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CAT Tracks for April 7, 2013
NCLB? |
No Child Left Behind?
How 'bout: "Neediest Children Left Behind!
The ultimate irony of NCLB is that it encourages educators to deny services to the students who need them the most.
NCLB was allegedly passed with the intent of ending "the soft bigotry of low expectations". I say "allegedly" because I will always believe that NCLB was a proverbial "Trojan Horse", conceived by the wealthy and the party which supports their interests, to decimate public schools and secure tax credits for segregating their children from the riff raff.
Instead, NCLB has resulted in the hard bigotry of imposing impossible expectations, causing public school educators to unwittingly do their dirty work or, with evaluation of teachers now tied to standardized test scores, lose their jobs.
Ideal, meet reality.
Anyway...
On my first trip to the bookstore after my release from the hospital, I must have still been under the influence of anesthesia, hallucinating, or somethin', somethin'...
In search for the latest dastardly serial killer, I bought a book about, of all things, education. Even more troubling, my purchase was subtitled: "A Year Inside One of America's 45,000* Failing Public Schools".
The book:
Serving me right, two-thirds of the way through the book, I have been unimpressed.
Talk about deja vu...
...talk about "been there, done that".
A year? Hell, try a decade...ever since George W. Bush started this mess! Walk in my shoes...our shoes.
Finally, at pages 166-167, I hit a passage worth repeating. It won't come as a surprise to anyone who works in a "failing school", but, it shows that cheating scandals aren't the only thing infesting public schools since the passage of NCLB. Yes, Atlanta may be the tip of the iceberg of illegal activity, but the legal shenanigans are much more rampant.
Way to go, George!
The following quote from the book makes reference to Mrs. Schaefer, Sergio, Mr. Hay, and the CMT...
Sergio - Struggling student with no hope of passing the state test
Mr. Hay - Principal of Brookside Elementary in Norwalk, Connecticut
CMT - Connecticut Mastery Test...usedfor NCLB compliance
Quoting Mrs. Schaefer, who was going to operate a pull-out program during the two months prior to the state test, trying to get the "bubble kids" (kids with the potential to pass) ready:
Mrs. Schaefer shook her head. Just saying those words caused her discomfort. Many times Mr. Hay had told her, had told all the faculty, "Our job is to move every child forward. If we can do that, I'm not worried how we score on the CMT." Yet when push came to shove, with all the pressure to achieve from the district, the state, the U.S. Department of Education and the media (but not the students' parents; almost all were happy with the school), another side of Mr. Hay and Mrs. Schaefer emerged. The two would scroll through reams of computer printouts, staring at the glow of data on their computer screens, searching for any edge that might help Brookside pass the exam.
Haven't reached the end of the book, so I don't know if it has a happy ending. I would ass-u-me so, or why a book?! On the other hand, after investing a full year on a story, maybe a journalist needs to write something...
...even an epitaph.
Mrs. Linda Schaefer - Literacy Specialist
"It's a shame," Mrs. Schaefer continued, "but there aren't the resources here for me to help every child. I'm one person, and at some point, I have to make choices. Between data that we had, my observations and the teachers' observations on which kids they felt had the most chance of moving up, I had to leave Sergio out. I could help him, but not enough to reach proficiency on the CMT.
