My daughter is a TAG kid in 8th grade. She says the lessons being taught this year are basicly a rehash of things they were taught in 6th grade. All the schools talk about now are the NCLB tests. I remember a few years ago all they talked about was teaching the kids.
My daughter, who loved school, is at the point now where she wants out. She’s bored.
We are on the doorstep to pulling her and going the homeschool route.
If all they’re going to teach her in US History is how to spell all the states,. we can do that here.
Is this analogy on point? Being uneducated, as a child, lacking basic skills and facts, is not a negative condition, it’s the default condition for being a child. Being sick and in the care of a doctor or hospital is a negative condition, not the default.
What’s your state’s policy on education for non-English speaking or ESL students? Why are they in regular classes where they would be subject to standardized testing one week after arriving from a foreign country? This sounds like a problem of managing students in special situations.
That’s a problem, clearly. But it still doesn’t address a problem with the underlying concept: there are basic skills and every student in America needs to acquire those skills and needs to demonstrate that they have done so. If a school has a high number of kids who haven’t gained those skills, there is something wrong and changes have to be made. And the way that you assess skills is through testing them. How else can we ensure that there aren’t kids passing through our school systems without being adequately educated?
You missed the point. We are now “grading” our schools on how well 100% of the population involved performs on the same test in the same language in 50 states and countless regions/tens of thousands of districts. The schools, who do their best to teach given their resources and population-a positive condition. Instead of rewarding them for taking, say, the children in a run-down section of town and doing their goddamned best to make functional adults/college students/people prepared for the workforce, we’re feeding them a curriculum based on a test for the entire nation and failing to take into account any special circumstances(health, welfare, economics, health or language).
It doesn’t matter what the district’s policy on ESL is. Instead of teaching them to read and write like for their future, we’ll be teaching them how to take a single battery of standardized tests in english. It’s pointless, and in and of itself, a policy that doesn’t take the individual student’s needs into account.
What makes you think a test is what’s needed? What says that a simple test written by a bunch of teachers-turned-beaurocrats is the way to go? We can never ensure that all kids know what is needed to succeed in the real world. In fact, I’d say it’s downright impossible. Hell, I’d even go so far as to say that it is classist and prejudiced.
Here’s why-In a few years when this all shakes out, schools will have policies of moving students around and eventually pushing them out due to nonperformance. They will become a burden on the system and administrators will find a way to score the bare minimums just so they can get their federal fucking funding-the equivalent of whoring our kids out. Right now they can transfer underachievers to districts with higher pass rates to cover up their “failures”, and therefore not impact negatively their test score rates.
How is this useful, compassionate, needed, necessary or an effective way of determining the efficacy of our school systems?
This is an issue in some indigenous communities where the kids aren’t being taught English, but their own language. (there was an NPR piece on this; I don’t have time to dig it up right now, but I will do so later.) Since schools have the right to instruct in whatever language they wish, some choose to do so, be they French-language “immersion” schools or schools for indigenous populations that choose to teach in their own language for cultural reasons. However, NCLB makes no provision for testing in languages other than English, thus making the concept of instruction in other languages meaningless.
As Mies van der Rohe said, “The devil is in the details.” NCLB is a nice idea in theory, but the details weren’t thought out very well. And, no, I wouldn’t have learned about Mies van der Rohe had I not been educated in a school.
Because tests are simply demonstrations of mastery of skills and facts. That’s how you find out what someone knows, by asking them to tell you.
You think that developing standardized tests is simple?
So we shouldn’t try?
What in hell does that mean? That because it’s traditionally been white people and people with more money who are able to read and do math, expecting that everyone else have those skills is a bad thing because it’s falsely imposing values on them that aren’t a native part of their culture or race or something? You do realize that the flip side of such an argument is that it suggests that poor people and minorities are meant to be left ignorant because that’s how it’s “always been?”
But that’s not what they are under NCLB. The tests become the curriculum itself. They also become a weapon with which to threaten the financial stability of the school. Politicians get to look like they’re doing something good, but the kids end up learning far less, and potential teachers have far less incentive to go into teaching.
Do you think an above-average achiever should be taught the same crap that the below average students are being taught? Do you think the below-average student who is having trouble with his multiplication tables should be forced to learn algebra at the same time as the above-average student? Don’t you see a need to differentiate between populations of students and what they are taught? To vary testing based on regionality? Language?
As tdn said above, that’s not what NCLB is. NCLB is a money-maker and it has so completely fucked over our schools that to compete for federal monies they must solely teach curriculum aimed towards a test.
No, the idea of a standardized test for a nation in exchange for blowjobs and federal money is simple. As I said previously, I have been involved with standardized tests since I was in elementary school-starting with yearly “Stanford Achievement Tests”, and moving on into my experiences with public schools and state-sponsored exit exams and placement tests.
Talk about character-reducing.
Not like this, no.
No, that means that the poor, under acheiving students who don’t have access to additional training/schooling/tutoring, and have less resources than other, richer, whiter children will be all but powerless to fight back against a system that will boot them around like a hockey puck, find special programs like SPED in which their underachieving won’t affect the school’s status and ultimately lead to a worse education for that kid than he would have gotten if he were left alone, to do his work.
THat means that ESL students will now know how to take standardized tests in English instead of learing a second language. That means that advanced students will have to listen to the same fucking regurgitated lessons they learned the year before. That means that students who need help with their testing will ultimately get more help and attention than any other students in school. The leaves botht he high acheivers and the low, low achievers to get forgotten about and fall through the cracks.
And it will happen, too. It happened enough when I was in school a decade ago and schools moved kids around just to get on a “distinguished school of california” roster. Now we have money to compete for. I guaran-fucking-tee there will be egregious errors of character, misapropriations, abuses of student rights, and overall, a homogenized workforce in 30 years who are worse of than I was a decade ago before every school in the nation changed gears to this new, inefficient piece of crap.
No, it’s definitely not far-fetched. I know educators and others who have the same theory. Specifically that it will create an opening for vouchers.
NCLB is a major problem in my community. Although it’s a small town, we have a high minority population, mostly Hmong and some Hispanic students. For a school that until a couple of years ago suffered greatly from declining enrollment, these minority students have been a great asset to our district (and community) and our enrollment is now on the rise. We’re thrilled to have these kids and their families here.
One of the problems I see is the way the test scores students are supposed to achieve are increased every year. This is particularly difficult with ESL students. Like someone in this thread already pointed out, a student could move into the district a week before the test (or even at the beginning of the school year and not know a word of English) and still be expected to pass. With the percentage increase required to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) each year, that’s going to make it practically impossible for a district like ours to show AYP, because we’re constantly getting new students in who speak very little or sometimes no English.
Another problem is the way the scoring is broken up into subgroups. For instance, our school met AYP overall, but did not among ESL students. This information is made readily available to anyone who wants to see it. A concern among the administrators in our district is that our minority families will feel guilty and unwanted because their subgroup was responsible for the school making the list of schools not making AYP. That’s definitely not true. This is also a problem with students taking special education courses.
Another major problem I have with NCLB is that it’s taking the accountability away from the students and putting it solely on the school district. Students get nothing from these tests they are required to take - no rewards, no consequences whatsoever. It means nothing to them whether they pass it or not, because it’s not going to affect their grades or their progress toward graduation. The school, however, risks losing funding, being forced to hire tutors, and busing kids to another school (I think there’s more, I just don’t have it right in front of me) if they do not make AYP. At least with the Profiles of Learning, if the student did not pass the standard, he or she did not progress toward graduation.
I could really go on and on about this. These were just a few major points I thought of off the top of my head.
One last thing. My sister, a special ed. teacher, recently referred to No Child Left Behind as No Teacher Left Standing. I think perhaps No School Left Standing would be more appropriate. I think it’s pretty much inevitable that eventually every school is going to fail under this plan.
No. All students can learn. But those students do require additional resources. The trend seems to be that the poorest kids end up in the largest classes. Schools get additional funding based on the number of students that qualify for free lunch. That money never results in getting those kids in smaller classes. I am not sure where exactly this money winds up but I have noticed that our school has created another category of quasi-administrators. They teach fewer classes and spend more time producing work for people that have huge class loads. These quasi-administrators hold “mandatory” meetings for us, outside of the work day and demand that each member of the department is teaching the same lesson on the same day. We are required to give common assessments. Everybody should be in lockstep. Last grading cycle, these quasi-administrators ran every teachers spreadsheets and compared the number of failures. I can see the benefit of looking at this kind of data but given the current state of funding, I think it is an unwise choice. I would compare that to a coach that shows up to play a basketball game with five palayers. Instead of competing five on five, he takes two of his palyers off the floor to keep stats and video tape. It is disheartening. I have classes of 36. But the good thing is that I am closely supervised and I am reminded of expectations weekly. HooRAH!
The arguments against seem pretty clearly more significant the the arguments for, but hey, that’s just me.
I’ll add this. NCLB is idiotic. It now has public schools teaching towards passing a test, which is completely ass-backwards. The purpose of a test is to find out what someone has learned, not to make teachers teach what is needed to pass the test. Teachers are taking weeks or more at a time out of their normal curriculums to simply prepare their students to take these tests.
Also, if we don’t trust teachers to decide on their own whether a student has learned enough, why are they still teaching? Either we trust them enough to evaluate the students they’re teaching without these ridiculous standardized tests, or they shouldn’t be teaching in the first place.
Since NCLB, my son’s school pressured me to let them opt him out of all the standardized tests. The boy’s always scored low, he’s ADHD and has Asperger’s and qualifies for whatever they’re calling Special Ed now, but it’s only this past year that I ever heard of opting kids out of the testing. He’s in 7th grade this year, and his test-taking skills are no worse than they were all thru elementary, in fact I’d wager that he’s better at it now since he’s more mature and we’ve got all the medication issues figured out.
His school counselor, school social worker and learning consultant all individually took the time to consult me about ‘not putting him thru the stress’ of taking the tests.
Obviously, this isn’t conclusive evidence of anything whatsoever, just found the timing interesting.
Come to think of it, if all children are equally neglected, no one child will ever be “left behind.” They’ll all be screwed to precisely the same degree.
As a teacher in training, the No Child Left Behind Act scares the crap out of me. It’s enough to make me question whether teaching is what I really want to do with my life. I have a true passion for teaching and helping other people. But if all my time is wasted teaching kids to be able to pass some test, then I will not last long.
van der Rohe said “God is in the details.” This was corrupted to “the devil” by H. Ross Perot.
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My favorite aspect of the Needy Children Left Behind act is that we evaluate schools according to how the kids are doing on a standardized test, irrespective of the situation of the schools, neighborhoods, cities, or families in which they live. Then we say to those who have the most problems, “We’re going to cut your funding until you do better.” (Can you say debtor’s prison? I knew you could.)
Now, I am well aware that money has been thrown away in many cases and that simply throwing money at the problems of schools will not solve them, but I can pretty well guarantee that if we remove the money for basic resources from a troubled system, that system will not miraculously improve.
(And vouchers have, so far, proved to be a pretty horrible boondoggle. The Cleveland experience has been that the majority of the kids who flee to the voucher schools are the ones who were already doing well–which is a shame, because those schools have not been getting better scores than the public schools from which the kids fled, despite the fact that the state subsidy for the vouchers is higher than the state subsidy for the kids in public schools.)
In relation to the first paragraph above, imagine how the kids must feel when they don’t do well and the school is penalized for it. Way to motivate 'em, eh?
Your words I bolded are, imho, the key to the second part of your post that I quote here.
I did a lot of substitute teaching during my stay in Texas this past year. From what I could see, a lot of these kids just didn’t care. And from the things they said, they didn’t care because their parents weren’t involved in their lives or their education.
And as you said, it doesn’t take long. 15 to 20 minutes a night, or even a little help with homework a few nights a week. We, as parents, can’t just drop our kids off and expect for all to be taken care of by the school district.
Particularly given how they hinder our teachers and school system with funding and curriculum issues.