Unless you've been teaching in the inner city, your opinion on NCLB means squat. Is the NCLB going to make a difference when children go home to drug infested neighborhoods? Will the NCLB act make a difference when most inner city children come home to one-parent houses and the grandmother is taking care of the children? Will the NCLB act make a difference when education takes a backseat to other aspects such as living on a daily basis? That answer is a resounding NO! Riprorin you have good intentions but it doesn't equal realistic aspirations.
Privatizing schools and the NCLB act is not the answer. The problem is we have a breakdown in the family and it's a HUGE issue in the inner cities. I should know as I've worked with children and young adults who have to go through that harsh reality on a daily basis.
Second, why put the full blame on public education? Part of the blame should be on the individual, but that is neglected because politicians are afraid to blame anyone. I guarantee you that if inner city children had a decent and secure family to go to we wouldn't have these academic issues (low test scores, high drop out rates, etc...). I'm a firm believer in
Maslow's theory of hierarchy. Take a good long look at the pyramid. If a person is to obtain the first part of that pyramid, they will need to fulfill their physiological needs: Hunger, thirst, and maintenance of internal state of the body before they can even reach the second plateau. If a child has an unstable family then that child will not have a chance in hell of reaching the second phase. How can that child have academic success if his or he physiological needs are not met? They can't and I've seen it all too many times. At this one particular elementary school, we had a student that was being neglected by his mother. He wasn't sleeping at night and his mother was out partying every night. The child would come into class and literally fall asleep while the instructor was giving his lesson. What is the school supposed to do in this case? My point is it's not always the school's fault! Bad parenting is at fault as well but it's never brought up because a) The Democrat's don't want to piss off their voting block which are the minorities and b) the Republican's don't want to start pointing fingers because they don't want to be accused of being racist. It's all politics and nothing more.
Moreover, privatizing is the answer? Pleaaaaaasssseeee. Its not! Will a privatized school pay for the free breakfast, lunches and free after school activities public school children now enjoy? I doubt it! In addition, what about special education? Will a privatized school pay to teach children with disabilities? Teaching special Ed children can be a costly endeavor and as we have all seen in the corporate world, it's all about cutting cost at the expense of the individual.
Let's take quick look at the charter schools and their horrible test schools. Since I'm not able to link the article I've pasted it. It's down a bit if you want to read it.
In the past five months, three major reports have been released showing that charter schools performed more poorly than public schools on the same tests. The most recent of them, issued this month by the Education Department, presented a re-analysis of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress comparing outcomes for charter and public school students on these national exams.
There are issues within public education that need to be addressed. Not all public schools are failures and all you need to do is to compare a wealthy district with a poor district. In the wealthy district, you have parents that are well educated and academics are a priority! In the poor districts, you have good well-intentioned parents but most lack a solid educational background so they can't adequately support their children the way that they should. In addition, let's not even get into the limited resources issue.
In addition, did you know that Harvard University conducted a study and in this study they compared the word bank between 6 year old children from well to do neighborhoods and inner city 6 year old children. The researchers had found that the 6 year old children from the well to do neighborhoods knew more then the 6 year old children from the inner city but the real shocker was
the 6 year old children for the well to do neighborhoods knew more then the grown ups from the inner cities! In essence, a 6 year old child knew more words then a 40 year old parent! It all starts at the home and until this is addressed we aren't going to fully address the academic issues we face in this country. No ACT is going to change that issue!
Riprorin until you actually start to work in the inner cities your opinion on this matter means nothing to me. I'm not being mean or nasty but how can you have an opinion if you've never faced the problems on a daily basis? There are some aspects of the NCLB act that I do like but I've rambled on long enough and I'm tired. Finally, I find it highly offensive that you need to call every democrat a liberal. Why do you need to label people? Do you think that all blacks are drug dealers and criminals? You do like to label people pretty quickly so I'm on the fence. I'm a conservative democrat and not a liberal so please don't label me.
CHARTER SCHOOLS FAIL TESTING...
Press of Atlantic City, The (NJ)
January 4, 2005
Section: Editorials
Edition: All
Page: A11
CHARTER SCHOOLS SHOW THE LIMITS OF FREE-MARKET IDEAL
-AMY STUART WELLS
In the past five months, three major reports have been released showing that charter schools performed more poorly than public schools on the same tests. The most recent of them, issued this month by the Education Department, presented a re-analysis of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress comparing outcomes for charter and public school students on these national exams. It echoed the NAEP findings released in August by the American Federation of Teachers. Yet another report, released reluctantly by the Education Department this fall, looked at state exam data in five states and came to the same conclusion.
What are we to make of this? Proponents of charter schools say that we don't have enough data and that the schools have not existed long enough to be judged. Opponents say three strikes and you're out.
My own view is that there are important public policy lessons to be learned from a reform movement that was promoted as the answer to a failing public school system, and that cannot, 14 years later, keep pace with that system. As a researcher who has studied charter school reform in six states, I believe we should not interpret the recent reports as an indictment of individual charter schools. Rather, they should alert policy-makers to the hazards of building an educational-reform movement on top of untested rhetoric about market forces and public schools. I have seen some excellent charter schools, with well-trained educators and solid curriculums. They tend to be in more middle-class communities, where private resources augment the low level of public funding that charter schools receive. I have also seen charter schools run by people who collect the public funding while providing minimal services for low-income students who have few other options. And I have seen a lot of the charter schools that fall somewhere in between.
With such variation at the grass-roots level, it's not fair to say that all charter schools are failures. Yet clearly we have enough evidence to suggest that the free-market ideals that fueled this reform movement are at best misguided and at worst harmful to the most disadvantaged students. It was this rhetoric that persuaded lawmakers in 42 states to pass laws establishing some 3,000 charter schools. It is this set of principles that lawmakers must reconsider.
To better understand why so many policy-makers entrusted the education of so many children to an untested reform movement, we need to look back to the 1990s, when the allure of the market-dominated most public policy decisions. Smaller government, privatization of public services, less regulation, freer markets and more competition became the mantra.
In the field of education, politically conservative reformers and their well-funded think tanks passionately advocated free-market philosophy as the best way to force public schools to improve. They called for charter school laws to deregulate what they saw as an overly regulated public education system. They wanted more public money in the hands of private and independent school operators. They claimed that these more autonomous schools could do a better job with less money and thus force the public schools to either compete or go out of business.
What the bipartisan supporters of charter schools did not consider was that there was scant evidence to suggest this reform would actually improve public education. And in one statehouse after another, the free-market advocates pushed for charter school laws with no caps - or high ones - on the number of charters to be granted, and with the greatest degree of autonomy for the charter schools. Ultimately, the focus of the free-market reforms was to increase the quantity of charter schools while paying little or no attention to their quality. This is educational deregulation at its worst.
Now the national test scores support what state-level studies of charter schools have suggested for years - that free-market principles are not what is needed to improve public schools.
In this decade of growing free-market disillusionment, policy-makers should amend state laws to better support the high-achieving charter schools and close the rest. And I hope they will also remember the hard lesson learned from this reform: that free markets in education, like free markets generally, do not serve poor children well.
(Amy Stuart Wells is a professor at Teachers College of Columbia University and editor of "Where Charter School Policy Fails.")
Copyright, 2005, South Jersey Publishing Company t/a The Press of Atlantic City
