Per the linked story NCLB chickens are coming home to roost and are starting to cause some schools to be completely disassembled and then reassembled from the ground up. Is this a useful thing for underperforming schools or is the fault in the unrealistic expectations and goals of NCLB?
The fundamental problem with the No Child Left Behind act is the same problem that plagues a lot of federal legislation these days. It’s too long, too complicated, too byzantine, too incomprehensible, and filled with statements that contradict each other. The entire thing was designed around the goal of giving Congress critters something to brag about. To that end, it’s jammed with individual passages that look to serve popular buzzwords: “accountability”, “school choice”, “reduce regulation”. However, it was not designed around a centralized plan for correcting failing schools.
Under NCLB, all schools are evaluated according to student performance on a nationwide standardized test. There’s no reason to believe that this test provides an accurate measure of how well students are learning in a broad sense. Evaluating in this manner gives teachers incentives to teach exactly the material covered on the test. A more fair evaluation scheme would include objective data such as graduation rates, percentage of students who enter a four year college after graduation, surveys of parental satisfaction, and cross-referencing with other standardized tests. (The NCLB is basically repeating the same mistakes that many states made with their systems of standardized tests during the 90’s.)
Even if you do accurately classify a school as “failing”, it’s difficult to see how the major shake-ups that NCLB demands are going to help. NCLB gives any qualified teacher a very strong motivation to stay away from any school that might fall into the “failing” category, and of course it has the same effect on administrators, counsellors, and other personnel. Thus, the schools that most badly need contributions from talented people are least likely to get them.
Big picture: the big problem that schools face in America is a shortage of teachers, and a shortage of qualified teachers. To get more qualified applicants, you need to make the job more attractive. NCLB makes the job less attractive.
ITR champion, may I ask if you teach in public schools?
You are absolutely incorrect!
There is no national test. Each state is left to develop their own test and one of the tests used to evaluate California high schools is the CAHSEE (i.e. the high school exit exam).
Second, why evaluate a school based on how many students go to a 4 year college? Does a student going to junior college (very popular option in Calif) or vocational school mean the schools did not do their job?
What is this cross-referencing with “other standardized tests”? Pop-quiz: What is the difference between norm-referenced and criterion-referenced standardized tests? Which would you use to evaluate whether the school did their job correctly? On a normed test, how many standard deviations would be considered passing? Does it even make sense to talk about passing a normed test?
Survey of parental satisfaction? One (of many) reason(s) students do so poorly is due to parent apathy. Even if you don’t take this into account, how do parent perceptions give an accurate portrayal of the academic work the school is doing?
You actually got this one right. I am a teacher with master’s degrees and credentials in both mathematics and special education. Why the hell would I want to go teach in a low-performing school when there are so many options open to me? Answer: NONE! I don’t even get hazard pay (an idea of my district a few years ago).
True. I have one word for you…privatization. 
I’m sure thats not what you were getting at though.
I’m not sure how your way would be more ‘fair’ to be honest. It would simply skew the results a different way (seems like it would skew them toward middle and upper class schools, who’s students would enter colleges at a higher percentage reguardless of how well they ‘learned’…same with ‘graduation rates’, as this doesn’t really reflect how well a student is learning, but how much emphasis is put on finishing school, as opposed to going to work or going into a trade type school). I’m not sure why exactly you feel that standardized tests are necessarily a bad thing to gage how well a school is or is not doing in educating students (I’m opposed to them for other reasons…but then I’m opposed to public education as the default).
If I understand what you are saying here, its better to trick potential teachers into going to ‘failing’ schools by making sure they don’t have the information that they ARE ‘failing’ (and leaving aside the fact that just through the teachers grapevine they are going to find out)…presumably for the ‘good of the students’. Is that what you are saying in a nut shell?
My major problem with NCLB is that its an attempt to patch over what I consider an already failing program…i.e. the entire public education system in the US. It attempts to do this by attempting to have schools conform to a federal standard, and then throwing truely staggering amounts of money at the problem. From my perspective as an IT vendor who’s company is involved in the eRate program, its been benificial. But as a parent I have to say that, while I sent my eldest children to public schools, and while there still ARE some very good public schools in my state, I’ll probably be sending my kids to private school, finances permitting.
As for the OP, I’d say its a good thing to attempt to shake up the current system. It NEEDS shaking up, in a big way. I just don’t think NCLB is enough of a fundamental shake up to the system to REALLY make it work. YMMV.
-XT
Restructuring, reorganizing, a lot of motion without fixing anything.
“We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn that later in life we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization”
[RIGHT]Petronius Arbiter[/RIGHT]
My high school grades were high enough to get into any but the five hardest-to-get-into major-and-school combinations in Spain (here you apply for school and major, not just school). I’m a Chem Eng from IQS; that’s one of the four hardest-to-get-through combos (the others are two CompEng schools and one for Mining Eng), and I did it one year faster than the median.
My parents still weren’t satisfied. So, would you say it was my teachers who failed? I don’t think they did… it’s my parents who needed to wake up and realize that a GPA below 100% is perfectly survivable even if it belongs to your child.
IANAL or an education expert, but from what excerpts of NCLB I’ve read, articles, etc, it sounds to me like it’s both overreaching and vague. Mind you, if any country government ever finds a good school system - the next government of the opposite sign will tear it apart, just because it’s the opposite sign.
I’m of the mind that NCLB was devised as a sneak attack to destroy public education so the conservatives can make an excuse to push for privatization/vouchers.
Taking this same ‘logic’ to its conclusion, why not envision the entire public education system in the same light? Its ALL a vast conspiricy to prove that public education sucks and should be privatized!
Personally I don’t start thinking conspiricy when simple incompetence can suffice…
-XT
I wonder if perhaps we have unrealistic expectations when it comes to education. Face it, not every kid is “college material.” Encouraging higher education is great, but we shouldn’t *expect *that every kid will go on to get a degree. Not everyone is destined to be a doctor, lawyer or engineer-- somebody’s gotta dig the ditches, so to speak.
Secondly, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. A kid who doesn’t care about education is never going to be a Rhodes Scholar. There is a segment of our population which is vaguely contemptuous of education, and some parents take offense if their child expresses a desire to better themselves, taking it as an insult to their lifestyle. Add to this the children of people who would like to be more involved in their child’s education but don’t have the time or money, and you have a lot of kids who are going to be “left behind” no matter what the government does.
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might claim that NCLB is just another effort of the government to ensure that the population is not taught critical thinking skills, only to regurgitate data on demand.
From where I’m sitting, public education was doing a reasonable job until NCLB drifted down the sewer pipe.
On that, I’ll agree – after all, this administration is the world’s leading exporter of incompetence.
I’m no fan of the Dubya administration, but I do believe some of the truly radical things they have attempted (Social Security reform and NCLB chief among them) were good-hearted attempts to actually fix something they believe is broken. And they’re probably right – change is needed. I choose to believe (and I may be terribly naive here) that they took the typically Republican position that if you throw a wrench into the gearbox, Yankee ingenuity will allow Americans to rebuild it better. I think the intention of NCLB was to actually change the nature of the problem and force people to come up with solutions that would work.
What they didn’t understand – indeed, what I think none of us really understood --was how fiercely the entrenched bureaucrats and politicians in Washington would defend their turf, right or wrong. Many of us liberals just don’t understand that a government solution to a problem doesn’t mean The Almighty U.S. Government steps in with massive resources and presents a brilliant solution that works everywhere. I don’t know where we got the idea – where I got the idea – but it’s one we have clung to for decades.
The United States is just too regionalized and heterogenous (is that spelled right?) for a one-size-fits-all solution. So when NCLB didn’t fix public education overnight, instead of looking to ourselves for solutions, we blamed the Bushies for screwing up the works.
I’m willing to believe that Bush and his staff simply had faith in the American people’s ability to come up with creative solutions. And, actually, we do have that ability. But there’s a huge bureaucracy and hundreds of equally huge Congressional egoes standing between us and the solutions. I know Bush has been accused by my fellow travelers of trying to seize imperial power. But we have to ask ourselves if maybe he isn’t just trying to wrest it away from Congress to hand it back to the American people, except that we haven’t had it for so long we don’t know what to do with it. Some of the well-researched and well-argued posts on this thread lead me to believe that maybe, after bitching and bellyaching for the past 20 years that control of the public schools needs to be given back to the local communities, I’m now being given that opportunity, but I’m too scared or hidebound or ignorant to actually seize that power.
I dunno. I hope this doesn’t offend anyone, but you’re watching an old liberal in the process of changing his mind about something. It’s not a pretty site, is it?
Er…you SERIOUSLY think that public education was doing a good job prior to NCLB and the Bush administration?? :eek:
Interesting theory. I never would have considered it, and am not sure how valid it is. It IS interesting though.
-XT
But I don’t think the disenchantment with American public education is a symptom of overachieving parents. There really are serious problems when large numbers of Americans school children don’t even know where Louisiana is or what the three branches of U.S. government are. Imagine a Spain in which huge numbers of pre-college students don’t know where Castille is or who the Moors were. That’s what America faces today.
You can’t change parental apathy without changing culture. You can’t change culture without changing education. You can’t change education without completely restructuring the way that it is funded. I’m not a big fan of privatization, but it is a solution to this problem. My preferred solution would be to collect and distribute funding for the schools more equally at the state level instead of little Charles Jr. having an inherrant advantage little Billy-Joe due to the fact that he was born to upper-middle class parents.
When we equalize the system I think we can start discussing penalties for individual schools under a national guideline. Until then it’ll just exacerbate the problem.
One of my lifelong mantras has been that we need to “return to local control of public schools.” That’s probably because my generation (baby boomers) grew up believing that locally-funded and locally-controlled schools produced the best-educated high school graduates in history. Just because we believed it, however, doesn’t mean it was true.
It is commonly accepted wisdom that the little eastern Colorado school district I grew up in produced, per capita, as many National Merit Scholars and military academy graduates (the primary measures of achievements back in the 1950s and 1960s) as the big Denver schools did. We believed that was because the locals controlled and funded their schools. Now, maybe the wheat, irrigated corn and cattle that were the economy for that school district back then (and still are, actually) provided tax revenues that paid for a high-quality education. The economy of the area hasn’t changed, but now we have school finance equalization, and the school district I grew up in has serious quality problems.
So, does local control/funding really make a difference, or was there something else even bigger that was coincident with the shift to state-wide control and growing federal funding and influence that caused the decline in the quality of education? Am I taking too much on faith to believe that, because kids today don’t know what I knew when I was their age, they’re not as well-educated as I was then?
Y’know, it suddenly occurs to me that, for a Democrat who is passionate about education, I know pretty damn little about it!
Don’t get me wrong - I think schooling still needs to be controlled locally - I just think it needs to be funded equally.
Though there’s still the chicken and egg problem. How do you get to students when their parents are apathetic? School should be reinforcing what they’re learning at home. How do you set the seed and break the cycle of apathetic parents?
Even I, a Canadian, know the answers to those questions.
Louisiana lies between George Jr.'s state and Jeb’s state.
The three branches of the U.S. government are George Sr., George Jr., and Jeb.
More seriously, how many schools are there in the USA that are subject to NCLB, and how many of them will end up being restructured? If it is only the worst of the worst that are being restructured, then perhaps restructuring is not a bad thing.
I’ll put my bald speculation behind the “road to Hell, paved with good intentions” hypothesis. The aftermath may well favor those who want to “starve the beast” and so forth, but I have a feeling the motivation can be as simple as things like Dubya wants to make his librarian wife happy, and she feels passionately about education.
Anyway, if it increases local control, I’d say it’s a good thing, or, at least, a lesser evil. I’ve pretty much given up on a national consensus about education, though if a sane one could be achieved, I’d of course favor that. I’ve just lost any hope it can. Preferably, I’d like states to keep their money for education as well, in lieu of Federal funding with the attendant senseless mandates. After all, why do I want my tax money going to Kansas if they insist on teaching creation science? Why throw good money after bad when national policies stink so rottenly anyway?
I think it was decent, but not without room for improvement. I certainly don’t think it was the hopeless train wreck that some conservatives like to portray it as.