No Child Left Behind Standards Unobtainable
No Child Left Behind Standards Unobtainable
Thu, 10/25/2012 - 12:57am
Posted by pmrmsm
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.