As with most legislation, I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt that the No Child Left Behind law was well intentioned. That being said, hear this from an insider's (teacher's) point of view...the whole thing stinks out loud!
Schools are now held accountable for their students' test scores and every school is expected to achieve at the same level (eventually). The bar is set at essentially the same level for every kid in America, regardless of starting point, socio-economic background, family status, academic ability, academic history, etc.
Imagine you run a chain of dog training facilities across the country. You have a facility in 10 different states and in all different types of towns and cities. You have well qualified staff to train the animals in all your facilities. Each of your facilities is equally equipped. However, some of your facilities are in nice suburban places full of McMansions and shiny happy people with shiny happy pets that have been pampered and cared for since birth. Some of your facilities are located in the country where lots of folks have dogs, but there hasn't been a whole lot of pampering, more like a lot of squirrel chasing and mud wallowing. And some of your facilities are located in urban centers where dogs are kept in small places and rarely go outside. Now imagine the government passes a law that says every dog that comes through your facility has to master the very same series of tests in the very same amount of time. Any facility that does not meet the criteria will be taken over by the government. Do you really think that each of those dogs is going to get from point A to point Z at the same pace given their various backgrounds?
This is essentially what our public schools are now facing. Get all your kids from point A to point Z be the end of the year or else. Here is the problem. In most schools 60 to 70 percent of the kids will easily get to point Z mostly because they didn't have to start all the way back at point A. But what about the other 30 to 40 percent of the kids who are either at point A or can't even SEE point A at the beginning of the year. Those kids (for hundreds of different reasons) have so much farther to go to get to point Z that it is ridiculous to expect it of them.
Let's face it, the government apparently expects our public schools to prepare 100 percent of our students for college. Are 100% of our students capable of succeeding in college? Are 100% of our students even interested in going to college? Sure, those 60 to 70 percent I mentioned are probably ready to give college a go. What about the other 30 to 40 percent? Maybe, with a lot of hard work, dilligence, and creativity, we could get some of them ready for college too, but all of them? Come on now!
One thing our education system needs is a really quality option for some of those 30 to 40 percent of our students who are probably never going to be "college material" for any one of hundreds of reasons. Let's get these kids interested and excited about something that they can actually see themselves succeeding in down the line...and let's provide these opportunities for them early in their educational process. I think even the Middle School grades would benefit tremendously from such an approach. I hesitate to use the word "trade school", but really, that is what it would amount to. Let's put these kids into life application style studies. They will see a point to school, finally. They will not get so lost in the shuffle. They will not be expected to jump through the same hoops as everyone else when they see no point in it at all.
That is step one of my plan. Step two hits testing. Our current testing is broken! Again, it goes back to the point about getting all students to jump through the same hoop at the same pace. What we need to do to hold schools accountable for our children's education is INDIVIDUALIZE our testing system. Instead of judging a school by its student body as a whole, let's make sure that every student is progressing at the proper pace. This solves the whole point A to point Z problem. If a student comes in at the beginning of the year at point A, fine, let's work on getting him to point D or E. Then next year he can start off at point D or E, and let's try to get him to point H or I, and so on. If students are progressing at an adequate pace, then the school is doing its job. Funnelling every student down the same path and expecting all of them to arrive at the same destination at the same time is setting us all up for failure.
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Did you just call my kid a dog??????
ReplyDeleteSeriously though, I can't argue with anything you're saying. I do wonder (just from a pure ignorance standpoint) how we would go about determining where every student was at the beginning of a given school year? Do we administer a test to see where the kids are? You know, to determine if they're at A or Z.
If that's the case, it seems to me that kind of testing could then be used as a tool to monitor each individual's progress, as opposed to squeezing each kid into a box of equal production.
Am I in the ballpark of what you're talking about here?
Exactly, you test at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year...and it should be based on the kid's progresion. If a kid scored poorly on his 7th grade exit test, why should he start out taking the 8th grade entrance test the next year? He has already proven that he isn't ready for it. Let's go back and get that kid up to speed on what he has missed until he tests out of that level. I am really for doing away with traditional grade levels in Middle and High School years. I think you should have to achieve benchmarks and then move on to the next benchmark. At the end of the traditional time frame, like when a kid turns 18, he should have showed mastery of x amount of benchmarks. Then you would have to show mastery of x amount of benchmarks to enter college. If it takes some a little longer to get there, so be it. If I were the education czar, things would be thus!
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