Are School Administrations Nationwide Trying to Hurt George Bush?

06.17.04 | mlmr

[tom h]

"You are pretty dense"

"Posted by Sloth"

... and your name speaks for itself. Lighten up.

[bk1000]

" These people have forgotten who they work for and who is paying the bills."

No they haven't. That's exactly why they don't want an independant audit!

[luckystarmom]

I'm posting about this to one of my yahoo group and maybe another. They have people that are more legally informed than me. I don't know if you've ever been to the IEP_guide yahoo group, but it is very informative.

Some kids will never read (or never read at their grade level), and the schools should not be held accountable for those kids.

I like standardized testing for "normal" kids, but it is not fair to the students or to the schools to try to get all kids to perform at the same level.

This has certainly peeked my interest.

[SoftballMominVA]

Some are born mentally retarded, brain damaged, severely autistic, in addition to those who are learning disabled. In my school we have about 50 Learning Disabled kids, but we have 10 kids in the severe population. These kids have IQ's in the 30's and 40's. _________________ Are you saying mentally retarded children are learning with normal children? What year did this social engineering experiment start?

I apoligize if I was vague. The MR children are in the same school, in one of two classes, but they do not attend regular classes. They have a specific curriculum focused on life skills, such as buttoning, shoe tieing and in some cases how to toilet. The more advanced ones might work on recognizing colors, the alphabet or simple arithmatic and work skills. The staff consists of one teacher and 3 assistants.

The MR students ride a bus specified for them. When appropriate they attend assemblies and field trips with assistance from trained staff. Some of the students attending regular classes will create books on tapes for their use and will occasionally read to them. Again, this is a supervised activity with children able to handle this type of interaction and with full knowledge of parents of all. When my daughter badly sprained her ankle and was unable to attend PE, she spent 50 minutes a day for almost 4 weeks reading to two girls. My daughter enjoyed it and the 2 girls seemed to also. They seemed to look forward to seeing her and at the last day of school (today) they handed her a picture the 2 of them had painted for her. One mother searched me out to tell me how much her daughter liked Nattie. (Not her name, but the closest this child could manage)

This is just one or two examples of how MR children can benefit from attending a regular school, even if they are in their own classroom. I just don't see any harm being done here, in fact, I see good.

[mlmr]

No they haven't. That's exactly why they don't want an independant audit!

I think the whole public education system needs an audit.

[BlueNgold]

"Are School Administrations Nationwide Trying to Hurt George Bush?"

Yes.
Next Question...

Note: I have a close family memeber who is a classic NEA member-teacher... She began to complain about the NCLB ... When I suggested she write a letter to Sen Kennedy the NAMED AUTHOR of the Law she turned, gasped, stomped her foot, and turned heel ... oops ;-)

[JimRed]

My sister is a (conservative) teacher -- she says that No Child Left Behind is terrible, so many tedious rules.

Without the "tedious rules", how do we get accountability?

[doesnt like kerry]

Sorry I missed the period, but it's impossible to put an apostrophe in a username.

[Kay Ludlow]

don't you think a teacher works with every child one-on-one at least some every day?

No, I know that's not true in my public school. I moved my children (now in college) from Private School to public school in 4th grade, and they did not get one-on-one time. By sixth grade they did half their work in group projects, and graded each other's papers while the teachers sat at their desks reading books. They were not provided with any educational challenges, and spent all elementary school waiting for the rest of the class to catch up.

My son finally got one-on-one attention when he began being the class clown (out of boredom). He has mild Cerebral Palsy, so his 4th grade teacher marked his papers down for poor penmanship, even though we had explained that he didn't have good motor skills in his right hand. My daughter's 4th grade teacher was apparently confused about which child she was even at the end-of-year conference.

I wish I had been in a position to home-school them; unfortunately I was the breadwinner.

I'm sure there are schools and teachers out there who are good with their students and teach them (we had a couple of excellent teachers), but the majority are not. In our school district the average teacher salary is $60,000/year, so it's not like we aren't paying for quality education...

[VOA]

It won't stop. It will get worse and worse as more and more medically fragile children
survive traumatic births.

I've pondered the end effect of all the fantastic new technology for rescuing
infants that would have perished say a couple of decades ago.

Here in the Los Angeles area, talk radio stations occassionally play (probably
under duress) a Public Service Announcement featuring a breathless, concerned father
saying that his child was "...born premature...and nobody can tell me why..."

As much as my heart goes out to folks in these situations, this PSA is
one of the better advertizements for spending a few billion dollars that
might simply tell us "save premature babies, that inherit the predisposition
for such an outcome from their parents...and in a few generations, you will have an
'epidemic' of premature births".

If this is the case, I have no idea what the costs of added care for the
coming generations (in infancy and early schooling) may be.

[ladylib]

Only if their parents want to home school them. If they don't choose to do so, their kids are entitled to a free public education and it's up to the school to deliver it.

Do you know who is getting hurt by NCLB? Bright students who are being shortchanged because all the money and effort is going to the lower end of the spectrum.