For that matter, what do your unsupported attacks on Bush have to do with this thread?
I expect the standard partisan catcalls in this or any similar discussion, but let’s try to not hijack this thread into the standard “your guy is bad” rhetoric with claims for which there is no support beyond one’s personal biases. I think GWB was a lousy president, but I do not believe that he wished harm on any children. (And it should be noted that Needy Children Left Behind had the support of a majority of Democrat politicians when it was passed with strong support from Ted Kennedy.)
My wife was a special ed teacher for 30 years. Some of the kids she taught were so severely handicapped they couldn’t even write their name on a standardized test, much less pass one. Some of them had such profound physical problems they couldn’t toilet themselves.
The only rational standard for judging those students was progress, rather than achievement. Progress for them might be measured in infinitesimal steps, but at least over a period of several years, it could be measured.
I’m no fan of standardized testing, but it does seem to me that it’s proper to evaluate if the students are learning anything, and then crunch the numbers like mad to evaluate whether a given teacher, over a longish period of time, is doing a good job, or whether a group of students responds better to one style of teaching than another.
The only problem with this is that it produces yet another level of research that your locally elected school board and their appointed staffs may or may not take into account. And the public school critics want fast answers rather than a realistic evaluation.
Well, that’s not entirely true. Publishers were powerful lobbyists behind NCLB, and they have benefited handsomely:
[QUOTE=Pittsburg Post-Gazette]
The federal No Child Left Behind Act, signed in 2002, has spawned products including tests, test preparation and curriculum, aimed at meeting the requirements that all children be proficient in math and reading by 2014.
That piece of the business is worth about $25 billion a year, said Jerry Herman, managing director of Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. Inc., a St. Louis-based broker-dealer investment firm.
[/quote]
Yes, and the very act itself was a business opportunity from the start. As all teachers know, every educational “reform” is usually also a mechanism for selling more stuff to school districts. We’re going through that yet again here in California with CCS, which yet again guarantees that Person and McGraw Hill, the publishers who dominate the market, get locked in with extremely lucrative deals. Remember that George W Bush already had a very cozy relationship with McGraw Hill before his presidency, while his administration was pushing Open Court in Texas.
Remember, too, that in those few months between his governorship and Sept. 11, 2001, about the only presidential authorship Bush could claim was NCLB. Not a coincidence that he was in a schoolroom publicity photo-op when the planes struck.
Aren’t special education students exempt from standardized testing? I graduated 8 years ago; from what I remember parents could excuse their child from any standardized tests by notifiying the school in writting (not that the school publiczed this). Is that not the case now? I remember our guidence counselors really hated when parents did this because apparently the students who’s parents didn’t want tested tended to be the ones the administrators most wanted tested. Hell I got grief just being the only one in my grade for refusing to take the freaking ASVAB!
You can only exempt a small portion (a percentage that I can’t remember) of your special ed students… So the most severely disabled are usually exempt. But there are plenty of special ed students who have no chance of being proficient on the test still taking the test.
The problem isn’t the attempt to use metrics; it is the misuse of metrics.
When metrics are used those using them need to have a profound understanding of their limitations. Overemphasis on the metrics can result in trying to game for the metric rather than targeting the true goal of which the metric is a mere proxy, and used without due caution and unwisely can lead to short term, rather than long term intervention planning.
It is one thing when students are only motivated by “will this be on the test?”; when that, by necessity becomes the overriding concern of the school itself as well the problem is even greater.
If a child receives special ed services, there are a couple of different versions of the test you can give them (they’re called Extend I and Extend II, but I can’t remember which is which). There are serious limits on how many kids can receive these versions of the test.
A few years ago, our district gave these versions of the test to something like (here I’m making up numbers, don’t trust them) 100 students, even though by law we were only allowed to give them to something like 70 students: our district has a lot of kids identified as special ed, being an urban Title I district with a hospital in town and with a reputation for providing stellar special ed services.
We applied for a waiver from the state, asking that we be allowed to consider all of these students as eligible for Extend I. The state denied our waiver request. So the district had to put the names of all Extend I students from the district’s 9 schools in a hat and pull out 30 names; those would be the students who were not considered Extend I eligible and therefore would be treated as not passing the test.
And here’s where the numbers are for real. Our school drew four names from the hat, including three names for students who were free/reduced lunch. If we’d drawn two free/reduced lunch names, we would have met our NCLB goals; but because we drew that third name, we had one too many free/reduced lunch students fail the test, and by failing this one out of 17 NCLB goals, our school was regarded as having failed to meet NCLB goals.
I can’t say I’m a fan of the law. I don’t buy the conspiracy theories about how eeeeevil Republicans were trying to destroy public education (unless Ted Kennedy was a closet Republican), and I do think the law had some laudable goals and has had some positive impacts, but key elements of it are amazingly stupidly designed.
I’m surprised that a bill that had a 384-45 passage in the House, 91-8 in the Senate, was co-sponsored by Democrats George Miller (House, CA) and Ted Kennedy (Senate, MA (who was one of the co-authors)) is being touted as a purely Republican measure.
The real problem isn’t partisanism–it’s that education “reform” has become such a political football in the first place. There are so many layers upon layers of grandstanding piled on top–and obscured motivations underneath–that learning really isn’t the issue under discussion.
I don’t think this happens so much in other countries.
Can you expand on this? Grandstanding can’t really be the problem here, can it? NCLB was the first real top-down federal education ‘reform’ that I know of. Sure, reforms have been tried at the state and local levels…
I think the real difference between us and other countries is how little control the federal government actually has over public ed here.
The fact that it was presented as his program from its inception, and that claims were being made about the motivations behind NCLB from the second post on in this thread.
And, interestingly enough, another class of special ed students being classed as special ed…
My daughter scores 98th-99th percentile on standardized tests. She’s also “special ed” - she has a speech impediment. She does, indeed, have a speech impediment - the school encouraged us to do an IEP for her this last year as she is was in fifth grade and hadn’t yet grown out of it - one hour a week of speech therapy. That classes her as “special ed” and puts her scores into the statistics for special needs kids, instead of the “white, upper-middle class, parents college educated” profile she had.
Now, if our school wasn’t desperate to avoid being classed as failing (which we were very close to doing) due to low scores in special ed kids, would they have pressed us to get treatment for my daughter?
They aren’t the only ones. Quite a few prep schools classify virtually all of their students as “special needs” and file IEPs on them. That means these children of the elites get extra time on all standardized testing, like AP tests, NCLB testing, and SAT/ACT. Amazing how well those schools do, isn’t it?
Having an IEP doesn’t mean getting extra time — “gifted” kids get IEP’s to let them take part in extra programs (this is what happened to me). I mean, obviously it would be possible to have a school make up impediments to get children extra time; but at that point we’re talking outright fraud, not just a manipulation of bureaucratic categories.
Yes, yes, it does–there’s a reason I have to wear SPF 5 million sunscreen whenever I go out under The Orb That Burns, and other folks don’t. But your post isn’t substantive or illuminating; it’s just you riding a hobby horse through the thread shouting “woohoo!” It’s furthermore a Down’s Syndrome hobby horse: you’re suggesting that genetics are the only stumbling block to equality, as though environment has no effect on issues of equality.