WIcruizer said:
That's funny. That comment from someone who hasn't been able to back up a single point they made in this entire thread.
Easy for someone to play armchair quarterback. Teachers across the country saw through this plan quite clearly.
Why George Bush's No Child Left Behind Act is a failure
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
By Marianne and David McGrath
Imagine a man stocking a farm pond with newly hatched trout and then, in six months, trying to catch a trophy-sized trout there with a fly rod.
Imagine, next, this "fisherman" trying to determine why his trophy hunt was a failure by repeatedly electro-shocking the pond to see what floats to the surface, and in the process, stressing to death the weakest of the trout fingerlings.
These imagined scenarios are analogous in many ways to the current assessment frenzy gripping school districts throughout the country. There swirls a madness of high stakes testing mandated by President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, which has been more like the electro-shocking of the students, teachers and schools, rather than a measure for improving education in cities like Chicago.
This colossal mistake began as a campaign strategy for garnering votes, whereby George Bush imagined he could fulfill his pledge to be the "education president" by embracing the education reform movement's latest mantra of testing, testing and more standardized testing. The result is that, sadly, the history of come-and-go fads like new math or forced busing is being repeated, insofar as the weight of federal law has been applied to yet another fanciful trend concocted by educational theorists who, like the education president, have likely never taught a single minute in an elementary or secondary classroom.
Long before the president's act took effect, and when the administrators at our own schools were infected with the Excessive Testing Virus, meetings and debates and reams of agenda were imposed on wary faculties, experienced enough to realize that objective tests administered after a quarter or a semester or even a year, have limited reliability. No teachers we know would even think of factoring a standardized test score into a pupil's report card. Such scores may be helpful in supplemental ways, but they can never reflect a student's performance and achievment for a given time period. For education occurs according to a complex integrated, and cumulative dynamic that does not allow for 16- or 40-week segments to be validly and separately measured by the Iowa Basic, the S.T.A.R., the I.S.A.T., or any of the other machine-scored products-for-profit proliferating throughout the country.
So we teachers wrote cogent-sounding reports and made pledges of ongoing concern to mollify the administrators, and we finally got back to the teaching tasks at hand.
Then Bush made ETV the plague of the land in 2002 with a plan to close schools, transfer teachers, and uproot students on the basis of these very tests.
Standardized test questions, with a choice of a, b, c, d or none of these, for answers, may be useful for screening contestants for a round of TV "Jeopardy." But they do not offer proof or even illumination on how students think critically, solve problems, communicate orally and in writing, or learn.
Surely, some such exams may be helpful when used in conjunction with other modes of evaluation, such as performance measures (portfolios, projects, interviews, observations), formative assessment (student self reflection), learning records, and retention rates. But relying solely on numerical scores from single summative tests administered to every grade, every single year, is like constantly electro-shocking the farm pond to stun the fish and exhibit them, if not in their worst state, certainly not in any semblance of their full competence.
Unlike Bush and his advisors, the nation's school board members, superintendents, and principals understand all of this and have been, according to recent disclosures in the media, cooking the books, juggling the numbers, and "customizing" definitions of grade levels and ethnic origins, in order to comply with the law that punishes entire schools if even a single subgroup (low income, special ed, non-Native, for example) of its students falters on exam day.
Who can blame them? How else but by somehow short circuiting this law, do superintendents keep a school open, for example, that is making great strides because of its charismatic principal's leadership, but whose subgroup of ESL pupils scored below the national average in reading English their first year? How else but by perhaps finessing the definition of special education, might another district keep intact a staff of dedicated teachers in a school which the parents see as a beacon of hope in an urban neighborhood blighted by violence and poverty, but blighted mostly by Washington's disdain? How else except, perhaps, by challenging this federal act in court, can states with multiple schools rated as failures last year (1,700 in Illinois), maintain quality education for its children?
The electrocuted farm pond can recover if its fish and plants and water are stabilized, nurtured, and cared for, and the electrical prod put away. And our nation's struggling schools with diverse student populations may also prosper if the president and his grandly flawed education design are the only things "left behind."
Marianne McGrath, a teacher at Northeast School in Evergreen Park, and her husband David McGrath, professor of English at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, have a combined 53 years of teaching experience. They live in Oak Forest.
And this is from 2004. Funding for education across the board has been slashed from every federal budget since then.
I can respect that difference, however, and it's what makes these discussions occassionally interesting. But the "Dissent is unpatriotic" crowd? Sorry...sheep is the only word I can use for them that would make it past the word filter on this site.
