Chapter 6 ~ More food for thought!

OVERHAULING NCLB!!

• I know I complain about NCLB as do other people, but has anyone "with brain cells" actually sat down to try to rethink this is a way that would benefit students??? or are we all just waiting on someone else to do it? I am just a lowly teacher, is there anyone in Washington really on our side?
• It won't happen overnight!!!!!!

Beehinds Behind ~ Chapter 5

I feel like I keep asking the same questions over and over!!!

• Does no one seem to understand what NCLB has done to the teaching profession?
• These tests that we are giving are doing nothing but leaving more and more children behind, especially the ones who needed help in the first place!
• The students who do NOT get vouchers to "get out" of the lagging schools, what happens to them? When you have a whole school who needs vouchers to get out of a low performing school, what do we do with the building, teachers, etc. Is there not somthing wrong with the picture?
• THIS IS ALMOST TOO MUCH TO HANDLE!!!

The Quest Continues

The presentation now has Thought Provokers for Those Left Behind for Chapters 3 and 4. We need to make sure we plan for our 20 min. We don't want to leave the basketball version or "not on the test" behind.

Gem Girls... can you see the end of the tunnel??? I see a glimmer of light.

Don't leave your BEEhind Behind- Chapter 4

• Does our federal government go about every single decision BACKWARDS?
• p. 73MCLB- People in charge, must know the schools intimately -- through first hand engagement, not printouts and manipulatable bureaucratic data.
• "When's the last time anybody here saw a higher up in their school?"

Don't leave your BEEhind Behind- Chapter 3

• How many parents do you really think understand when we say "You're son/daughter is doing very well and improving tremendously, HOWEVER they have failed the test, Sorry!" (p.55)MCLB. Raising a child's score 30% counts for nothing for them or for us as teachers, but if you were lucky enough to get a group of high achievers in your homeroom, guess what you are awesome!!!
• Should we not be looking at each student individually and measuring their personal growth instead of looking at overall scores of a school (such as mine) with a large transient population as a whole?

Now we do the dance of joy!

Frolicking with abandon.... Finished! Finished! Finished!

MCLB Summary Chapter 6

MCLB Chapter 6: Leaving No Child Behind: Overhauling NCLB
--Monty Neill

No Child Left Behind cannot “fulfill its lofty promises” as it is written. The objectives of the law are laudable, but cannot be accomplished through heavy use of standardized testing and punitive sanctions. NCLB is underfunded, and promotes a public perception of widespread school failure where none exists.

Instead, schools must follow principles for authentic accountability. (They should NOT be held accountable for factors beyond their control, like poverty and “the historical consequences of racism.”) Ten principles include: a shared vision and goals; adequate resources used well; participation and democracy; prioritizing goals; multiple forms of evidence (the portfolio approach); inclusion; improvement; equity; balance bottom-up and top-down accountability; and interventions. Time must be allowed for any changes in schools to take effect, and severe penalties like “reconstitution” should only be considered if nothing else has worked—for there is no evidence that reconstitution improves the quality of instruction. A national campaign and a commitment to reclaiming quality educational practices will allow us to better achieve NCLB’s stated goals without the need to suffer from the law’s many negatives.

MCLB Chapter 5 Summary

MCLB, Chapter 5: NCLB and the Effort to Privatize Public Education
--Alfie Kohn

No Child Left Behind keeps local communities from being able to choose their own educational policies and programs; it makes teachers choose between real learning and test scores; and it punishes the children on the other side of the racial / socioeconomic gap. The entire initiative is endorsed by people who are opposed to the idea of public education. Is NCLB a political tool of those who wish to privatize education?

When large numbers of students reach proficiency on standardized tests, officials raise the cut scores. The call for “high standards” (code for high-stakes testing) and “freedom of choice” (code for voucher programs) comes from the very people who would benefit most from the inevitable perceived failure of public schools under NCLB’s mandates—businesses and corporate interests. Desperate and “failing” schools use federal funds to buy curricula designed by private firms while panicked parents send their kids to Sylvan, Kaplan, or Princeton Review for (pricey) test tutoring.

It is not enough to say that NCLB needs to be reformed; “instead of scrambling to comply with the provisions of NCLB, our obligation is to figure out how best to resist.” (p. 96) Teachers—indeed, all citizens—should reject NCLB as a step towards the privatization (and de-democratization) of education.

MCLB Chapter 4 Summary

MCLB Chapter 4: NCLB and Democracy
--Deborah Meier

“The very definition of what constitutes an educated person is now dictated by federal legislation. A well-educated person is one who scores high on standardized math and reading tests. And ergo a good school is one that either has very high test scores or is moving toward them at a prescribed rate of improvement. Period.” (p. 67)

People nowadays have been distanced from educational governance. The “cure” for this that NCLB offers is to increase that distance, taking decision-making out of the hands of local school boards and handing down requirements from large test publishers, federal education consultants, and politicians. Consolidation of schools has seriously endangered students’ feelings of community; NCLB locks this divide into place. The implication is that children, families, teachers, and communities don't have sufficient judgement to make sound educational decisions for themselves. Trust in the multiage community is undermined.

Democracy, messy and time-consuming as it may be, is the real solution to these problems. Schools must “build a community-wide consensus about the essential purposes of schools,” decide what to do about minority / dissenting viewpoints, choose their own educational leaders, and find a way to ensure that rich and poor students are allocated equal resources. Returning decisions about promotion standards and real accountability to the local level won’t solve all of education’s problems —but it’s a start.

MCLB Chapter 3 Summary

Many Children Left Behind Chapter 3: NCLB’s Selective Vision of Equality: Some Gaps Count More than Others
--Stan Karp

Some of the most-publicized aspects of NCLB are the sanctions it imposes on schools and students with low test scores. These include mandated school-funded transfers for students at low-scoring schools, required but unfunded tutoring services, staff replacement, and even restructuring of schools who fail to meet targets for five years running. Unfortunately, none of these strategies have any record of success as school improvement strategies. Instead, they are “political strategies designed to bring a kind of ‘market reform’ to public education.” (p. 55)

Schools that are obsessed with test scores are schools that fail to appropriately address students’ real needs for learning. Bilingual education classes, foreign languages, art classes, and field trips are discarded in favor of developmentally inappropriate practices that people hope will ratchet up test scores. Special education students and other disadvantaged subgroups get blamed for missed score targets, building resentment against those who need extra intervention. At the same time, the underlying social factors that are shown to cause unequal performance are actually increasing in strength. Rather than address the causes, our country’s social and educational policies perpetuate the conditions which create those gaps in the first place.

So why would our leaders support an initiative in which an estimated 75% of all schools are predicted to be labeled as failures? Karp infers that it is political posturing, whereby the worse things seem, the more politicians have to work with to get themselves reelected. As he says, “it becomes clear that NCLB is not a tool for solving a crisis in public education, but a tool for creating one.” (p.65)