No Child Pushed Ahead
The government is a giant dinosaur in a china shop and government involvement is rarely the best solution (or even a workable solution) to problems. Invariably, corruption -- of one sort or another (and not always the financial kind) -- sets in. This is certainly the case in education. Sol Stern writes at City-Journal of the unintended consequences of No Child Left Behind:
The law demanded that all American students be "proficient" in reading and math by 2014 and imposed increasingly onerous sanctions on districts and schools that failed to make adequate progress toward that goal--but then let each state set its own proficiency standard. To look good to the feds and the public, education authorities unsurprisingly lowered standards and found other ways to game the tests (see "Can New York Clean Up the Testing Mess?," Spring 2010).But NCLB's accountability system led to another distortion, this one harming top students. Because the law emphasized mere "proficiency," rewarding schools for getting their students to achieve that fairly low standard, teachers and administrators had an incentive to boost the test scores of their lowest-performing students but no incentive to improve instruction for their brightest. Robert Pondiscio, communications director for the Core Knowledge Foundation and a former New York City Teaching Fellow, describes how the process worked at his South Bronx elementary school. "Eighty percent of the kids in my fifth-grade class were scoring at the two lowest levels on the state reading and math tests," he recalls. (Each student in New York State receives a test score from 1 to 4, with 1 signifying performance far below grade level, 2 below grade level, 3 grade level, and 4 advanced.) "Early in my teaching career, an assistant principal told me that the kids in my class already scoring a 3 or 4 'are not your problem.' In other words, my goal should be to move the kids scoring at the lower levels up a few points on the scale. I was not specifically ordered to do this, but the message was very clear. My job was to get more kids over the lowest two hurdles, because that's how the school was rewarded for good performance in the city's accountability system."
As a result, Pondiscio says, the few gifted minority students in his class didn't receive any extra attention--attention that could have given them a better chance to pass the rigorous test for admission to one of the city's elite specialized science and math high schools. That's especially sad when you learn that the percentage of black students passing the admissions test for top-ranked Stuyvesant High School has dropped steadily over the past decade. Last year, it fell below 1 percent.
THis is nothing new. In many circles, NCLB has always been known as "no child gets ahead". NCLB concentrates effort and resources on the worst students, on those children with the lowest IQs, in an attempt to bring them to a minimal standard. Good students are bored out their skulls, and are taught to be underachievers.
The cold, hard truth: The top 10% of our students are immensely more valuable to society than the bottom 10%, or even 30%.
Starting at latest in 4th or 5th grade, the best students need to be separated out and given much more demanding schooling. This is where extra resources should be invested, if you actually care about the future.
a_random_guy at December 26, 2011 12:50 AM
Gifted education , or rather the lack of it, is my pet peeve. I think it is related to your above post... we punish brilliance, we don't reward it. The hard-working smart kid is despised by everyone.
When I was getting my EdM, I started at my fallback school before I switched to my dream school. The students at the fallback school made all sorts of snarky comments about wanting to kill the smart kids. I flipped out at one guy, and promptly became hated. I should have shown more self-control, but my BS once-a-week gifted math program from elementary school had a high suicide rate amongst its graduates.
We do not do enough for gifted kids, we hate them. We let them coast by on their smarts for too long, and then they don't develop the skills they need to function. We mock them, we roll our eyes at them, we let the other kids bully them. We don't start giving them the support they need until it is too late.
NicoleK at December 26, 2011 5:02 AM
The bottom twenty percent fail anyway, while consuming resources that could be used better elsewhere. When I write fail, I mean lose at life, not lack a piece of paper. I don't know what you do about that. Nobody is going to make me Michael Jordan on the basketball court, and nobody is going to make these kids into plumbers, electricians, nurses, or mechanics - people with good jobs that require skills and discipline.
I suspect we are in for a lot of social unrest until one of the neglected smart kids creates a get-smart work-hard pill.
MarkD at December 26, 2011 5:37 AM
This has been happening for years, even before NLCB. I knew a young lady that had come up through the Catholic School system. She technically had all the credits she needed to graduate at end of her junior year in public high school. The principal of the high school refused to let her graduate early because of funding. I.e he would lose money because she wasn't in school. So she took the required credit courses for the first half of her senior year. She couldn't get the school to give her the diploma mid-year. So she didn't do any courses the second half of the year and worked a job full time.
The school was happy with it, but she was pissed.
Jim P. at December 26, 2011 6:24 AM
So what is the answer to an organization that is enabled to promote kids that can not read, lacking in understanding Work 101 (show up on time properly dressed) and can not write.
Bob at December 26, 2011 7:45 AM
So the criticism of NCLB is that its proponents should have recognized that teachers are lazy and dishonest, and would distort any effort towards accountability to harm the kids?
Maybe they were naive, but it seems like the solution is to fire the teachers and break up the unions, not abandon all standards.
sandra d. at December 26, 2011 8:24 AM
Sandra, the problem with the current standards is the focus is on getting the bottom kids up, and the kids who are achievers don't get pushed.
NicoleK at December 26, 2011 9:17 AM
There was a big scandal in one of the towns here in CT about this very thing, and the principal was allowed to resign, rather than face the music:
http://rep-am.com/articles/2011/12/10/news/local/605211.txt
In August, "School employees in the state who cheat on Connecticut's standardized exams could be held financially liable for retesting and investigation costs under a proposal from Acting Education Commissioner George Coleman.": http://articles.courant.com/2011-08-03/news/hc-waterbury-cheating-0804-20110803_1_connecticut-mastery-test-substitute-teachers-school-employees
From the article:
"Current state law requires the state Board of Education to revoke the teaching license of educators who are caught fixing student scores on the mastery tests. But "as a token of how incensed I am" over the alleged misconduct at Waterbury's Hopeville Elementary School, Coleman told the board Wednesday that he also wants to make them pay — literally.
"Coleman plans to request that lawmakers expand the statute to give the board and state Department of Education wider authority in sanctioning teachers, including "recouping costs incurred as a result of testing improprieties." He also wants the department to have the power to remove local school staff suspected of cheating, pending an investigation."
Flynne at December 26, 2011 9:49 AM
This discussion brings to mind one of my favorite bits of writing from John Derbyshire:
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/228261/everythings-spout-kansas-city/john-derbyshire
"In 1977, when the story begins, Kansas City's schools were in simply terrible shape...Over the next twelve years the district spent over 2 BILLION dollars, most of it from the state of Missouri, the balance from increased local property taxes. Fifteen new schools were built, and 54 others renovated. New amenities included, Ciotti tells us, an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, a robotics lab, professional-quality recording, television and animation studios; a planetarium; an arboretum, a zoo, and a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary; a two-floor library, art gallery, and film studio; a mock court with judge's chambers and jury deliberation rooms, and a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability...The whole project was a comprehensive failure. After twelve years, test scores in reading and math had declined, dropout rates had increased, and the system was as segregated as ever..."
Think of what could have been accomplished if a tenth of that money had been spent on the best students instead of the worst.
This started long before NCLB. No lessons have been learned.
Martin at December 26, 2011 11:15 AM
Oh, this has been happening for a long, long, time. Back in the 70's and 80's, when I was in school, finishing my work early and well would often get me the "reward" of helping other students with their own work. It didn't help the other students become smarter or more self sufficient, of course...just overloaded me.
And on the rare occasion that I needed help myself, I was told to figure it out myself because I'm smart.
deathbysnoosnoo at December 26, 2011 3:00 PM
NCLB is only the latest in a long string of reform attempts going back half a century at least. And the public education establishment has managed to co-opt and quoform every one of them, while milking the funding that was supposed to pay for the reform. The education edifice is unreformable. The only hope is to tear it all down and start over.
Cousin Dave at December 26, 2011 5:06 PM
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