No Child Left Behind hurting top students

[Balta1701]

Here's a WaPo editorial on something I didn't even really realize until this morning; President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" act has done some serious damage to the best students the public schools in this country have.

 

The act was constructed based on forcing all schools to bring their lower level students up to some level of proficiency. In response, schools have done exactly what you'd expect...poured funds into getting those students up in grades. So where have those funds come from? They've come at the expense of the higher performing students, who are suddenly becomine even more rare in many states, including California and Tennessee, for starters (have data on those places).

 

Not surprisingly, with the entire curriculum geared to ensuring that every last child reaches grade-level proficiency, there is precious little attention paid to the many children who master the standards early in the year and are ready to move on to more challenging work. What are these children supposed to do while their teachers struggle to help the lowest-performing students? Rather than acknowledging the need to provide a more advanced curriculum for high-ability children, some schools mask the problem by dishonestly grading students as below proficiency until the final report card, regardless of their actual performance.

 

Perhaps these schools, along with the drafters of NCLB, labor under the misconception that gifted students will fare well academically regardless of whether their special learning needs are met. Ironically, included in the huge body of evidence disproving this notion are my state's standardized test scores -- the very test scores at the heart of the No Child Left Behind Act. Reflecting the schools' inattention to high performers, they show that students achieving "advanced" math scores early in elementary school all too frequently regress to merely "proficient" scores by the end. In recent years the percentage of California students scoring in the "advanced" math range has declined by as much as half between second and fifth grade.

[jasonxctf]

just ask any school teacher or administrator about No Child Left Behind. They'll tell you what a horrible program it is. And in fairness, it was a joint effort between both parties. The administration did not fund the program however causing schools to eat the entire cost internally. This caused school deficits which inturn caused many schools to go out to voter referendum to increase tax rates making the schools look like the bad guys.

 

Horrible program, needs to be eliminated or at worst gutted and re-written. (and funded)

[spiderman]

just ask any school teacher or administrator about No Child Left Behind. They'll tell you what a horrible program it is. And in fairness, it was a joint effort between both parties. The administration did not fund the program however causing schools to eat the entire cost internally. This caused school deficits which inturn caused many schools to go out to voter referendum to increase tax rates making the schools look like the bad guys.

 

Horrible program, needs to be eliminated or at worst gutted and re-written. (and funded)

 

I hear too that the program isn't good, but the people who tell me this are so far left, they wouldn't give Bush credit for anything.

 

Saying that, can you expand on what's wrong with the program ? Are there any good things in it ? What specifically needs to be fixed, etc ?

 

Thanks!

[southsider2k5]

I hear too that the program isn't good, but the people who tell me this are so far left, they wouldn't give Bush credit for anything.

 

Saying that, can you expand on what's wrong with the program ? Are there any good things in it ? What specifically needs to be fixed, etc ?

 

Thanks!

 

The unfunded mandates are my problem with the program. I have no problem with the federal government having escalating goals in exchange for funding public education. There needs to be some degree of responsibility in the school systems who by and large have no had to stand up for the students they have produced. There needs to be a way of doing this that doesn't penalize the students though, and reduced funding pretty much guarentees that. I really believe that if schools systems are to be publicly funded that they need to be more evenly distributed. The rich suburban white schools don't need as much money, and the poor urban schools need more. I really believe that property taxes being the lion share of local funding is basically socioeconomic discrimination and it needs to be adressed.

[Balta1701]

I hear too that the program isn't good, but the people who tell me this are so far left, they wouldn't give Bush credit for anything.

 

Saying that, can you expand on what's wrong with the program ? Are there any good things in it ? What specifically needs to be fixed, etc ?

 

Thanks!

Well, one obvious thing implied by his post would have been to fully-fund the program and its mandates, but we're long since past the point where that would happen at the federal level.

 

There are also a few other insane portions of that bill which I can already tell you need to be changed just from what I know about it...the bill for example requires something ridiculous like a 100% graduation rate by sometime about 10 years from now otherwise the schools will be classified as failing, that is obviously going to need to change.

 

The point of NCLB was supposedly to try to fight against failing schools by forcing the schools to make their lowest level students pass or face losing funding. What this article seems to make clear, along with the rudimentary early data, is that schools are doing exactly that, but at the expense of all of their other students - if the entire goal is making sure a specified percentage of students graduate, then you just assume like 75% of your students will have no problem and focus all your extra resources on the ones at the margins where you can make a difference. The problem with that of course is that you hurt the 75% at the same time as you're helping the marginal ones that you wind up graduating.

 

Is there a solution? I'm honestly not sure...there has to be a balance between spending resources on people at the top of their classes so that they're prepared to blaze their way through colleges and wind up leading fields in research and industry and trying to get everyone through high school, but I'm not sure where that balance is, and at least this early evidence suggests that NCLB is too focused on the lower end, to the point of doing actual harm to the upper end.

[jasonxctf]

i cant recall the specifics of how the gauge success vs failure, but if it's test based, a law like this forces teachers to teach to the test rather than just teach students how to learn.

[southsider2k5]

i cant recall the specifics of how the gauge success vs failure, but if it's test based, a law like this forces teachers to teach to the test rather than just teach students how to learn.

 

The sad thing is teaching to the test would be an improvement over the social promotions that have plagued the system for years. As it stands now we have a generation of HS grads with no skill sets whatsoever, because no one ever had to pay for not teaching them something. We have been investing in a system that only rewards the top HS students and robs the rest of them.

[Heads22]

The problems the administrators in my SD had with it were the unrealistic goals. They think that it was a good idea in theory, but 100% proficiency will never, ever, be achieved, especially when including special ed students.

[LowerCaseRepublican]

This is the kind of thing that has been part of a big debate in my education classes that I've been taking for the past year and a half.

 

Most administrators take into account the abilities of teachers by the loudness of their classroom (quiet = good teacher) It is part of this divide between administrators and teachers that which follows to the idea that administrators believe that there needs to be X amount of topics covered. Any deviation from this to cover topics in depth, have discussions etc. are frowned upon (basically because admins/some teachers lose their over-arching sense of control & state/federal testing problems could come by not covering topics a mile wide)

 

Some teachers don't like having less "structured" classes that involve discussions, etc. because they are usually loud, the teacher does not have as much classroom control as one would if it was a quiet lecture/notetaking procedure and administrators/some teachers frown upon it as being too time consuming. The time consuming thing also goes along with the state/federal testing as well.

 

NCLB only forces teachers' hands into this style of teaching. As Jonathan Kozol put it in his new book "Shame of the Nation": [in certain schools, teachers began] embracing a pedagogy of direct command and absolute control" usually found in "penal institutions and drug rehabilitation programs."

 

And yes, this is a very limited sample size but when I've student taught and had the ability to use discussions and alternatives to lecture, the class has been very responsive & really been involved with the information.