...The way the system is being organized and operated today...with all the data collecting, business tactic processes, assessments given more than instruction, not to mention lack of funding to train teachers as promised by the NCLB act....the system is failing, not the teachers/teaching.
The child who can't make that 'grade' in a regular classroom is sent through a referral process then tested for special education. In the past, those children who COULD NOT learn due to diagnosed learning disabilities were helped with special education classes. Now, those children are expected to make the grade along with all the other kids. That's just not reality. My god...we are not saying that we don't want to 'GIVE THEM A CHANCE".....OR that they can't learn.....
But as it is now, those children who need help are not placed, not qualifiying into special programs and are simply not serviced. = they are left behind.
The way it is today all children expected to do the exact same on tests scores..be damned their abilities. THAT'S what is wrong with the act...not the high standard of teaching or the programs provided. I love the new programs. I am one of the advocates of the NCLB provisions...."Reading First" schoosl...etc.
Lawsuits have forced school systems to focus more on the life of the system as opposed to the needs of the children. ..but at what cost?
To require/demand that EVERY single child read at the 5th grade level is actually not a bad idea....but the punitive actionst that are given to the schools/teachers who dont' make that happen is unfair and frankly doing more to reverse the very idea of leaving no child behind. That's why this has to change...
I wasn't really that interested in this discussion at first because I don't have kids. It's not that I'm not concerned about the quality of education today - I live in a neighborhood full of kids, of all ages, and have several schools within a couple of miles of the house. I have noticed, the last few years, that whenever I get a chance to talk to younger people about, oh, let's say general subjects they should have learned in school, a large proportion of them don't seem to 'know' what you might have expected someone that age to have learned by their age, say, even twenty years ago. That's a mild way of saying it seems like people are getting dumber.
I think I can understand a lot of what Cynthia is complaining about. It is unreasonable to expect every child of a certain age - say 10, about the age of the average fifth grader - to progress at the same rate, and be at the same level. On average, most should be able to pass basic reading, math, science, et cetera, tests for their grade level. Some will score higher ( the A and B students), some average (the C students), some below average (the D students), and some will fail (the F students). (That may not be the grading system your schools use, but that's what the schools I went to used back in my day.)
The students who couldn't (or wouldn't) keep up, who slipped into the lower C average or to a D, were given extra time, usually in a remedial class. If they failed, they were held back a year to go through that class level again, until they could pass the material. Students who were ahead of their class could be moved to a more advanced class - not the next grade level, necessarily, but a class in their grade level that covered more advanced material than the basics.
Students who somehow passed to the next grade but who were found unable to do the work at that grade level once they started could be put back into the previous grade level. I would imagine there was some system to track this, so the school system could keep tabs on the teachers and be sure they weren't just passing students to get rid of them, or to keep their numbers up.
It wasn't a bad reflection on the teacher back then to go to the administration and tell them student X just could not keep up with the classwork and needed to be placed in a remedial class. Back then, before ADD, ADHD and Ritalin became well known, it was understood that some kids were going to have more trouble learning the material than others, and more trouble keeping up with their grade level, and the teachers and administrators were able to exercise several different options to try and help them.
I've heard a lot of the same complaints Cynthia has from several others. Teachers are 'teaching to the test' in order to have enough of their students pass the FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test) to keep their percentages up and keep their jobs. Students are learning more by rote, rather than learning problem solving skills. Students who have no business being passed on to the next level are being passed. It's on the news and in the papers.
In the meantime, America is losing - and in some cases, has already lost - it's place as the world leader in several different technologies. I read in the paper the other day that the Army is having to accept more and more recruits who don't have high school diplomas.
Our education system seems to be broken. NCLB doesn't seem to be fixing it, if it is forcing teachers to 'teach to the test' and fudge their numbers in order to keep their jobs. That's not quality control. Maybe I just got lucky and managed to spend my school years in an exceptional system, but it seems to me it worked just fine. Teachers were free to try to help their students get the education they needed without fear that they could be dismissed for referring a student to remedial classes, or even holding a student back because he could not handle the material; at the same time, teachers who weren't doing their jobs (by passing students to the next level who shouldn't have been passed, ignoring problems and having higher than normal failure rates) were weeded out by the system.
And the students
learned. It seems to me that's the bottom line.
