized day care altogether, but that’s a different rant.
oxymoron said"4) It’s probably true that our education policy is boiling down to this: bright students don’t need our help. But as a nation we really can’t afford to move into a post-industrial world with a huge percent of our population lacking basic literacy and numeracy. So we’re going to focus on getting this group up to proficiency. "
I think that sucks. The brightest students DO need help! It’s not his fault or anything, but it still sucks. As a mother of 3 kids, all bright and one “gifted” (whatever the hell that may mean)–my kids get bupkus. They’re in a “good” school districts, and there still isn’t enough to truly feed them. Since they are not behavior problems or “special needs”–they get ignored.
I admire (most) teachers and feel they have an impossible job. BUT–when it is teacher and student/parents fighting admin for ability based curriculumn etc(as happened to my daugher in middle school)–there is something wrong with our system.
OK-Johnny really needs to learn how to read–no argument from me there.
The ignorance and illiteracy in the country is appalling.
But Susie and Joe also need to have their “gifts” nurtured, encouraged and mentored. As a parent, my job is to reinforce, to expose kids to new and divergent experiences(enrichment), to teach civility etc. Little did I realize that it would be to correct the incorrect teachings of grammar, punctuation and historical context etc.
There is something wrong when the kids that are left behind are the supposedly America’s best hopes for the future. I think what has gotten lost in school today is transmitting the love of learning, and the curiousity that all kids have re: the world is practically punished at this point. It is sad.
Oh, and if this NCLB is to really have any impact at all–it needs some money. The true failure of any educational program in the country is lack of funding… We don’t value kids in America, for all we tout youth culture–we don’t want to invest in hypotheticals. Instead we teach the test–and what good is that except to take you to the next level? What happens when the levels run out (aka graduating from college)?. Is this test-taught person an informed person? Are they conversant in political science, economics, history, culture, language and math?
NO. But they can ace any standardized test…
Sorry, just ranting here. Hit a nerve.
Well, you don’t know me well enough yet, to know if you should be flattered!
I posted that on impulse, b/c what you said was just so sensible and sane…and that is hard to come by these tricky days.
I am not, sadly, partial to white chocolate, but I do love chocolate with nuts!
I think your girlfriend and my husband are cut from the same cloth…(dammit!)
Update: Never mind. The kids of Lincoln, RI will be able to get trounced in the regionals by a home-schooled non-native English speaker after all.