With a Name Like That How Could It Fail?
November 24th, 2008 - 11:36 am
Is No Child Left Behind leaving behind a lot of children? Read:
[A] recent study found that Texas’ public school accountability system, the model for the national No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), directly contributes to lower graduation rates, especially for minorities. Teachers and administrators are essentially rewarded when minority students drop out, so retention efforts are now virtually non-existent. Why retain students that make it impossible to comply with NCLB, is the unspoken question with a no clear answer.
Read the whole thing.
(Hat tip, Jocelyn Armstrong.)
The irony of the bad name aside, it’s a good thing when people who don’t want to learn are allowed to leave schools. Everyone wins. And those losers will either succeed despite being uneducated or will live the mediocre lives they bring on themselves.
The logic there doesn’t seem to work.
If they’re “benefiting” under the Texas system (or NCLB, so I’ll just say NCLB to save space) by having those kids drop out, it must be because they’re not learning, right?
If they were being well-served by the schools, they’d have no trouble meeting the state-set low bar for compliance.
That graduation rates are lower suggests only that instead of giving kids who didn’t learn diplomas that are worthless (because they don’t prove that you know anything, because even kids that don’t know anything get them), they’re dropping out.
The net effect of that is that their lack of education is more visible, and that the value of a diploma is slightly restored.
(The motivated will, of course, be able to get a GED and go on to college in any case, if they desire to. The unmotivated can’t be forced to learn.
I don’t see where this is a problem.)
The Liberty Family is experiencing this firsthand. Schools here in Florida are far more interested in teaching to the FCAT test than to teaching fundamentals. And it is not just the at-risk kids who are getting neglected into dropping out…
Liberty Son is a “gifted underachiever,” brilliant but easily bored in class, requiring more than just rote stimulation, currently doing his best to fail 6th grade. We can’t afford private school, are having to deal with imagination-less bureaucrats who have no idea how to deal with anyone outside the increasingly-narrow norm.
This doesn’t have anything to do with Liberty Son being a special snowflake, requiring kid glove treatment, it has to do with the total dumbing down of the US public school system, and the placement of people you wouldn’t trust to navigate out of a wet paper sack as the teachers of our children.
Feh, need to go hit something now.
Sigivald’s logic seems right to me. I’ve never understood how teaching to a test can be bad, especially a math test.