Question Of The Week, 3/4/07
Good morning. Once again I started out looking for the Question Of The Week in the news wires and found what I was looking for right there in my living room. This weeks Question Of The Week is. Is the No Child Left Behind Act really working?
I'll post my answer in the Comment Section Monday night.
God Bless America, God Save The Republic.
I'll post my answer in the Comment Section Monday night.
God Bless America, God Save The Republic.
posted by David Schantz | 3:17 AM
5 Comments:
David,
Hey! This is so similar to my QUESTION OF THE WEEK, the one I posted on Friday, March 2! Synchronicity!
They've been rolling in the dust HERE.
Is NCLB working? In part. But the feds truly have no Constitutional right to intervene in local education.
I question as to why NCLB was "necessary" in the first place. Why did local systems abandon curricula which was working only to try experimental texts and methods?
IMO, the school systems were only to happy to grab federal dollars so as to "comply" with NCLB. We've got quite a dust-up over those dollars right now, here in Fairfax County. See above link.
I have not heard any teacher tell me they supported the “No Child Left Behind Act.” According to the teachers I have talked to, No Child Left Behind created a lot of useless paperwork and made schools, I believe, create some kind of standards for educating children. In reality, these standards are just a group of words and statements that have no actual meaning. To sum it up, it creates useless work on teachers and forces them to teach from a test.
The federal government has no constitutional authority in education other than the education of Washington D.C. which is in a very poor condition. If they cannot fix the education problems is Washington D.C., what makes them think they can fix education in every state?
The best way to fix the education problem is to attach money to each student and allow parents to send their children to the school of their choice. Similarly, this can also be done through tax credits. Bad schools will go out of business while good schools will thrive. Anyone who denies this denies the role of competition in economics and is therefore not to be trusted on economic matters.
I just spotted THIS in today's WaPo:
The principal of Earle B. Wood Middle School in Rockville gathered teachers and handed out a list of all the black, Hispanic, special-education and limited-English-speaking students who would take the Maryland School Assessment, the measure of success or failure under the federal No Child Left Behind mandate.
Principal Renee Foose told teachers to cross off the names of students who had virtually no chance of passing and those certain to pass. Those who remained, children on the cusp between success and failure, would receive 45 minutes of intensive test preparation four days a week, until further notice.
Under President Bush's education initiative, hundreds of middle-class suburban schools like Wood, with a history of solid test scores, are at risk of academic failure. They must address nagging achievement gaps that cut along racial and socioeconomic lines or face the penalties and possible "restructuring" that the federal law prescribes.
The coming weeks will bring a battery of tests -- Virginia's Standards of Learning exams, the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System and the Maryland School Assessment -- that will determine whether schools and students have made "adequate yearly progress" under the law. Maryland's testing begins March 12.
Because these "high-stakes" tests exert unprecedented influence on public education, principals and teachers are struggling with the ethics of test preparation: Is it right to give extra help to some students and withhold it from others based on who is likely to pass? Is it acceptable to set aside regular instruction for lessons on how to solve multiple-choice questions? Is it all right to forsake free-form poetry for a steady diet of heavily formatted reading passages?
That is what some teachers say has happened at Wood. Their accounts and interviews with Foose offer a glimpse at a kind of test-prep triage that analysts think is increasingly common at many schools but is rarely discussed in public.
More at the above link.
First I want to thank you for stopping by to answer this weeks question. I have never liked the idea of the federal government getting involved in educating our children. The No Child Left Behind Act only made the feds role bigger. I recently met a 19 year old high school graduate that reads at the third grade level. If the No Child Left Behind Act is really working how could this have happened? I'm going to have to say no.
God Bless America, God Save The Republic
Some Schools Didn't Need Fixing, Just Scaring
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