OUR VIEW: No Child Left Behind should be fine-tuned
Published: August 15, 2009
Remember when No Child Left Behind was introduced and President George W. Bush said there would be more accountability in education? Here it is — at least our part of it.
We’re not going to blast our county’s teachers over the fact that six of our 10 schools failed to make adequate yearly progress on standardized tests. We’re sure they worked very hard all year to cram all of the state-prescribed education — mandated by federal law — into every student’s brain in the hope that they would regurgitate the correct information when testing time came around.
Still, the tests are the yardstick we’re given to measure the effectiveness of education. We cannot have more than half our schools getting failing marks. We’d rather have all of our schools passing with flying colors.
Can that happen? Maybe today, but eventually no. By 2013-14, all students are required by the federal No Child Left Behind law to show proficiency in reading and math. Anything less and the school fails. That means no kids failing due to disability, or even their own rebellious nature. This might come as a shock to some of us, but there might be a kid out there who would tank the test just to mess with the system. Anyone know a kid like that?
Naturally, the only 100 percent we’ll see in 2013-14 probably will be failing schools.
Do we have a better way? No.
But it is the best system we have at the moment, so we encourage our local educators to do their best to right the ship. We also encourage U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor and Sens. Jim Webb and Mark Warner to revisit NCLB and fine-tune its flaws.
Accountability is a great thing, but it works best when it’s realistic.
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Kudos to the Culpeper County School Board for revisiting its policy on renting school buildings, and props to Town Councilman Steve Jenkins for bringing the issue. He is right that a group looking for a place to have a one-hour meeting should not be made to pay for at least three hours, and the board is right to look into the issue.
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Reader Reactions
It should be scrapped. We have teachers teaching to a standardized test at the end of the year…and I suspect some students simply don’t care. Then the schools are to blame, and the teachers. I have never believed that these tests measure what is actually learned. Accountability by all means, but sane accountability.
Now, how many of these schools didn’t achieve ayp, but improved significantly from last year. That’s a valid question isn’t it?
CSE opines “ We’re sure they worked very hard all year to cram all of the state-prescribed education — mandated by federal law —“.
NCLB does not mandate the education. They do mandate that the state have some kind of math and reading test. I think science has been added to the mandated list but not social studies. But they have no input on what goes in an SOL test. That’s done for VA by a European company.
And I’m all for accountability, just not stupid accountability. As an example: A school can do poorly on all 29 of the measures but just sneak over the bar on all. Another school can do great on almost all the measures, but miss say attendance which can mean the difference between one student missing one day of school too many over the arbitrary bar.
The first school is lauded as meeting AYP. The other school is derided as a failure.
Anyone think this is a good way to judge schools?
Better than fine tuning No Child Left Behind,it should be scraped. The Federal Government should get out of education and leave it up to the states. The whole Federal Department of Education should be eliminated.
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