Can the No Child Left Behind legislation be anything but a ploy to cut, and eventually completely dismantle, funding for public education? My wife and I both are public school teachers. We teach in very different demographic areas. Her elementary school is in a low-income, high-minority, highly transient part of town, where a high percentage of parents do not speak English at all, let alone as a second language. Her school is held to the same standards of standardized test achievement as schools that are predominantly upper-middle class white schools – those schools whose students can afford supplies, tutoring and technology. My wife has to buy paper for her students.
It is almost intuitive that such a school needs more, not less, funding to achieve the equity of opportunity that all students deserve to receive a quality and competitive education. Yet this school is already on probation according to NCLB, and is threatened with federal funding cuts unless it achieves a certain minimum of scores on the state achievement test. I would like to ask Mr. Bush how he expects this to happen. NCLB forces school districts to go against years of educational research that says teaching to the test is absolutely the worst way to provide critical thinking and reasoning skills. Districts must do this or face loss of funding.
I teach in a well-to-do high school, and while our scores are some of the highest in the state on the state assessment, we are also being admonished by the district that it is now not the success that is important, but the rate of improvement. And we will also join the ranks of the probationary schools if we do not improve our scores by “X” percent each year on the state assessment.
When schools have spent a period of time (two years) on probation, not only do they lose funding, the districts are mandated to provide transportation to the students to another school of their choice within the district, which will thoroughly mire the transportation system, and add to costs that will be subsequently removed from classroom budgets.
This legislation is flat out asinine, and I can’t think for a minute that Bush &Co. had the best interests of our nation’s children at heart when it was devised. It is simply another way to widen the rift between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots. If allowed to continue, it will kill public education. But I think that was the plan all along – keep ‘em stupid, stupid.
Everett
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