The mandatory testing forces teachers to teach to the test instead of teaching to the children.
Passing the test may prove a child can take a test.
Doing poorly on a test doesn't necessarily/always mean the child hasn't learned or doesn't understand the material, it may simply mean the child doesn't take tests well.
Schools which do not do well on tests are not necessarily bad schools. It was exactly this emphasis on testing which closed down the school my children have attended. I KNOW my kids were learning there.
I also know about 70% or so of the kids going to this school were at or below poverty level. This means the parents were so busy struggling to make ends meet, many of them didn't have the time to work with their kids.
Testing can be valid as a tool to see where things can be improved, but it should not be used as the end all determination of how a school is doing.
I watched my children's school spend money which could have been used in the classroom to bribe parents (incentives) to make sure their children were present on testing days and to bribe children into trying harder to do well on the tests.
I totally agree, Abigail. I am hearing that teachers may opt to quit or take early retirement if they are forced to spend more time merely teaching their students to recite facts for a test. In a society where the technology is changing so fast, we need citizens who know how to think.
One of the problems with the outsourcing movement to India is that most of the workers from India are taught in a manner similar to that. The biggest complaint I hear is that people from India tend to not have much initiative and critical thinking skills, and instead require directions to follow. Since most managemers are incompetent, this results in something being built precisely how the American managers asked, rather than what the business really needed.
It would be a shame if American kids were taught to be like this -- the ability to reason and use logic is something that I think is vital to us. Being able to correctly answer a question is great, but the other half of what you need is to understand why the answer is what it is.
Cindy,,,,,when I think of no child left behind I have remberances of the Home of the Innocents here in Louisville where I have a concrete horse implanted. It stands in the entrance driveway as a rememberance of what I could have been! And somethng to keep me in touch wif reality wif what I can can be for the next generation!
Having studied the National Reading Panel's report and read the act carefully, I also believe that school districts have been put in the position of trying to factory produce a population of Lexuses on a Yugo budget.
Parents---if they are also able to get a palatable version of all the above would know of more so called rights...(IDEA has Rights, NCLB does not) i.e. a parent insisting a reading program be evidence based vs. a good sounding ideology without research back-up.
Problem is...I'm anal and actually read that stuff, but 99.99% of the pop. doesnt. Furthermore-many fight change of any kind and then on top of that there are the different cultural paradigms that include and exclude parental involvement...for whatever cultural value. It is pretty messy.
There is talk here in Maine (speaking with managing editor of a daily here) that Maine's guidelines, which are currently above those of NO Child Left Behind, will be dumbed DOWN to meet the Act. Many teachers will quit or opt for early retirement rather than have to work like this. Question: is it mandatory to accept the No Child Left Behind guidelines, or can a state exceed them?
My wife just completed her 26th year of teaching in the NC public schools, and she has some very strong opinions about NCLB. I'd let her respond to this, but it would probably go on for several pages.
On the surface, this law sounds great.
The three main goals are:
1) To make sure that all students in a school as well as students from low-income families, minority populations and students with disabilities perform well in the areas of reading and mathematics.
2) To hold schools responsible if all children are not on grade level or above.
3) To make sure that there is a highly qualified teacher in each classroom.
Now who can argue with those goals? Sounds wonderful, doesn't it?
The problems come in when you start looking at the specifics.
NCLB lets individual school systems define their own standards of "proficiency" in reading and mathematics. What's considered proficient in North Carolina is not necessarily considered proficient in North Dakota. The only requirement is that there be some sort of standardized test so that schools can issue a "report card" of how they measured up.
One of the biggest problems is that the law sets up 10 different subgroups of students in a school. There must be a minimum of 40 students in a subgroup and all of the subgroups must meet Adequate Yearly Progress (grade level on the standardized test) for the school to meet its NCLB goals,
This means that if all of the students in a school kick butt on the test except the "Limited English Proficient" students or the "Free/Reduced Price Lunch" students, the school as a whole fails. Two years of failure means parents can pull their kids out of that school and the school system has to let them transfer to any other school in the system that they want.
NCLB defines a "highly qualified teacher" as one who has a bachelor's degree, full state certification, and can prove that they know the subject that they teach. Well, duh! That sounds to me like "barely qualified." I don't know how it is in other places, but in Charlotte you don't get hired without a bachelor's degree and subject knowledge. They will give you six months to get state certification, but if you don't get it, you don't stay.
Apparently, a school system can opt out of NCLB, but they'll lose their federal funding. They're not likely to do that.
NCLB defines a "highly qualified teacher" as one who has a bachelor's degree, full state certification, and can prove that they know the subject that they teach. Well, duh! That sounds to me like "barely qualified." I don't know how it is in other places, but in Charlotte you don't get hired without a bachelor's degree and subject knowledge. They will give you six months to get state certification, but if you don't get it, you don't stay.
I forget where it was that I lived that this was taking place, I think Georgia, but at the time the school system was accepting anyone with any BA degree to be a teacher, but you'd have to take a two week certification course or something relatively easy. I guess that would be the reason for a provision like that, which is still sad.
[tongue in cheek] That depends on your definition of good as well as your perspective! It is a very good way to enforce the further dumbing down of America!
It's yet another classic example of lowering the bar. The states get to define the pass/fail criteria for a school--how fudged up is that?
Georgia recently announced a large percentage increase in the number of elementary school students who passed the state test for that grade, but then refused to reveal what a passing score was. It was eventually discovered that the passing grade was less than 50%.
If your kids don't succeed, make the test easier! Lower your standards! Just don't discipline them, 'cuz it might make them feel bad, and don't help the teachers out because the money is better spent on Jumbo-Trons for the high school football stadium...
I think lawyers and teachers should swap salaries.
My husband is a teacher and he feels it is detrimental to children with learning disabilities who are now forcibly mainstreamed. He had a child with with a handicap in a class of his and this child could barely get by and became quite frustrated. Some children have aides to personally help them in each class.
As far as kids who just mess around and don't get good grades in school, graduate unable to read a newspaper or balance a checkbook, they don't need legislation. IMO, they need parental involvement.
Zixar that can work the other way too - to a school' detriment.
When I taught in NJ - when they first instituted the State-Wide uniform test for high school graduation....the school I taught in had pittiful passing percents. However...it was an inner city school which had a large number of transient students. I would routinely check in and out between 10 - 20 students over the course of a year.
Additionally, about a third of the students were not able to speak English, by virue of recently entering the country.
At first...ALL students of a particular grade in a school were lumped together and we had passing grades in the low 40% which brought down all kinds of havoc on teachers and board members.
Suburban schools never had this problem, so it made inner city teachers look like retards!
Finally, the State allowed the scores to be separated according to native English speaking and ESL students...and the first year that was done, the English speaking students who passed jumped to 73%. Now that is not a huge number...not acceptable to me, for example...but it just shows how one counts the numbers is very important in these matters.
It's one of the problems stemming from the decay of our society. The trust that parents and teachers could once put into each other has dwindled to near nothing. Teachers can't trust parents to take the time to reinforce proper social behavior, let alone ensure that homework is completed satisfactorily. Parents don't trust teachers to exercise necessary discipline, so the power to control unruly children is gone. Schools have not gotten any better since corporal punishment was removed, in fact, the problems are getting worse. The social experiments of the 60s and 70s were not all good ideas. In fact, few were. "New math" was only a cute example. It was nothing compared to the disservice wrought by "political correctness" and absurd "self-esteem" building measures.
The pay for teachers is so low relative to the cost of living that the majority of people drawn to the profession are either idealists or incompetents. That wouldn't be so bad, except that it seems the ratio of the latter to the former is above 1:1! Add to that those who rise to school management usually come from the incompetent side, and the good teachers are few, far between, grossly underpaid, undersupported, and colossally underappreciated.
Cindy, I really don't understand how you put up with it. You must have iron guts.
krys: Well, that was the first metallic-organ metaphor that leapt to my mind, too, but Cindy could never be mistaken for the applicable requisite gender. ;)-->
krys: Well, that was the first metallic-organ metaphor that leapt to my mind, too, but Cindy could never be mistaken for the applicable requisite gender. ;)-->
If good teachers stay in the profession, it is ONLY because they care more about the kids than about all the administrational and political posturing. It is also because they find ways AROUND said administration and politicians (insert mustache twirl here).
Good teachers educate no matter what the educational soup de jour.
And some are fortunate enough to get an administrator or two that also care and educate no matter what. (like my new boss!)
I think I'll start a private school for dyslexic kids....maybe.....
NCLB seems to be a paper theory which discusses evidenced based techniques, yet the act itself is not an evidence based idea.
I have met Reid Lyon and know one of his teachers well...His own teacher ( a 60+ yo speech and language professor)thinks they have not got this one quite right.
another thought on the parental involvement issue:
here in NM...where we have a good 40 % of our school pop as Hispanic, the cultural paradigm is that it is the teacher's job to educate...not the parents...and this is especially true the close to first generation mexican/american and-or the rejection of parental involvement ideas are stronger when the parents are less educated.
In cases like this - we will not increase these parents involvement until they begin to change their cultures. The Alpha Mom's on the high powered PTA's in most suburban MC or UMC schools are not to be found here in the urban schools at all. Some might find my comments offensive, but the studies bear me out on the involvmnet issues.
I think the worst culprit are the whole language "priests" in my not so humble opinion. And then the idea we are competeing with video games....so we have the publishers put these books with lots of pictures and colors together....I better not get started.....I hate publishers....
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Abigail
Yeah, I think by and large it stinks.
The mandatory testing forces teachers to teach to the test instead of teaching to the children.
Passing the test may prove a child can take a test.
Doing poorly on a test doesn't necessarily/always mean the child hasn't learned or doesn't understand the material, it may simply mean the child doesn't take tests well.
Schools which do not do well on tests are not necessarily bad schools. It was exactly this emphasis on testing which closed down the school my children have attended. I KNOW my kids were learning there.
I also know about 70% or so of the kids going to this school were at or below poverty level. This means the parents were so busy struggling to make ends meet, many of them didn't have the time to work with their kids.
Testing can be valid as a tool to see where things can be improved, but it should not be used as the end all determination of how a school is doing.
I watched my children's school spend money which could have been used in the classroom to bribe parents (incentives) to make sure their children were present on testing days and to bribe children into trying harder to do well on the tests.
It stinks.
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shazdancer
I totally agree, Abigail. I am hearing that teachers may opt to quit or take early retirement if they are forced to spend more time merely teaching their students to recite facts for a test. In a society where the technology is changing so fast, we need citizens who know how to think.
Regards,
Shaz
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Mister P-Mosh
One of the problems with the outsourcing movement to India is that most of the workers from India are taught in a manner similar to that. The biggest complaint I hear is that people from India tend to not have much initiative and critical thinking skills, and instead require directions to follow. Since most managemers are incompetent, this results in something being built precisely how the American managers asked, rather than what the business really needed.
It would be a shame if American kids were taught to be like this -- the ability to reason and use logic is something that I think is vital to us. Being able to correctly answer a question is great, but the other half of what you need is to understand why the answer is what it is.
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Littlehawk
Cindy,,,,,when I think of no child left behind I have remberances of the Home of the Innocents here in Louisville where I have a concrete horse implanted. It stands in the entrance driveway as a rememberance of what I could have been! And somethng to keep me in touch wif reality wif what I can can be for the next generation!
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washingtonweather
Having studied the National Reading Panel's report and read the act carefully, I also believe that school districts have been put in the position of trying to factory produce a population of Lexuses on a Yugo budget.
Parents---if they are also able to get a palatable version of all the above would know of more so called rights...(IDEA has Rights, NCLB does not) i.e. a parent insisting a reading program be evidence based vs. a good sounding ideology without research back-up.
Problem is...I'm anal and actually read that stuff, but 99.99% of the pop. doesnt. Furthermore-many fight change of any kind and then on top of that there are the different cultural paradigms that include and exclude parental involvement...for whatever cultural value. It is pretty messy.
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shazdancer
Dear washingtonweather,
There is talk here in Maine (speaking with managing editor of a daily here) that Maine's guidelines, which are currently above those of NO Child Left Behind, will be dumbed DOWN to meet the Act. Many teachers will quit or opt for early retirement rather than have to work like this. Question: is it mandatory to accept the No Child Left Behind guidelines, or can a state exceed them?
Regards,
Shaz
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Pirate1974
My wife just completed her 26th year of teaching in the NC public schools, and she has some very strong opinions about NCLB. I'd let her respond to this, but it would probably go on for several pages.
On the surface, this law sounds great.
The three main goals are:
1) To make sure that all students in a school as well as students from low-income families, minority populations and students with disabilities perform well in the areas of reading and mathematics.
2) To hold schools responsible if all children are not on grade level or above.
3) To make sure that there is a highly qualified teacher in each classroom.
Now who can argue with those goals? Sounds wonderful, doesn't it?
The problems come in when you start looking at the specifics.
NCLB lets individual school systems define their own standards of "proficiency" in reading and mathematics. What's considered proficient in North Carolina is not necessarily considered proficient in North Dakota. The only requirement is that there be some sort of standardized test so that schools can issue a "report card" of how they measured up.
One of the biggest problems is that the law sets up 10 different subgroups of students in a school. There must be a minimum of 40 students in a subgroup and all of the subgroups must meet Adequate Yearly Progress (grade level on the standardized test) for the school to meet its NCLB goals,
This means that if all of the students in a school kick butt on the test except the "Limited English Proficient" students or the "Free/Reduced Price Lunch" students, the school as a whole fails. Two years of failure means parents can pull their kids out of that school and the school system has to let them transfer to any other school in the system that they want.
NCLB defines a "highly qualified teacher" as one who has a bachelor's degree, full state certification, and can prove that they know the subject that they teach. Well, duh! That sounds to me like "barely qualified." I don't know how it is in other places, but in Charlotte you don't get hired without a bachelor's degree and subject knowledge. They will give you six months to get state certification, but if you don't get it, you don't stay.
Apparently, a school system can opt out of NCLB, but they'll lose their federal funding. They're not likely to do that.
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Mister P-Mosh
I forget where it was that I lived that this was taking place, I think Georgia, but at the time the school system was accepting anyone with any BA degree to be a teacher, but you'd have to take a two week certification course or something relatively easy. I guess that would be the reason for a provision like that, which is still sad.
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Jim
Read the first 3 chapters of "The Bell Curve" then we'll talk.
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Cindy!
I agree Pirate
....NCLB was NOT drawn up by teachers....which, by the way, is who they should ask about the problems in schools. (duh)
It doesn't do much good...and provides no funds.
Every single educator I've ever worked with or spoken to thinks it is among the worst acts ever passed (and I agree completely).
If one is in a good school, NCLB wasn't needed to begin with....if one is in a mediocre or bad school...NCLB will not do any good.
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krys
from Cindy!:
[tongue in cheek] That depends on your definition of good as well as your perspective! It is a very good way to enforce the further dumbing down of America!
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Zixar
It's yet another classic example of lowering the bar. The states get to define the pass/fail criteria for a school--how fudged up is that?
Georgia recently announced a large percentage increase in the number of elementary school students who passed the state test for that grade, but then refused to reveal what a passing score was. It was eventually discovered that the passing grade was less than 50%.
If your kids don't succeed, make the test easier! Lower your standards! Just don't discipline them, 'cuz it might make them feel bad, and don't help the teachers out because the money is better spent on Jumbo-Trons for the high school football stadium...
I think lawyers and teachers should swap salaries.
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Watered Garden
My husband is a teacher and he feels it is detrimental to children with learning disabilities who are now forcibly mainstreamed. He had a child with with a handicap in a class of his and this child could barely get by and became quite frustrated. Some children have aides to personally help them in each class.
As far as kids who just mess around and don't get good grades in school, graduate unable to read a newspaper or balance a checkbook, they don't need legislation. IMO, they need parental involvement.
WG
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krys
Zixar that can work the other way too - to a school' detriment.
When I taught in NJ - when they first instituted the State-Wide uniform test for high school graduation....the school I taught in had pittiful passing percents. However...it was an inner city school which had a large number of transient students. I would routinely check in and out between 10 - 20 students over the course of a year.
Additionally, about a third of the students were not able to speak English, by virue of recently entering the country.
At first...ALL students of a particular grade in a school were lumped together and we had passing grades in the low 40% which brought down all kinds of havoc on teachers and board members.
Suburban schools never had this problem, so it made inner city teachers look like retards!
Finally, the State allowed the scores to be separated according to native English speaking and ESL students...and the first year that was done, the English speaking students who passed jumped to 73%. Now that is not a huge number...not acceptable to me, for example...but it just shows how one counts the numbers is very important in these matters.
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Zixar
It's one of the problems stemming from the decay of our society. The trust that parents and teachers could once put into each other has dwindled to near nothing. Teachers can't trust parents to take the time to reinforce proper social behavior, let alone ensure that homework is completed satisfactorily. Parents don't trust teachers to exercise necessary discipline, so the power to control unruly children is gone. Schools have not gotten any better since corporal punishment was removed, in fact, the problems are getting worse. The social experiments of the 60s and 70s were not all good ideas. In fact, few were. "New math" was only a cute example. It was nothing compared to the disservice wrought by "political correctness" and absurd "self-esteem" building measures.
The pay for teachers is so low relative to the cost of living that the majority of people drawn to the profession are either idealists or incompetents. That wouldn't be so bad, except that it seems the ratio of the latter to the former is above 1:1! Add to that those who rise to school management usually come from the incompetent side, and the good teachers are few, far between, grossly underpaid, undersupported, and colossally underappreciated.
Cindy, I really don't understand how you put up with it. You must have iron guts.
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krys
Not only does Cindy! have iron guts - but she also has some parts made of brass!!!!
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Watered Garden
Zix----Regarding teacher's pay, I think we should reverse a trend - give the teachers what the Congress makes and vice versa!!!!
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Zixar
krys: Well, that was the first metallic-organ metaphor that leapt to my mind, too, but Cindy could never be mistaken for the applicable requisite gender.
;)-->
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Zixar
WG: It's a start! (But lawyers make more...and contribute even less to society...)
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Steve!
Amen to that!!
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Zixar
Steve: No fair! You peeked!
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Cindy!
If good teachers stay in the profession, it is ONLY because they care more about the kids than about all the administrational and political posturing. It is also because they find ways AROUND said administration and politicians (insert mustache twirl here).
Good teachers educate no matter what the educational soup de jour.
And some are fortunate enough to get an administrator or two that also care and educate no matter what. (like my new boss!)
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washingtonweather
I think I'll start a private school for dyslexic kids....maybe.....
NCLB seems to be a paper theory which discusses evidenced based techniques, yet the act itself is not an evidence based idea.
I have met Reid Lyon and know one of his teachers well...His own teacher ( a 60+ yo speech and language professor)thinks they have not got this one quite right.
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washingtonweather
another thought on the parental involvement issue:
here in NM...where we have a good 40 % of our school pop as Hispanic, the cultural paradigm is that it is the teacher's job to educate...not the parents...and this is especially true the close to first generation mexican/american and-or the rejection of parental involvement ideas are stronger when the parents are less educated.
In cases like this - we will not increase these parents involvement until they begin to change their cultures. The Alpha Mom's on the high powered PTA's in most suburban MC or UMC schools are not to be found here in the urban schools at all. Some might find my comments offensive, but the studies bear me out on the involvmnet issues.
I think the worst culprit are the whole language "priests" in my not so humble opinion. And then the idea we are competeing with video games....so we have the publishers put these books with lots of pictures and colors together....I better not get started.....I hate publishers....
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