argh

[learnteach]

 

"Tomorrow is the 6th anniversary of the day that I signed the No Child Left Behind Act into law. And since that day we've come a long way, fewer students are falling behind. People are beginning to get used to the notion that there's accountability in the public school system. Look, I recognize some people don't like accountability. In other words, accountability says if you're failing, we're going to expose that and expect you to change. Accountability also says that when you're succeeding you'll get plenty of praise. "

President George W. Bush
January 7, 2008


I can't even begin to respond to this.  Well, I can begin, but it's not very reasoned.  3 points:  The administration load of the program, and the continual testing (4 times a year by the school) suck up any advantage.  Secondly, the metric (the test) is incredibly poor.   Testing of this sort doesn't really work.   Finally, the amount of funds pledged versus the amount of changes and work, and the codicil requirements which require many extra resources to pull up the low performing students, mean that we're taking all the programs that reward intelligence and achievement to try and enact basic social programs in schools.  

Comments

Re: No Teacher Left Standing

[terpsichoros.livejournal.com]

People who are paid tax money should be held responsible for what they're paid to do. Period. End of story.

I seriously believe that a lot of the idiocies going on in the name of NCLB are attempts by entrenched administrators to make NCLB look ridiculous, to generate pressure against it. NCLB doesn't require testing progress 4 times a year; but learnteach's school implements quarterly tests, and blames it on NCLB.

On the other hand, a lot of the failures of schools can be laid directly at the feet of the "education leadership". Whoever came up with the idea that phonics is not necessary to teach children to read ought to be tortured, slowly, enduring the death of a thousand paper cuts with all the misspelled words they've caused. Similar torture ought to await whoever came up with the phrase "drill and kill", and at a higher level, the idiots who replaced courses which taught facts with "critical thinking" courses which leave the student with no factual knowledge, so that all their "critical thinking" decays into parrotting the platitudes current among their teachers and peers. The originator of the idea of replacing actual science content with environmentalist propaganda needs to be composted. Slowly.

Fixing any of these problems won't take money, which is a good thing, as additional money correlates with poorer results. We're spending more and more per pupil on education, and getting less and less. NCLB is a reaction to that, which says "You have to show that you are actually *educating* *all* your students. Not just the middle-class white ones."

Re: No Teacher Left Standing

[beanolc.livejournal.com]

If you're looking to engage me, or have me bite back, it won't happen.

Re: No Teacher Left Standing

[learnteach.livejournal.com]

Sure, you're right.

People who are given money of any sort--tax or otherwise--should be held responsible. Passing a standardized test, and basing all the funding on it, is a very poor way to promote accountability.

Administrators know they are paid on test results, and many companies come selling systems to improve them. If the students don't get used to being tested, how will they test well? If you don't test mid-course, how will you tag problem classes? The worst horror is that schools are tracked, not students, not by classes, but by general school. And when your student turnover is greater than 30% (any school in an area with immigrants will see this; we saw 60% year to year (and I'm speaking of within a class year, not the matriculation or graduation)) the statistics are based more on the random chance of economics. (The worst of this is trying to teach Chemistry to students who didn't speak English and hadn't passed Algebra. I'm guaranteed to fail there...but where else can you put them

Phonics is actually a poor way to teach spelling, used as the main method, for the English language. German, Japanese, sure, no problem. English? Enough, ghoti, own, Town, pool... The results from the years where phonetics were the main way? Not so good. Start there, move on...

As for actual science vs. environmentalist propaganda, I haven't seen that. I did see scientific theory versus religous belief multiple times. And, for the record, I did award extra credits for research presentations on global warming. I also awarded extra credit for cancer research (knowledge of, or personal stories) and for doing experiments. Do you consider global warming to be environmentalist propaganda?

The reason we're spending more and more per student will increase with NCLB. The classes must be mainline; problem students must be kept in class. In a 200 student school, we had 14 teachers and 4 special education staff, and the special ed staff had to have Master's level degrees. So, NCLB (which required this inclusion) is draining the budget for non-special education.

Given that you will have a direct interest in this, I recommend visiting schools. And looking into alternatives. I'm somewhat convinced that this law is a law by the privileged to break the system and force school vouchers into play.

Re: No Teacher Left Standing

[terpsichoros.livejournal.com]

Teaching reading without phonics is like teaching math without counting. Seriously - just because there are more rules for sounds in English than in most other languages, and there are more exceptions than in many, doesn't mean that most words don't actually obey the rules of phonics, nor that one can eliminate phonics from reading.

I had a teacher whose approach was "look at the shape of the word". Even in third grade, I thought that was bullshit - if I didn't already know how to read, I wouldn't have learned by trying to memorize thousands of words, instead of 26 letters and about 20 supplemental rules. Abandoning phonics in reading is the primary cause of dyslexia. Countries like France, which have letter to sound correspondence rules as complicated as those in English, but thoroughly use phonics when teaching reading, have dyslexia rates about 10% of ours.

I had lots of real science in school, but I also remember teachers pushing ideas like recycling would save the world (when the economics of most recycling were really poor), or that electric cars would save us all (where would the electricity come from?) and that nuclear power was dangerous because of its similarity to nuclear weapons, or that catastrophic meltdowns would kill us all. Oh - and air pollution might cause irreversible global cooling.

There are some significant flaws in NCLB, though many of its opponents would find some of those to be features. But I'd be willing to bet that in the long run, NCLB will be blamed for more things it didn't require or cause than even the Patriot Act.