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)

Many Children Left Behind

I've been researching the authors of each chapter of the book. All of them are proponents of education, but know that NCLB is not working. It's underfunded, and has way too many standards that can't be reached. A well performing school can be deemed below standard because it can't make unachievable goals.

Our Gem Girls team discussed all of our responsibilities as we finish the book after class last Thursday. Vicki our illustrator and summarizer extraordinaire has wonderful information already available here on the blog. Sheri is already making the connections between MCLB and Brophy. Thank you ladies! I've printed the rubric so we'll be on track.

Thank you as well Sheri for the request of being able to finish up our Teacher Work Sample during Spring Break. Thank you Dr. Zimmerman for allowing us this extra time!

Conference Follow-Up

It's seems I've been so busy since we taught a session at the conference on 3/14. We had a great group of 49 participants. Since then we've been busy back to ASU Graduate School classes, getting grades into the computer, lesson planning, teaching, etc...

Unfortunately due to our county's student conference day we missed over half of Thursday's sessions. I greatly missed SMART Board sessions done by middle school teachers on Thursday afternoon.

Most of the sessions I attended were great.

Thursday after the opening session I learned about making my own Wiki. Kimberly Harris taught participants how to create their own wikis. She has been in touch with participants after the conference with more information.

The only other session I was able to attend on Thursday was Get your SMART Board up to Speed. I learned more tools that I didn't even know were available on my new SMART Board. I've already had fun using the timer and spinner with students.

On Friday morning Vicki and I spent the first session time visiting vendors and psyching ourselves up for presenting. It went well!

After presenting on Friday I went to a non-fiction session led by a well known company. Since I don't have the option of spending money on a big program this wasn't very interesting to me.

The last concurrent session I attended was Start SMART: Winning SMART Board Lessons. These two gentlemen were not only entertaining, but also informative. I learned even more about the options of using the SMART Board in my classroom.

The Closing Session and Luncheon were great. Our table was the Goody's 500 so many samples of Goody's on the table. Lunch was great, I even got Vicki to switch desserts and I got the chocolate!

I greatly enjoyed closing speaker Deneen Frazier-Bowen. What an actress! We found that she had been all of the interesting "students" that had visited pre-conference and concurrent sessions and the opening session as well.

A great close to the conference was the it was moving to Raleigh in 2009. The NCaect also moved the bus to a new name-- TIES. Looking forward to an opportunity to attend the conference in '09.

Opening Keynote

Shift Happens! Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach has led us on a journey from what was to what is NOW! Web 2.0 -- Web 3.0. Second Life-- AET Zone has some of the attributes of Second Life, but I won't be buying any couches for my avatar's living room anytime soon, of course she would have to have her own living room first. Something to ponder-- Bloom's Taxonomy should now have the top Create. The Top 10 jobs in 2010 aren't even jobs today. To get 50 million users it took the radio 38 years-- digital cameras 8 years-- camera phones 3.5 years.

This conference is so deep into the Shift Happens- Gear Up With Technology-- there has been a constant race theme. There are drivers and pit crews- races and sponsors. We began with "Educators, Start Your Engines!"

"Student" Eddie is sharing with us now and has decided that Sheryl can keep speaking. She seems to know the language. She has three sets of numbers on her shirt-- they stand for the numbers of drop outs over the last three years. All of the numbers are over 20,000. Visit http://learningconditions.blogspot.com