No Child Left Behind Act
POSTED BY: Sassalicious
UPDATED: Friday, April 21, 2006 02:54
VIEWED: 6361
PAGE 4 of 4
P.S. My grandmother taught school for over 30 years. When asked how she feels about NCLB, she always explains why it is a bad idea. Her answer, "Not every one can be taught. Some people are just stupid."
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Finn has no response.
BTW Finn, the withdrawal of FEDERAL funding based on NCLB is right there in the law. I hope you can find it on your own.
Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.
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Quote:Alrighty. I can only assume that Omaha has a good reason for doing this.
Originally posted by Sassalicious:
The kids in Omaha will no longer have this option if the legislation isn't challenged because each school has been turned into its own school district instead of remaining part of the Omaha school district.
Quote:Nonetheless, it is the purview of the states, not the federal government, to educate children. If the states won’t do it, that doesn’t make the federal government the bad guy, but obviously someone has to do it. One of the problems seems to have been that the states point a finger at the feds while the feds point a finger at the states, and in the meantime, public education goes no where. NCLB clarifies who responsibility is whose. I’ve read through a lot of the law and most of it seems to be just common sense. Any school for which the states are unwilling or unable to improve, under Title I will be restructured, thereby hopefully solving the problem.
Originally posted by Sassalicious:
As for the state giving money to the schools, state governments don't like to give very much because the residents don't want to give money. However, in our society that is obsessed with athletes and celebrities, people are willing to raise sales tax to pay for a new football stadium. But when asked if they wanted excess money to go to social programs (from the tax increase they just voted Yes for), everyone said no. So the Green Bay Packers got a new stadium at the expense of shoppers/taxpayers and the mentally ill homeless in Green Bay have to rely on free samples from pharmaceutical companies for their medication.
Quote:Maybe. But people have been saying that for years; at least as long as I’ve been alive.
Originally posted by Sassalicious:
Maybe people will change their minds once they realize that 30% of students are going to drop out without graduating, males are falling way behind females in class, and the U.S. is falling behind in the worldwide arena.
Quote:I don’t know. Maybe your grandmother could shed some light on that. As critics of NCLB have been pointing out over and over, include you, no single system is going to work for everyone. The truth will be in an aggregate assessment. Does NCLB improve, in general, the quality of education in public schools over time? I don’t know if that is true, and I think it is too early to tell, but according to the Department of Education NCLB is working. That’s all I can tell you.
Originally posted by jya:
Now tell me again Finn, how NCLB is working. How can you say that when my daughter, who has been independently evaluated be her pediatrician, a psychologist, and her school, and been found to have way above average intellect, is being told she is in danger of being "left behind"?
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Can't find it yet?
Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.
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Books, or anything students learn needs to be relevant to their lives. In other words, if they are interested in it, if they can find some way to be attached to it, then they will be more apt to involve themselves in learning about it. This idea in Ed has been around for decades (it goes as far back as Dewey).
You are right that the NCLB act doesn't include the "take money away" language - of course it also talks about assistance but that isn't there. Affirmative Action (which I agree with on the whole) doesn't explicitly mention quotas, but those are used to help push it forward. The removal of funding is a part of it (even if indirectly) just as manipulating student numbers (they cut down on the number of dropouts by counting them absent instead now)is also.
Standardized tests were around before NCLB - but NCLB has helped to make tests a foundation of assessment. It furthers the problem in acedemics.
In the 60s and 70s this country saw literacy rates at their highest (reading and writing). Then in the 80s (good old reagan)the conservative movement decided that children need to do things like "read the classics" instead of modern books that were relevant to them. Guess what, literacy rates and school performance dropped dramatically.
There is no easy fix to the problem, but the first steps are to get rid of these tests and get politicians out of the mix.
Teachers and Academics study education so let them decide how to do it. Its like if the president tried to make decisions on science - oh wait! Yeah, and that's worked out well...
Look, I don't give a rat's behind about your political leanings and I"m glad you are willing to step into the debate with intelligent ideas to share. Do some research on educational practices and I think you'll see my point.
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You are right that the NCLB act doesn't include the "take money away" language.
It does, but in the negative sense.
Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.
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Quote:
I don’t know. Maybe your grandmother could shed some light on that. As critics of NCLB have been pointing out over and over, include you, no single system is going to work for everyone. The truth will be in an aggregate assessment. Does NCLB improve, in general, the quality of education in public schools over time? I don’t know if that is true, and I think it is too early to tell, but according to the Department of Education NCLB is working. That’s all I can tell you.
How amusing of you to imply my 7-year old daughter is stupid. You must have been so proud when you thought that up. Now I know what the problem is, you must be a product of NCLB yourself, seeing as how you have serious problems with reading comprehension. Obviously you missed the part where I said my daughter has above average intelligence, as well as the part where I said her reading is not the problem, only how fasts she reads.
It's obvious to me you have no children of your own, so I really don't know why you are so defensive about NCLB. It's not as if you have any vested interest or experience with the actual results of this law. Maybe you should open your mind a little bit to the people who actually deal with this issue on a daily basis.
As for it being too early to tell, I believe it was said in an earlier post that Texas is where NCLB got its start. In my original post, I stated how my high school has dramatically dropped in the 17 years since testing began. How much more time do we need?
As for it working, look at your own signature.
Quote:
but according to the Department of Education NCLB is working.
Quote:
...nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal
Alrighty. I can only assume that Omaha has a good reason for doing this.
When is segregation ever a good thing? Regardless of the reason, it's a bad idea. Thankfully, I'm fairly certain the Omaha district split won't hold up in a court of law. However, other schools (including private ones and suburban public schools) are refusing to admit students that might drag the test scores down.
Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal
according to the Department of Education NCLB is working
According to the U.S. Department of Education website "All children are counted under NCLB, and schools are responsible for making sure every child is learning." They say ALL children are counted, but with the loophole mentioned in the original post, minorities aren't counted. Minorities are the people who often don't do well on the tests for whatever reason. So in reality, all children are counted, except those that fail. And as someone previously mentioned dropouts aren't really counted either. Therefore, assuming that the statistics for claiming that NCLB is working are based off of incomplete data (incomplete because not all scores are used), the conclusion that it's working is likely false. Outliers can be dropped when doing statistical analysis, but that's typically only a few points, not large quantities of data points. Therefore, I find the Department of Educations conclusions to be highly questionable and mostly invalid. But then again politicians have a tendency to alter the scientific method and skew results to fit their respective agendas. Sex education comes to mind.
Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal
Maybe. But people have been saying that for years; at least as long as I’ve been alive
How long have you been alive? Out of curiousity, how long have you been away from the public school system? As for a timeline, males only fallen behind in the last 25 years or so, the same goes for math and science in the U.S. (though the NSF says that by 2010 90% of engineers will be from Asia), and you can be as blase as you want about it, but a 30% dropout rate is unacceptably high.
Furthermore, "In the last two decades, the education system has become obsessed with a quantifiable and narrowly defined kind of academic success" from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965522/site/newsweek/print/1/displaymode
/1098/. It's this very narrowness that dooms NCLB. For some basic math is a big deal whereas for others it's grammar. I've known people who had terrible grades in school, but scored in the 95% on standardized tests; on the flip side I also know people who do well in class, but terribly on tests. And since NCLB seems to be based on a test, it seems inherently wrong. There are better ways to judge a school's success and a person's educational development.
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Quote:It’s always someone else’s kid that is stupid.
Originally posted by jya:
How amusing of you to imply my 7-year old daughter is stupid. You must have been so proud when you thought that up. Now I know what the problem is, you must be a product of NCLB yourself, seeing as how you have serious problems with reading comprehension. Obviously you missed the part where I said my daughter has above average intelligence, as well as the part where I said her reading is not the problem, only how fasts she reads.
People seem to be happy to define an education system in which “stupid” kids get left behind, until their kid has trouble in school and then suddenly the education system is failing. For the record, I don’t think your daughter is stupid, nor do I think we need to design our education system based on the assumption that some kids are stupid. Clearly no single system, especially a large bureaucracy, will work for everyone, and it is inevitable that some kids might be left behind, but this shouldn’t be made into a policy, for your kid or anyone else.
Also for the record, I didn’t support NCLB. It’s not my kind of politics. Nonetheless, however it is the current system and it is a system that at least tries to offer a comprehensive solution, instead of the typical bitching, that normally seems to accompany the issue of US public schools. Whether it will work or is working is another matter that I’ve not fully resolved, but I don’t think there is anything wrong with giving it the benefit of the doubt and honestly examining it. It’s not like NCLB replaced a system that was working to perfection.
And you’ve misinterpreted what my signature is saying. Cicero was not talking about the US Department of Education. He was talking about the fanatical and unpredictable way that mobs influence the republican politics of Rome. In effect, a closer analogy to what Cicero was talking about would better be characterized by the way you and many others are reacting to NCLB. The way individuals with individual grips get compiled into a cacophony that seems to take on a single-minded effort all its own.
Quote:I’ve been out of the Public school system for a good while. Not 25 years.
Originally posted by Sassalicious:
How long have you been alive? Out of curiousity, how long have you been away from the public school system?
Quote:Then why weren’t those other ways used? NCLB is 5 years old? So it can’t account for the failings of the US public school system in general for the last 25 years.
Originally posted by Sassalicious:
And since NCLB seems to be based on a test, it seems inherently wrong. There are better ways to judge a school's success and a person's educational development.
Quote:I sympathize. I don’t like the federal government being involved with education at all, much less defining it in some centralized bureaucracy, which can only add to the complexity of the system and increase the number of disaffected students.
Originally posted by jmb9039:
There is no easy fix to the problem, but the first steps are to get rid of these tests and get politicians out of the mix.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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