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The mistake NCLB makes is thinking that pulling up the bottom pulls up everyone when it actually pulls down the top. Schools get the most bang for their buck by working with the lowest kids because once kids pass there is no incentive for them to do better. .
Take it a step further: Once kids pass, it's actually BAD for them to do better -- at least from the school's perspective.
If the kids do better, that's because the teacher did one or more of the following:
* Taught them more content
* Taught them more skills
* Reviewed existing knowledge more effectively
In all three cases, these actions would result in the class being tougher. At the very least, you'd be challenged to learn the minimum and then more than that.
Making the class tougher increases the chances that students will receive lowered grades (even though they might have passed the exams).
This will increase the number of parental complaints. Compared to the other teachers who only teach the bare minimum, you will be "the hard teacher."
From the school's perspective, they've done their job by teaching the bare minimum. Anything else or beyond that is a waste of their time because it increases the likelihood of parental complaints.
Teachers have nothing to back them up unless they are teaching AP and can say, "Look, I need to teach this material/skill because it will be on the test," but even then, the school's (usually unspoken) reply is, "Who the hell cares? The only thing that counts is whether the student is ENROLLED in AP -- not whether he actually passes the test." In fact, you could again argue that even with AP, it is to the school's benefit to make AP classes easy and relatively void of content. This will increase enrollment in classes because the student can still get the perk (and the weighted grade) of the AP class. The school will look better on the Challenge Index in Newsweek because of its increased AP enrollment. Whether or not the student passes is not the school's problem. They're not held accountable for that.
Kids were also tracked and grouped on ability. That allowed you to have a class of students who all excelled in Math and you could push them with additional challenges and deeper into the subject matter. You also had a class full of kids who needed remedial help and could focus an entire class on helping them get up to speed.
Today you have a class with A, B, C and failing students. How do you teach "to all" ? Well lower the bar; teach to the lowest student so that ALL students have the opportunity to pass. But to do that you now must lower the standards for passing so that ALL students can pass while teaching to the lowest skilled student.
What we are doing is dumbing down America rather than the lofty goal of the smarter students "bringing up" the skill level of the not so smart ones.
What public schools need to do under the radar, like I know my high school did was take all the kids who were taking the hard classes and put them on the same schedule every day... some of them went to public/private ivys etc, so is that the solution?
Kids were also tracked and grouped on ability. That allowed you to have a class of students who all excelled in Math and you could push them with additional challenges and deeper into the subject matter. You also had a class full of kids who needed remedial help and could focus an entire class on helping them get up to speed.
Today you have a class with A, B, C and failing students. How do you teach "to all" ? Well lower the bar; teach to the lowest student so that ALL students have the opportunity to pass. But to do that you now must lower the standards for passing so that ALL students can pass while teaching to the lowest skilled student.
What we are doing is dumbing down America rather than the lofty goal of the smarter students "bringing up" the skill level of the not so smart ones.
NCLB and removing tracking backfired.
ITA! You don't raise the bar when you require all kids to pass, you lower it. And you send the message to the kids that it's someone elses job to make sure they pass.
We need to go back to a tracked system where kids earned their way onto whatever track they were on. We need to drop this idea that every child is or should be college material. We need to hold our children accountable for learning. That is their part of the education equation.
I'm pretty sure the political objective of NCLB is actually to even the playing field by dragging down the top. I'm just surprised this was the brain child of a republican. Usually, they like the fact that the children of the haves tend to do better in school than the children of the have nots. Maybe they figure the haves will just pull their kids from the public schools and send them to private school.
"For starters, we don't have nearly enough people who are capable in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and math," said former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, a member of the council's task force that wrote the report, titled "U.S. Education Reform and National Security."
I'm pretty sure the political objective of NCLB is actually to even the playing field by dragging down the top. I'm just surprised this was the brain child of a republican. Usually, they like the fact that the children of the haves tend to do better in school than the children of the have nots. Maybe they figure the haves will just pull their kids from the public schools and send them to private school.
I don't think the original objective of NCLB was really to pull the lower students up. I think the conservative minds that came up with it knew that would never happen and the goal was to de-certify so many districts that vouchers and moving to affluent districts became the norm. I think the main goal was to derail public education completely. When looked at from that perspective it makes total sense that it was the brain child of a Republican.
Kids were also tracked and grouped on ability. That allowed you to have a class of students who all excelled in Math and you could push them with additional challenges and deeper into the subject matter. You also had a class full of kids who needed remedial help and could focus an entire class on helping them get up to speed.
Today you have a class with A, B, C and failing students. How do you teach "to all" ? Well lower the bar; teach to the lowest student so that ALL students have the opportunity to pass. But to do that you now must lower the standards for passing so that ALL students can pass while teaching to the lowest skilled student.
What we are doing is dumbing down America rather than the lofty goal of the smarter students "bringing up" the skill level of the not so smart ones.
NCLB and removing tracking backfired.
I think the original idea of removing tracking, which came before NCLB, had good intentions. Mainstreaming kids has it's positive points. When there is not mainstreaming then lower track kids are destined to failure. The reason that Brown v. Board of Education desegregated schools was because it was obvious that students in all black schools were never going to get the same education as students in white schools. When you track you run that same risk. I do think that lower track kids do receive a better education by removing tracking. And I also think that higher track kids get a worse education.
While I understand the reasoning. I do think it's better overall to go back to a tracking system. As long as the system encourages students to progress up to a higher track if their performance warrants it. I do worry about late bloomers not getting that opportunity because they are stigmatized in remedial classes from a young age. I taught a student in 7th and 8th grade that was held back as a 1st grader. He was not the brightest kid, but he was reasonably smart and had a great work ethic. After elementary school he attended a fairly prestigious all boys Catholic school and earned a $40,000 scholarship to Pepperdine University. I would hate to have seen those opportunities taken away because he got stuck in some tracking system.
"For starters, we don't have nearly enough people who are capable in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and math," said former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, a member of the council's task force that wrote the report, titled "U.S. Education Reform and National Security."
I would say that we also don't have nearly enough people who are knowlegdeable in geography, history, and foreign languages. It is appalling that almost none of my students have any geographic awareness at all, much less any idea of the underlying causes of the political problems that exist in the world today. Once again, though, I see a lot of the current neglect of these subjects as going back to the "not tested, therefore not taught" mentality that has arisen since NCLB.
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