No Child Left Behind = Load of Crap
My wife just got home from our children’s grade school’s Site-Based Council meeting. I don’t know exactly what a Site-Based Council is, but it seems to be the principal, vice-principal, teachers and other concerned parents discussing and working on school administrative and management issues. But that’s not the important thing.
The important thing is that our grade school just found out that it will not be an “excelling” school this year. Now the average person would hear this and say, “Oh, that school must have a bunch of stoopid people, or lazy teachers, or maybe they just suck. We sure wouldn’t want to have our kids go to that school. Booooo!” But, the devil, as always, is in the details. Well, actually, the devil might be in the White House, but that’s a different story.
Back to the No Child Left Behind Act, as it is playing out in my children’s grade school. The schools that get labelled as non-excelling, or whatever, may get labelled that way because of actual academic shortcomings. Or they may just run afoul of any number of little picky numbers. In our case, one subgroup of fifth graders, who were taking one part of the state exam, ended up having a three of those students, have to have “nonstandard accommodations” for that part of their testing. This might have meant that they had to have part of the test read to them or they might have had to dictate their answers to a scribe. In our case these three students required these “nonstandard accommodations” because it was part of their IEP, or “Individualized Education Plan”. An IEP, for those of you not familiar with current education lingo, is where a school tries to individualize the education plan for a student (complicated, huh), so as to maximize the chances that that student is able to learn to the best of their abilities.
Well, by the rules of the game, these three students having to have “nonstandard accomodations” are automatically counted as having failed, thus putting the subgroup just below the magical, scientifically proven to be important, 95% mark, whereby if you are above that mark, you are the bestest in the world and if you are below that mark, apparently, you suck. A student who has to have “nonstandard accomodations” is counted as having failed the test, whether they actually failed or not. They are also counted as having not taken the test, even though they actually took the test. And if fewer than 95% of your students take the test, you have not met the requirements. Sorry. Thanks for playing. Try again.
Schools make IEPs in order to try to “Leave No Child Behind”. But if they make an IEP, that student will automatically be counted as having failed if that IEP is enacted during the testing process. A school will either violate federal special education laws, by not helping those with learning disabilities, or they will violate the federal “No Child Left Behind” laws.
And that, my friends, is a load of crap.
You’re exact right. Nice pic!
Yes, in discussing the topic with my wife, we came to the conclusion that in order to have met the requirements of “No Child Left Behind”, our school would have been better off to have actually just decided to “Leave Those Children Behind”, and to have not made accommodations for them. Catch-22, huh.
When Bush first started his bid for the White House in the late 90s he campaigned on “education reform.” As a college professor, I read his “No Child Left Behind” proposal and saw that it had one purpose: to dismantle public education.
Public schools have been teaching Darwinism and that’s “evil” in W’s eyes. The best way Republicans saw to dismantle public education and steer young people to private schools was to have a plan that would make most public schools fail. The second part of the plan was to give taxpayer’s money to private, religious schools to teach creationism.
Now, 10 years later, the Bush plan is fully in effect and functioning as the Republicans had planned. Their only disappointment is that not enough public schools are “failing” so they’ll be turning up the heat during the 2008 campaign season.
By the way, one of their biggest enabler’s in the Asheville Citizen-Times is the cartoonist Tinsley who draws the unimaginative political cartoon, “Mallard Filmore.” Notice the constant attack on public education in his daily cartoon. This is not by chance, this is by design.
Phil -
Thanks for your insight. I think that you are right. Republicans can never sell anything straight because the American public will not buy it. Instead, they sell us x when it is really y.
If you have a dumb populous then you can sell them just about anything…like a war against a country that hasn’t attacked us.
Thanks again.
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