Well, here’s the deal. I am involved with my children’s education, and they do well. They do not suffer any problems with summer vacation. Why should they be penalized?
As long as there are parents that are crappy parents, then there will be kids that are “left behind”. I don’t know the solution, but I do know that my kids shouldn’t have to give up their playtime because of other bad parents.
NCLB, increased funding, etc., are not going to work to address the parent problem.
Agreed that an
Y discussion of genetic engineering would be a hijack. But my comments in this thread were absolutely on-topic. As I explained above, one answer to “where do we go from here” could be “stop hand-waving away the race/IQ studies and realize that some students and schools will perform on a lower level than other students/schools no matter what we do.”
Really, I think that education policy is the only area where the race/IQ studies have a clear and direct application. And the issues come up over and over–my local public high school has been tinkering for years with honors-only v. mixed-level classes in various subjects, all in an effort to have the numbers coe out in a way that makes them happy (and that is predicted to be unlikely by the race/IQ studies).
Since the rate of failing schools under the NCLB could reach 82 percent this year, it is clear that race/iq is not on-topic. Other wise you would need to show that all those schools are in trouble because of their race makeup, that doesn’t make sense.
As loathe as I am to defend such silly arguments, this rebuttal doesn’t actually work. Our school, for example, has (I think) 17 different requirements in order to meet NCLB standards. They’re something like:
% of total students tested
% of total students who pass
% of white students tested
% of white students who pass
% of black students tested
% of black students who pass
% of free/reduced lunch students tested
% of free/reduced lunch students who pass
…and so on, in reading and math. Historically (i.e., over the last 5 years or so), our white students have passed at rates of 95% and more, easily meeting current NCLB goals (but not meeting the ridiculous 2014 goals). Our black students have traditionally passed at rates no higher than 60%, leaving a tremendous race-based gap. Even if our overall scores are high enough, we’d fail NCLB for race-based reasons.
And that’s one of the good things about NCLB: if there are significant disparities between populations, schools can’t bury those disparities in high average scores: you have to do well for each population that you teach. You can’t leave the black kids behind if you do a good enough job teaching the white kids, in other words. If Rand Rover’s odious race theories were accurate, then maybe he’d be right, that where we should go would be to hold black students to lower academic standards than we held the smarter white students.
But of course, when I say that our black students pass at rates no higher than 60%, strangely our free/reduced lunch students pass at almost identical rates. Strangely, our black students and our free/reduced lunch students are a very, very similar population: there are some middle-class black students in our school, and there are some impoverished white students, but most of the poor students are black and vice-versa. And given what we know about the links between parent education levels and parent support for academics and parent income levels, we have some clear stuff to look at without needing to bring odious racial theories into it. (yes, yes, I can’t handle the TWOOTH, I’m a sheeple, you’re a brave intellectual maverick, baa baa, let’s move on).
I propose that NCLB has been an excellent information-gathering technique. The information we’ve gathered is this: schools can’t do it alone. We’ve put tremendous, amazing pressure on administrators and teachers to raise the scores of poor students, and an entire industry has arisen around creating curriculum that will do specifically this, and it doesn’t work. If we’re serious as a society about eliminating this achievement gap, we need to move beyond the walls of the school building, look at solutions that involve parents, workplaces, social support systems, etc. (And no, charter schools aren’t an answer: while there are some excellent charter schools, there are also some terrible ones, just like there are excellent and terrible public schools).
This is the part that really bothers me, because it points to a very different form of poverty than has traditionally affected students. When my mother was young she was undeniably poor, but she had a grocery store in the neighborhood and a mother who cooked three meals everyday for a large extended family.
Now, there are still poor students who have similar advantages. By and large, though, with this going for them they won’t stay poor.
If you live in a neighborhood where grocery stores moved out after riots decades ago and never returned, if meals outside of school come from a cereal bowl, a 7-11 or a McDonald’s, and if mom can’t cook because she’s working all the time and Dad can’t because he isn’t around - well, the fact that you are getting a free lunch can only fix so much.
I said a while back that the most important pieces of technology involved in the school day for my kids were an alarm clock and the stove at home. I still stand by that.
With your facility at creating and then defeating strawmen, one might reasonably conclude that that is the only opponent you are capable of beating. I don’t believe the race/IQ studies are “the truth.” I simply acknowledge they exist. I don’t hand-wave them away based on beliefs about how I wish the world were constructed. I’ve even read them, unlike you, because if you had . . .
. . . you would know that this rebuttal doesn’t actually work. The race/IQ studies control for poverty and still show poorer performance across genetic lines.
Also, surprise surprise, you think the REAL solution is more government programs. Wow, that’s straight out of left field for you. Who’d’a thunk it?
This is the only substantive sentence in that entire post. Sadly, it’s off-topic, as tom already said. Bump one of your threads about how black people are dumber if you want to discuss that.
NCLB is not failing only in schools with “race/IQ” issues, so it still remains a hijack in this thread. Take it to another thread.
[ /Moderating ]
What a shock! Your schools problem areas are our schools problem areas. Or, as said by my daughter’s fifth grade teacher…“the kids who you expect to do fine, do fine.”
If you would read LHOD’s post, you’d see that NCLB is failing because of issues implicated by the race/IQ studies. So, still not a hijack.
Many states conduct Alternative Assessment (some portfolio-based, others video-based) in lieu of requiring that students with severe cognitive impairments take the regular standardized achievement tests. These alt assessment tests are in compliance with NCLB.
Thank’s all for answering my question about the special education students. What about other children? Is there anyway for a parent to refuse to allow their child to be tested? 
As I said that was possible with the pre-NCLB standardized tests I took when I was in school. What happens if a child just happens to be absent on test day, and on re-test day? Other than trying to go after the parents for truancy is there anything the school can do?
In the context of NCLB, the free/reduced price lunch rate is simply a quick-and-dirty way to establish the number and percentage of students whose families fall below the poverty line. That’s all it is here.
How do you figure the standards set were delusional? The bar was deliberately set low and the Atlanta school system decided it was beyond their reach for HS students to pass at a 10th grade level. Most kids in other districts have little problem passing the test in their junior year.
Sure, pull them out of school and let them take the GED test. Hopefully they are in walking distance of a bus stop or a McDonalds.
Hey, great idea! Let’s expel students for missing a standardized test! Who said the Republicans had no workable plan to fix education?
I don’t know of any state testing with policies allowing it, but from googling “standardized tests opt-out” some people certainly attempt to. The mother in this cnn article apparently decided to use a religious objection to keep her kids from taking the test. I’m not sure what religious objections there could be to keep your kid from taking any part of the test, even Math, but…
The workable plan is to teach the kids the information they’re suppose to learn and not use public funds to cheat.
Hey, I’m all for teaching kids and not cheating. I just couldn’t figure out why you thought the suggestion you made before my comment was… well, worth making.
Because it’s patronizing to suggest a child should skip a test that is already below the level of achievement expected.