Laura Waterman Wittstock wrote: > The major strategy of NCLB is to force districts to comply with > artificial standards for performance which has fueled a > large remedial intervention business on schools. It is a privatization > effort that has already reaped millions for Republican Bush pals in > the private tutoring business.
All performance standards are artificial! This is a vacuous argument. "...fueled a large remedial intervention business on schools." NCLB requires that nonperforming schools provide tutoring. Call me an education radical, but I believe that schools should be requiring tutoring for students who are falling behind. The fact that some schools have not been should be a profound embarrassment for American education! If most schools already are, then NCLB is not requiring anything new. NCLB does not specify who or what type of tutorial services should be provided. If the schools are contacting with "large remedial intervention businesses," rather than providing tutoring themselves, then it's their own stupidity that's at fault, not Bush's Republican pals. > The imbalance comes from only looking at performance measures while > ignoring all other local conditions, which each district must deal > with. NCLB is quite cynical in its approach and it will have > deleterious effects on districts until the law is changed. This conclusion follows from false premises. Schools have failed minority students for years by not reporting performance measures for them and claiming that "local conditions" apply. > In balance, Minneapolis has adjusted quite well to the irrational > demands of NCLB. There are enormous challenges facing the district > in terms of ESL students, a continuing stream of new immigrants, as > well as the prospect of uncertain funding for some time to come, > thanks to a deeply misguided governor who puts politics before children. Most of the demands of NCLB are very rational. My point has been that the MPS have not adjusted by adapting their tests to fit with the requirements of NCLB and, in my opinion, they provide misleading information to parents by lying off responsibility to NCLB. David Brauer wrote: > Suspicions are dangerous (witness the previous contention > blaming the Minneapolis district for tests the state and > feds turn out to be responsible for). Suspicions unspoken can sometimes be more dangerous than suspicions voiced; it depends on the context. There is so much misinformation provided by the public schools and the teacher's unions than giving people pause to think about the issue may be a positive influence. > On a related matter: it's unfair, I think, to salute > testing in one post and then because the Minneapolis district > has used one to label it "CYA." The MPS having a 47% dropout rate is unfair. It is unfair to require multiple tests and then blame it on NCLB. There is a difference between good testing and bad testing, and between good management and bad. > In truth, the district has used NALT for years as an > accountability measure ...in some ways, providing more > accountability than NCLB. That's because the district has > used NALT to track individual student progress, which NCLB > doesn't require. This isn't an excuse for not persuading the NALT people and the State to fit the NCLB requirements. Just because NCLB doesn't require recording individual student progress doesn't prevent the schools from using tests that both record individual progress and meet NCLB requirements. > (This is a major flaw in NCLB that even supporters are trying > to remedy. The problem is if a school sees a lot of in-migration > of say, new immigrants, its results can look bad even though the > true culprit is the changing makeup of the class. NALT shows how > much each student has advanced per school year - say a grade level > per year, or more, in the case of remedial "catching up." If you > measure individual student learning, you can control for kids > whom you haven't taught for long, yet still show how your district is > advancing him or her and still aggregate results to fulfill NCLB's purpose.) As far as I understand it, NCLB doesn't prevent the schools from using its tests to do this. > Another reason why Minneapolis is sticking with NALT is that > they've been giving the test for years, and as any statistician > knows, longitudinal data is hard to come by (you only get it by > testing over a long period of time). Any good test designer should be able to retain a sufficient number of items to continue the longitudinal analysis and make the tests fit NCLB. The problem is coordinating this between the District and the State. > In any event, Chuck Holtman's original point was that federal > requirements have added to the testing burden. If you add the > friendly amendment to read "state and feds," he seems to be > pretty right on. It IS fair to say Minneapolis should drop > NALT, but it appears to be the tail on this dog - and not a > useless tail at that. I think that the responsibility is entirely at the State and District levels. Other than requiring additional grades and making the tests mandatory for all students, the Feds haven't required much more testing than what the State and the District weren't already doing or planning to do. Ann Berget wrote: > ...We had already restored the curriculum and instruction department > several years before, so with the best of intentions, we put together > a very focused summer school program and invited/urged low-performing > students to attend. As Ross Taylor said, "They stayed away in droves." > After a couple of years of struggling with that we wanted to know why > fewer than 4 out of 10 low-performing students were participating. > The responses from families tended to be things like "He's got more > important things to do", or "It interferes with our summer plans". > The answers we got were not encouraging. This begs the question, "Why didn't you make the summer programs mandatory?" That's the current strategy, rather than making student repeat the same grade in the same classroom without tutoring, schools are requiring mandatory tutorial programs before students go on to the next grade. This has been a direct result of NCLB. If you thought that the answer was focused summer programs that students didn't attend, why did the MPS continue to move students onto the next grade even though they hadn't mastered basic skills? As far as I know the MPS are still practicing social promotion! 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