Posted on 03/20/2007 3:56:46 AM PDT by theothercheek
Now that Congress is debating whether – and in what form – to renew No Child Left Behind (NCLB), some legislators on both sides of the aisle are openly wondering whether it’s time to face the reality that some children will never catch up, no matter what.
When Congress passed NCLB in 2002, the breakthrough federal education program aimed to have every public school student – whether middle class or poor, white or minority, native born or illegal alien - performing at grade level in reading and math by 2014. Robert L. Linn, co-director of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing at UCLA, recently told The Washington Post, "There is a zero percent chance that we will ever reach a 100 percent target."
A group of 57 Republican lawmakers have endorsed a bill that would essentially gut NCLB. The WaPo reports:
Under the House version, states could opt out of the law's mandates through a referendum or through a decision made by a combination of state officials. The Senate version would allow states to opt out of some requirements through negotiations with the federal government. Both versions would allow states to use nearly all their federal education funding, except money designated for special education, for any educational purpose.
One can make a credible case that it is senseless for NCLB to apply to special needs students or to non-English speaking illegal aliens (AKA"migrant children"), so the law was doomed to failure from the start. But The New York Times considers an additional factor that makes the educational goals of NCLB out of reach for millions of students, not just these hard cases: an acute lack of qualified teachers, particularly in the middle school grades.
Middle schools do not attract – and cannot retain – qualified, talented teachers, according to The New York Times:
[E]ducators in New York and across the nation are struggling to rethink middle school, particularly in cities, where the challenges of adolescent volatility, spiking violence and lagging academic performance are more acute.
As they do so, they are running up against a key problem: a teaching corps marked by high turnover, and often lacking expertise in both subject matter and the topography of the adolescent mind. …
"More people end up in middle schools because that’s where the openings are," said Carmen Fariña, a former deputy chancellor of the New York City school system who is now helping 35 middle school principals reshape their schools. "It’s not necessarily a choice." …
[I]n the Bronx, [Jason] Levy, the principal of I.S. 339, has worked hard to cobble together a staff capable of helping him revive a school mired in years of failure.
"Just go to a job fair," he said. "The lines for elementary school and high school are around the corner. We can’t get people to teach in middle schools."
One of his solutions has been to rely heavily on Teach for America. Twenty-one of his teachers, nearly a third, are part of the program, which recruits recent college graduates. While such teachers are often well-educated and energetic, many leave after their two-year commitments.
Why are these teaching jobs going begging? Because compared to middle school, teaching high school is a cakewalk – those students most in need of a dedicated, talented, innovative educator to inspire them to learn have dropped out already, the paper explains:
"Problematic kids in high school don’t come to school anymore, but in middle school they still show up," said Barry M. Fein, the principal of Seth Low. "I think that piece alone makes it more challenging."
The challenges surface in test scores. … The most recent results of math and reading tests given to students in all 50 states showed that between 1999 and 2004, elementary school students made solid gains in reading and math, while middle school students made smaller gains in math and stagnated in reading.
So there you have it: Tenured, unionized teachers who can’t – and don’t want to – make sure no child is left behind (second item, The Daily Blade, February 23, 2007). Whodathunkit?
NOTE: In case I did not put all the links in correctly, this is the second item in a feature called The Daily Blade and follows an article titled, "Nagin Has A Chocolate Chip On His Shoulder."
Could it be that girls like softball, swimming, volleyball, lacrosse, soccer, competition cheerleading, and field hockey?
Amen.
Agreed. But some people seem to think that the low IQ kids don't need or deserve education. They do. But it should not come at the expense of normal IQ or high IQ kids. Unfortunately, it does because the only way special ed kids can get the best education is to be mainstreamed with a special aide to help them. I know because my brother's oldest two kids are high IQ kids and his youngest has Down Syndrome. Mainstreamed - but left back two years in a row at his parents' request - he reads and does arithmetic better than most of the kids in his first grade class. Next year they will move him to second grade so he can get his reading up to par too. He may stay in second grade for a couple of years till his speech ability catches up to everyone else's. By then, he will know how to read, write and do math - in a regular class.
I am not a teacher, however I am a parent, and I couldn't agree with you more. Because I pay attention, I have seen exactly what some of the teachers are up against, whether it be parents who insist "little johny could NEVER be a problem" when he definitely is or "my little suzy is just too bright for this sillinss" when the reverse is the truth all the way to district bureaucrats who will not give them any backup support.
Sshhhhhhhh - no one's supposed to know that.
Thank you for saying that!
We put our children into these awful environments that if it weren't state mandated, it could be considered contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Kids need much more adult interaction and modeling than they get in these huge schools. They don't need to be in a place where they are put into an adolescent pressure cooker with no real discipline, where who is hot today is much more important than anything the teacher drones on about, where they are molded into PC correct structures, where they are force fed a set of values no matter what the values of their parents have.
And then we wonder why the kids are the way they are.
You say that, yet you just referred to a picture of mixed age kids and said that could be a private school with vouchers/tax credits. Implying that mixed ability grouping is a great idea! You are very good at talking up both sides of an issue - whichever one fits the argument o' the morning.
By definition half of all children are below average intelligence. Yet, an inordinate amount of time is wasted making them feel happy. (Hollywood is truly responsible for some of this, viz., the incredible fairy tale, "Legally Blonde" flick). In the old days it was "its a tough world, get used to it buttercup"; now its, "can't we all get along?"
Let all the 'problematic learners' who only disrupt and cause problems leave - that's right - let them leave. Give them the choice. Then, annually test teachers in the areas they teach. If they don't pass with a 'C' or better then give administrators the ability to fire their currently NEA covered backsides. Then, RIF one out of every three administrators. Just get rid of some of that fat. The school districts should be allowed to take that money and improve their schools based on what their communities want. Give everyone with school-age children vouchers. Give everyone who has no school-age children a tax break so they don't have to fund what they don't use.
They also like track, archery, gymnastics, basketball and golf.
If the parental values set down at home, if any are at all, are done so properly it really isn't going to matter if they are "force fed" something different.
My bad - I forgot about those - you all have archery at your school? That's awesome! My girls would have loved that. We have a neighboring county with a rifle club with both boys and girls in it.
Not nearly as well as pay for performance.
The trick is how to make that system work in the education sphere. Some teachers excel at communicating new and/or difficult ideas. Others are great at motivating the kids who simply are unwilling to try. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, and not every administration will value a particular skill the same. Add in the fact that any random draw of students will invariably skew the playing field to some degree, and it becomes a bit problematic to find a "fair" system. Of course, since we've utterly destroyed the concept of trusting in schools and teachers over the past few decades, everyone will want to challenge the "fairness" of any new pay system.
True but also we will never have 100% literacy because of the sheer number of illegals coming into our schools who do no not speak English. With our current Bilingual programs, these students will never be proficient in English.
My youngest brother has down syndrome and he attends a school just for kids with disabilities. They are grouped by ability, every teacher is a special needs' teacher, they have all the help they want. It works in a way mainstreaming just can't. He's very fortunate that such a school exists not far from my parents' house.
The problem with mainstreaming is even if you hold the kid back until he's mastered the work, at some point you're going to have a 16 year old in fourth grade. That's just asking for trouble. Not to mention the other kids in the class who are probably getting a very negative view of people with disabilities as "that big slow kid who wastes all our time".
While I think mainstreaming is better than sticking disabled kids in an institution to die, it's not at all ideal. A school designed to work only with special needs kids can concentrate the resources they need.
I have better idea. Close the Department of Education. Tag the money to the child. Let the parents send their children to schoolf of their choice - public, private, religious, non-religious, military, whatever. No federal or state strings. (Have to figure out some allowance for home schoolers...)
If the parents choose poorly, its their problem and their child's. I suspect most parents will choose as well as is possible for their location.
It does more than you realize sometimes. I saw what it did to my kids...it can take a long time and many heartbreaking mistakes for a kid to come back to what groundwork the parent lays during those years when the school peer group takes over and the school is drumming nonsense in their heads. Youngest son is just starting to realize what Mom and Dad said is for real....I am not sure if oldest son will ever snap out of his adolescence.
I've seen that statement before and I'm not sure it's true. My perception is that there just aren't many people who would really like to be teachers who aren't because the pay is too low. The people who are studying, say, engineering aren't doing it just because it makes money, they're doing it because it interests and challenges them. Most engineers or scientists would be absolutely miserable in a classroom full of fourth graders. Or if not, the stupid moronic education classes they'd be required to take would drive out the interest.
As an undergrad, I frequently had non-major classes with education majors. To hear them complaining about how much work they had to do - and it was all stuff like "Make a poster to teach the water cycle" and stupid things like that. I wouldn't have lasted a semester as an ed major, I'd have stopped showing up for class. No amount of pay would do that.
Now, merit pay for teachers - rewarding them for actual performance, that might help. I'd support that. What I'd really like to see though is tax credits and more competition. Break the government monopoly!
And that is what lesbian coaches like too.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.