Diane Wiley wrote: > excuse me, Michael, but my son is African American > and in Special Ed -- and his public school had wonderful > SE people until 7th grade and I still had to pay a lot > of money for private tutoring for him year in and year out > -- and then in 7th grade he was basically set adrift.
I know that this is going be difficult for many people to understand, but NCLB is designed to be effective at the school level not the student level. Why is this? Because it would be impossible to create Federal programs that dictate standards at the student level. And it's impossible because many liberals and most conservatives are opposed to the Federal Government setting national educational standards and they both support local control of the public schools. I personally believe that there is a role for national education standards, but I don't expect to see them in my lifetime. The inability to mandate NCLB requirements at the student level has a number of negative consequences. Most importantly, individual minority students enrolled at high performing, predominately White schools, may receive very little benefit from NCLB if their numbers do not rise above certain levels. The only benefit these students will only benefit if their level of achievement identified by testing cannot be hidden under the carpet, which in turn forces some degree to school accountability and responsibility. Testing requirements for minorities is a benefit and requirement of NCLB that many people don't understand. NCLB requires that 95% of specific student populations show up for testing [as long as there are a minimum numbers of students in these groups]. Why is this? Because there are many historic examples of schools discouraging certain groups of students from participating in testing so that they can artificially inflate test results and hide discrimination. Is the 95% participation requirement unreasonable? I don't think so, for a number of reasons. The main reason being that schools can arrange for make up-exams for students who don't show up on test day. The 95% requirement for minorities is a protection to insure that these populations are not ignored at schools like Barton where test schools are dominated by middle class White students and where White middle class parents react like, "What problem!?" Another consequence of emphasizing schools rather than students is that authors of NCLB unfortunately focused on aggregate statistics, assuming that you could ignore differences between groups of students at the same grade level in alternate years. This might be reasonable in really large schools, but the variability between classes can be too great in small schools. However, there are a number of fixes for this problem, none of which are intractable. Michael Atherton Prospect Park REMINDERS: 1. Think a member has violated the rules? Email the list manager at [EMAIL PROTECTED] before continuing it on the list. 2. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. For state and national discussions see: http://e-democracy.org/discuss.html For external forums, see: http://e-democracy.org/mninteract ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
