NCLB is a piece of garbage, as was the system in place before NCLB. Education belongs at the local level, with some activities consolidated at county or state level.

One word: homeschool. Or maybe it's two words. Whichever...it's better than NCLB!

Seriously, though, I don't know how our education system can be fixed. It is in such a mess and there is way too much money and ego tied up that I suspect there's no way to heal it. There must be some way, but I surely don't know what it is.

Reply

Teachers who teach the test are a failure. It is a cop out. Whether or not you support NCLB, I'm so tired of hearing this excuse. The teachers I work with manage to teach children what they need to know to pass the tests (all ability levels and socioeconomic levels) without sacraficing the entire learning process. By the way - most of us came from backgrounds other than education, don't buy into the Union trap and are successful, loving teachers.

Reply

No surprise. All the parents around here bemoan the huge amount of time and focus spent on testing. And the displeasure seems to cross political lines.

Fortunately Baby A is only three...maybe things will reverse a bit before she reaches elementary school. I really hope so.

- L

Reply

I have been a high school teacher for the past 9 years and attended MANY informational meetings about NCLB. I've never known a teacher to think NCLB is a good plan. Instead of closing the learning gap, it seems to widen it. Yet another failure of this administration.

Reply

I always thought test scores were meaningless, even though (or perhaps because) I was lucky with standardized tests.

When I was younger, it was the teachers and their union and other democrats / liberals who were pushing for uniform standards, hence standardized tests. Now they have them, and they are trying to blame others for the fact that it isn't a perfect solution. I always knew it would distract focus from real, meaningful learning onto rote learning. Rote learning is actually easier for teachers, at least when they are dealing with kids who aren't out of control (probably those lower 20% whose results got worse).

However, if 70% of kids did improve, let's not throw out the baby with the bath water. Let's figure out whether the increased test scores are meaningful (in which case, why aren't we totally CELEBRATING?); and if so, what worked. And with those 20% whose scores got worse, let's figure out why and what to do about it. The problem really is in thinking that a standardized approach works for everyone. Teachers have to exert themselves to address each child's individual issues (and not thru ADD drugs), and the system needs to encourage that.

Reply

I"m not a teacher, but I know a lot of really good teachers that don't teach to the test. They teach the children and then before testing is done, review the test materials with the children.

I'm sorry, but if 70% of the children did better, wouldn't it make sense to find out why the lower 20 got worse and why the upper 10 didn't change? Which, in my opinion, the upper 10 didn't change b/c they didn't learn anything new...b/c they are in the upper 10 (does that make sense?)

But anyway, if over half the children did better, wouldn't that mean that the system is working? Grant you it's not the best, but it's still working...

Reply

Normally the fact that 70% of students improved WOULD be great news. However, the point of NCLB is supposed to be closing the gap between the middle 70% and the lower 20%. The gap is widening, it's not working. NCLB needs to be trashed and something else worked out. Maybe educators who work with kids that have more problems in schools should be included in the development of something new. Maybe there can't be ONE program for all students. I don't know.

Reply

While I agree it would be nice to close the gap by improving the results of the kids in the bottom 20%, I still think it's more important to achieve a net improvement in overall educational results. The lower 20% are not going to be key to our nation's future success; the other 80% are. So, while it's important to help the lower 20%, it should not be done at the expense of the other 80%. Or, would some people be more satisfied if we closed the gap by bringing the other 80% down closer to the level of the bottom 20%?

The kids at the bottom 20% generally have issues that are irrelevant to the other 80% of kids. The approaches that work for them may actually slow the others down.

Since the problem here is focused on the lower 20%, focused solutions are in order. The study suggests teachers don't bother much with the lowest 20% because they don't expect their efforts to have significant results. Maybe we could change that by tying their rewards to the improvement of all kids, but with additional rewards for those who fall in the bottom 20%? Or, maybe we should have the bottom 20% receive more intensive tutoring from personnel other than regular classroom teachers? How about providing "tutor training" or literacy classes to the parents of at-risk kids? Focused solutions will direct certain resources to those who need them most, without compromising the improvements experienced by 70% of the kids.

I think a lot of the controversy is really due to the fact that the president who signed this into law was a republican, and the teachers' union will bash anything republican. The bill was strongly supported by many education-friendly democrats, as was the underlying concept long before Bush became president, but those facts are fogotten since the unions are politically motivated to turn this into an us-against-them thing. What they really hated was the teacher accountability aspect of it. Some teachers were actually refusing to fully implement the programs, because their unions had an attitude about it. This, no doubt, has distorted the results of the programs.

I am sure there are lots of better possible solutions to our educational problems than NCLB - though I think the statistics indicate it hasn't hurt our educational results overall. But I do believe teacher accountability has to be a key part of any reform. Why this idea is so offensive to the teachers' unions is a question only they can answer.

Reply

Part of the problem with NCLB is that it doesn't really address half the problem. My mom is the NCLB coordinator for my home parish. The majority of the lowest 20% are the ones who are also the poorest. They do not have the parental involvement that the middle and upper class kids have.

Some of those parents are trying, but it's hard to be able to help a struggling kid if you're stuck working 2 jobs with variable schedules to make ends meet. Some of the parents just don't really know how to help, and can't afford a tutor. And then you have the parents who just don't seem to care.

During the summer break, these kids lose a lot of what they learned because no one is reviewing it with them. And to catch those students up to where they should be means teachers need to do reviews for the first 4-6 weeks so those students aren't immediately lost with new material.

Year round school would really help most of the lowest 20%, because they wouldn't go a few months with no one helping them practice what they learned. I think there are teachers who are doing the best they can, but when you spend 1/6 of each school year reviewing last year's material, it really pushes you toward "teaching to the tests" to keep up.

And it's a vicious cycle. Teaching to the tests means most kids won't have mastered those skills, so they will have be reviewed before teachers can have any real expectation that new material can be mastered.

To truly have "no child left behind", we need to also teach the parents how help their children at home. But that would take time and money that most school systems (and working class parents) don't have. The free/reduced meals programs for poor students in the summer is a good start, but we also need to feed their minds during those months.

Reply

All I know is that my mother and sister are public school teachers and have HATED, HATED NCLB for years. So much so that my sister got her Masters in Technology so she would no longer have to be a "classroom" teacher who is held to those tests. I work at an independent school and we have parents (and teachers) flocking here to flee those tests and what they have done to the classrooms.

And Karen, while it sounds like your school and administration has a good plan some schools and administrators have become Test-Obsessed to the detriment of other classroom activities. And, while of course you can say teachers should leave those schools, it's not always that easy since, let's face it, most teachers are not the primary bread-winners in their households. It's not like they can move to seek better work.

And MUM hit the nail on the head: the point of NCLB was to close the gap in achievement, not widen it.

How much you want to bet this report won't be in the mainstream news?

Reply

This is pretty far out there and I have mixed feelings about the idea myself, but...

What do you all think of scrapping our public school system all together, and giving families a tax benefit for each child for their education? I'm normally suspicious of "the free marker is the answer to everything" mode of thinking, but I'm wondering if it could really get any worse.

Reply