No Child Left Behind ... standards unobtainable
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Nine of Portland's 16 public schools failed to meet federal performance standards in the 2011-2012 school year, but school officials say those results don't accurately reflect what's happening in classrooms.
Statewide, only 184 of 608 public schools made adequate progress in 2011-12, down from 276 the previous year. Maine schools are required each year to meet higher testing targets than the previous year to make "adequate yearly progress."
No Child Left Behind...standards unobtainable
In Portland: Casco Bay, Deering and Portland High Schools, Lincoln and Lyman Moore Middle Schools, Hall, Lyseth, Presumpscot and Reiche Elementary Schools all failed to meet the standards of No Child Left Behind. This is not the first time that some of these schools have appeared on this list and I don’t blame them for being upset. Their scores may show a 3% increase from one year to the next as an example, but what good is that if the government is demanding a 5% or an 8% increase.
To me, this is going to be harder and harder to do and I don’t care what school in the state it is because no school will reach 100% in all testing areas by 2016. You can ask any parent, any kid who knows about this, any educator, any administrator, any person on the street. We all knew that when we were in school that we did not score 100% at 100% of the time. So what makes our idiot government officials think our kids think they are going to be any different. At some point you may see every school in the state on this NCLB list.
I could see setting this number much lower. Not because we want to dumb things down, but to be realistic. We should be looking at something obtainable. Something around 85% or 90%. Of all the world’s educated countries, we are ranked at 28th. There are a whole lot worse places to be. Sure, as our scores go up, our rating will go up and it will take time. It is not like we fell to 28th overnight and it is not going to be a short period of time to get out from this spot. I think that instead of looking at a year and percentage of where they want to be. They should look at a percentage of increase for each year that should be obtained. But, don’t just throw them on the NCLB list with one bad year…give them an additional year once it has been identified after the first year.
Want to know how your school did or what areas it may or may not have issues in? There is a chart at the top of the page for what the letters mean in the different catagories. It could be me, but I seemed to notice a lot of "S"s for Students with Disabilities on a statewide trend.
"66% used to be failing, but under NCLB it is treated the same as an A. Imagine how poorly the schools would be doing if there were no standards in place. As it is now 20% pf the best and brightest who go on to college need remedial courses just to get to where they should be when they leave high school. That's what you are getting for your $130,000 in tax money per student. If these standards were linked to teacher and administrator compensation then you'd start to see some progress."
NCLB is joked about in "the system" as "No Child Learning Better". It is actually worse than depicted above. As a nation we used to be 17th in academic achievement among developed nations. Now we are #35 and declining. Common Core will accelerate the decline.
I could see setting this number much lower. Not because we want to dumb things down, but to be realistic. We should be looking at something obtainable.
One part of the equation no one talks about regarding "no child left behind" is the teachers. Many teachers refuse to teach what will be on the tests. They feel they have been teaching a long time and know whats best for the kids. They refuse to change.
What happens when you dont teach kids what is on the test? They fail. Pretty simple.
Its easy to show where teachers are not participating by showing these failing schools. The problem with this is, even when teachers do bad, you cant get rid of them because of the strong unions.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
Connecting teacher pay to performance rather than a union scale would be a start. Unions create mediocre teachers resulting in mediocre students.
Under NCLB 1 in 3 students can fail to meet the math standards and that is considered succeeding. That is for the schools that are SUCCEEDING. I ask again, how bad would our schools be performing without being held to even this low threshold of performance? A student can either do the math or they can not. There is no teaching to the test involved.
The real reason the teachers and administrators do not like things like NCLB is that it points out the poor results we are getting for our $130,000 per student. They FEEL they are doing a good job and that should be good enough for those of us paying the bill. If your electrician miswired 1/3 of your house circuits but they FELT that they did a good job would you be satisfied with the results and just pay him anyway?
This thread needs a restart. The OP suggests that there are some education standards which are unobtainable, The standards have been obtained and they appear in reply #1. Is there a chance that this thread was intended to be about unatainable standards?
Intended or not; That is the inevitable result if the situation is examined honestly. NCLB and Common Core will not improve our position as #35 in the world.
The status quo provided by the current education empire is how we got to #35 in the world. Doing nothing to change that would have almost guaranteed our continued decline even further.
Is there a chance that this thread was intended to be about unatainable standards?
I disagree that the standards are unattainable. I've seen too many teachers, not teaching. Many times when you walk into class the teacher simply says "start reading on page 80 until the end of class" And the teacher does who knows what till the next class. The problem is, the teachers are not teaching. Simply babysitting. We need to get back to actual teaching.
To much social engineering not enough skills , glad they all have laptops or IPads imagine the scores without them.
Ipads only become useful or useless, depending on percpeption, in our district after 7th grade. This is the first year that all three elementary schools are not on the NCLB list.
Wow three whole schools out of how many? Not worth the money spent on them, sorry to see that teachers are unable to teach. So are you saying that teachers are no longer needed since now that the kids havev IPads and now have attained the required levels, whereas when it was just teachers without the IPads the results were unattainable, sad?
We originally only had the high school on the list, but when doing our own evaluation we found more weak links in our own district that the state did not identify. So we took the money to fix one schools problems and addressed them on a district wide basis. What good is it to address it in high school if they are coming in broken long before that stage.
Also what I was saying with the Ipad issue is that in our younger grades (k-5), we don't have use of the Ipads and are no longer on NCLB list. Look at all the other schools in the state that do have them that are on this list. I also realize that there are a lot that also do have them that are not on the list either. It really depends on the teaching style and curriculm of the school.
Exactly, Ipads make little or no difference, it comes down to quality teachers in the end. And no amount of money will make a poor teacher a good one.
How can that be? The education empire is constantly telling us that if we just pay the current teachers more they will miraculously become even better teachers than they already are, even though they are in on way responsible for the current poor performance of our students. More money will fix everything.
And no amount of money will make a poor teacher a good one.
I agree. We have thrown more money at the problem and we now the same really bad teachers who now happen to make more money. Designed new schools to have smaller classrooms to employ a higher number of bad teachers for the same amount of students, and so on and so on.
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The standards are not very high despite the whining from the education empire. It is even worse than it appears. Here are the standards the schools are required to meet.
In order for schools to make Adequate Yearly Progress in 2012-13, they had to meet the following targets in 2011-12 testing:
Reading, grades 3-8: 75 percent of students must be proficient
Reading, grade 11: 78 percent of students must be proficient
Math, grades 3-8: 70 percent of students must be proficient
Math, grade 11: 66 percent of students must be proficient
66% used to be failing, but under NCLB it is treated the same as an A. Imagine how poorly the schools would be doing if there were no standards in place. As it is now 20% pf the best and brightest who go on to college need remedial courses just to get to where they should be when they leave high school. That's what you are getting for your $130,000 in tax money per student. If these standards were linked to teacher and administrator compensation then you'd start to see some progress.