Going beyond No Child Left Behind

[Neil D]

[:"green"] In a effort of homogenize the threads, I have started this thread regarding children education. [/]

January 31, 2006

What this country needs is a breath of fresh air. Call it the No Child Left Inside movement.

The timing is right. Critics of the president's No Child Left Behind bill, signed into law three years ago, are gaining in force and effectiveness, but have yet to focus on alternatives that might capture the public imagination.

No Child Left Behind requires the states to improve teacher training and to erase the achievement gap between white and minority students in exchange for federal dollars. In practice, No Child Left Behind turns out to be test-centric, an approach that critics consider the pedagogical equivalent of tunnel vision – with not much light at the end of the tunnel.

A recent National Assessment of Education Progress study of 11 large urban school districts including Los Angeles, found that, between 2003 and 2005, most fourth-and eighth-graders made only negligible progress in math and reading. The influential report asserts that student scores remain virtually flat in cities like San Diego, Houston and Boston.

“This nation has squandered away four years and billions of dollars in education funding,” says Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children's Defense Fund. “Our children have been tested to death, forced to regurgitate, and at the end of the day they haven't learned to do basic reading and math or much less learned to think.”

But wait. Other observers read the NAEP tea leaves differently, pointing to significant progress in reading and math for 9-year-olds, especially Hispanics and African-Americans, compared with the previous survey in 1998-99. The other groups studied, ages 13 and 17, showed little comparative improvement. Proponents of No Child Left Behind contend the reform effort isn't broken; it simply needs to focus more on teenagers. Maybe so.

Still, many Americans worry that an overemphasis on testing, and a narrowing definition of education, warps the classroom by unintentionally pushing teachers to teach to the tests. In such classrooms, the joy of learning can become an afterthought.

Last week in the Northern California town of Point Reyes, a rebellion was brewing. The school district has been branded as failing because of inadequate student participation in standardized tests. As The Point Reyes Light reports, if noncompliance with federal standards continues, the district will face harsh punishments, even a possible takeover by the state. A faction of school board trustees has proposed that the district opt out of No Child Left Behind, by refusing government funding attached to the legislation.

Trustee Stephanie O'Brien says that No Child Left Behind simply doesn't fit her progressive district, which offers such alternative programs as Open Classroom and Montessori. “This is a radically diverse community, and we stand to risk being homogenized,” O'Brien told the Light. If it succeeds, the Point Reyes rebellion won't break the bank; the amount of federal money lost will be only $44,000, 2 percent of the district's annual budget.

Nonetheless, the Boston Tea Party was more about symbolism than tea.

The brewing rebellion is particularly intense in Utah and Connecticut, states that are political polar opposites. In Connecticut, more than two-thirds of cities and towns have thrown their support in support of a lawsuit against the No Child Left Behind act. Connecticut's attorney general, Richard Blumenthal will argue the case today in U.S. district court, in New Haven.

Like many rebellions, this one has yet to offer much of an alternative for education reform, other than support for local control. If an overemphasis on standardized testing was failing to significantly increase literacy, what approach – or approaches – would work?

The debate about testing should not prevent a closer look at the forgotten environment in and around the school itself. Long before No Child Left Behind, school districts began to isolate students from the surrounding neighborhoods, from nature, from the non-cyber world.

Indeed, during the 1970s, many districts, including San Diego Unified, began to construct new schools with no windows. Educators argued that windows prevented students from concentrating; architects of these schools created “vision strips,” as they called them, thin slots at the tops of the walls that allowed some light to come into the room, but nothing else. Some vision.

Today, school districts are cutting recess and building schools with no playgrounds, even as Johnnie and Jeannie spend more of their time bent over a test or a video game. Meanwhile, a growing body of scientific knowledge points to immersion in the world, especially in nature, as one of the most effective ways – perhaps the most effective way – to help children learn. Standardized test scores might even improve, if no child were left inside

Article for NCLB

[Neil D]

Quote:

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I don't know of any other way to measure knowledge than testing (as imperfect as it is). If there was a better way, I suspect we would be doing it. We measure how well a teacher or school does by the test scores of the students. Teachers complain that this means they have to teach to the test. So either we don't test anyone and have no accountability or we test teachers. Are there any other reasonable possibilities?

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I have a hard time believing of the adversarial position that you have against teachers in general.

You readily admit to the inability of testing for good teachers, but you are willing to make policy to make teacher test only to the test, and not to knowledge, thus dumb down the students by measures forcing students to momorize and not think. Somehow, by the few poor teachers that have come unto your radar, you feel that ALL teachers are lazy, and incompetant to teach. How did someone put this...making policy on extremes makes poor policy...or something to that effect.

You reflect the feeling that teachers are nothing more than glorified babysitters. And you enact policys to prevent teachers of creating thinking students. This is truely insulting to the teaching profession.

What you seem to forget is that measures have been in place since schools began. You ignore the teaching profession and the education it takes to become a teacher, which has a tendancy to weed out bad students.

If it were not for a teacher, we wouldnt have the equation of E=MC squared. And that is because, Eistien wasn't good at addition and subtraction. In todays, NCLB policies, he would have been transfered to another school and left behind.

[Bravus]

There are exceptions in every profession, of course, but teaching is hard work that is often not all that well paid: generally, people teach because they love teaching and love kids. They need support and encouragement, and adequate funding and materials, and some recognition from parents. Good teachers generally don't support the few bad teachers they encounter, and would be happy to see them out of the profession. But what's happening is that the 'accountability' measures that are put in place to deal with a minority of 'bad' teachers (in terms of knowledge, skills or attitude) are beating down the great majority of 'good' teachers, and making a hard and often thankless job even more so.

What's happening with No Child Left Behind is the macro version of what's happening everywhere: diagnostic testing is being used to punish, not to support. Where students are failing to reach the standards, what they need is *more* help, not less. They need more teachers, smaller class sizes, more school nurses and counsellors and other support people, better services for students with disabilities.

The correlation that is strongest in virtually all educational studies is between educational achievement and socioeconomic status. 'Failing schools' are, by and large, not due to 'failing teachers' - they're poor schools. So to punish those schools and teachers by further de-funding them is to actively create a permanent underclass and undermine the very kinds of social progress and success that those on the right claim to value. If you're poor, you'll get an inferior education, and stay undereducated and poor.

The approach should be the exact opposite: use the tests to diagnose problems (if you need the tests at all: we *know* where the problems are) and send help, not punishment. Sure, there's also a case for improving leadership in some of these schools, and they may well have ended up with the weaker teachers. So get rid of the teachers whose problem is attitude, and provide extensive professional development and support for the teachers whose hearts are in the right place but who have themselves been failed by the education system.

As I noted above (erm, I mean, in the other thread), the difference in basic assumptions about what is the disease, and therefore what is the cure, is fundamental.

[Dr. Shane]

School choice all by itself will remedy most bad schools. Open enrollement, post-secondary option, charter schools and vouchers all should be part of public policy. School choice shouldn't be something that only kicks in when a school is considered "bad."

Note: if any of the terms used above are not familiar a Google search should be able to define any of them.

We now live in a global market place so each country's work force must compete with other countries for jobs. That means our schools must produce the most intelligent and motivated students possible. It also means schools need to prepare students either for college or vocational training. Students graduating from high school should either be prepared for college or to enter into the work force in vocations like manufacturing, mining, construction, agriculture, etc.

[Neil D]

I am not sure if Lyndell is a Public school teacher or an Adventist school teacher, but I am sure that she can back me up when I say that the general attitude of the church toward thier teachers is that of a easy job, teaching nice children the basics of Christian education from 8-3 with weekends and holidays off along with a minimum of 3 months off for summer. La de da de da....

This picture is so far removed from the truth that any sembelance to it is nearly fantasy at best. Just this last week, my wife got thru with an problem self-esteem child, from an Adventist home, who was showing nude pictures to various members of the class. There are problems of familys who are drug dealers, sexual offenders, and other problems at this school and this is not the only current school to have these problems. You would think that this was a regular public school, not a private church school.

Now, add to this that there are problem familys, who have problems with the church, church business, dysfunctional familys, scholastic problems, 'exceptional child' problems [who wouldn't like to have THAT problem!], psychological problem, ADD and ADHD problem children, and there are parents who believe that thier child is THE prima donna of the class and why doen't the teacher recognise their child abilities, solve interpersonal conflicts between student and teacher and among all of this, the teacher is to teach her/his class reading writing and arithmatic...along with history, social studies, biology, spelling, with a few fun subjects like art, and an occasional school outing....and do it all in the six hours that is aloted to her 5 days aweek 9 months out of the year.

Anyone think that this is a easy job?

[Dr. Shane]

Teachers have an awesome responsibility and are part of any nation's foundation. As I said earlier, we are in a global economy and how educated our work force is has a lot to do with how competitive we will be.

Since teachers are on the public payroll and education itself does not generate a direct profit like business, they will never earn what they deserve. It is the same with police officers. These public servants do much more than they are compensated for in dollars.