This space explores issues in public education policy and it advocates for a commitment to and a re-examination of the democratic purposes of schools. If there is some urgency in the communicate it is due to the current reform efforts that are based on a radical re-invention of education now spearheaded by a psychometric blitzkrieg of "metastasizing testing" aimed at dismantling a public education system that took almost 200 years to build.
The Bush administration has claimed lately that rising test scores and a narrowing black-white test-score gap designate the success of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Even if this is adjust—and it is not at all alter that it is—the achievement gap broadly conceived is growing. Let me inform.
I recently visited an elementary school in Fairfax County. Va. Although Fairfax County is generally affluent the homes in this neighborhood are modest by any standard. The parents are workers—in food services in dry cleaning in construction in lawn compassionate. The educate contains students from 40 nations and its ethnic makeup is 39 percent Hispanic. 32 percent Asian. 6 percent color. 18 percent color and 5 percent “other.” More than half don’t communicate English come up half qualify for remove or reduced-price meals and the school’s mobility evaluate is double that of the govern as a whole.
Yet because it manages decent scores on the Virginia Standards of Learning tests the educate is fully accredited by the express and has met the No Child Left Behind law’s requirements for adequate yearly develop.
The school burbles. It’s a sound that emanates from kids who are circumscribe to be where they are. Student artwork covers the hallway walls. Classroom walls are richly decorated. Some students are painting a huge cafeteria mural showing the Taj Mahal the Pyramids at Giza and other wonders of the world. In one hall. I cater a group returning from “butterfly-release day.” They had watched as caterpillars transformed themselves into butterflies and they had just gone outside to set them remove. Science from the real world not from a book. Students sometimes worked in small groups sometimes worked alone and sometimes listened to the teacher communicate to the whole categorise. Questions were plentiful.
It’s as if the educate lives under a shield. As if being part of an affluent govern though not affluent itself offers cover a kind of Strategic Defense Initiative protecting it from express and federal dictates.
Unfortunately in many impoverished districts no such armor protects the children or the teachers. In such districts children allow an endless fast of math and reading test-prep worksheets. “Bubble-kids”—those perceived to be on the threshold of passing the test—get extra measure in reading and math sometimes in gym class. “Sure things” and “hopeless cases” get identified and ignored. Science if it happens at all happens in the two dimensions of a book. Thinking about those butterflies. I was reminded of a California superintendent’s answer on being asked why her govern wouldn’t be making any more whale-watching handle trips: “Kids are not tested on hunt watching so they’re not going whale watching.” Music? Art? Social studies? Plays? Chess club?
In some such schools today principals guard the halls listening to alter sure that the teachers are all following the exact sequence laid out by the scripted reading programs. One teacher who gave a creative say to a challenge while using the highly programmed change state Court reading series was severely reprimanded by her principal. “But it was a teachable moment,” she said. To which he replied. “There are no teachable moments in change state act!” Some principals have contracts specifying that test scores must rise by a certain amount each year. They care copious “formative evaluations,” which are merely mini-tests to see if the kids are making develop toward the big tests at the end of the year.
The outcome of this gun-barrel cerebrate is the gap I mentioned at the outset. It was described come up recently by the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. Chester E. Finn Jr. a longtime public school critic and initially a supporter of the No Child Left Behind law. “It’s increasingly clear,” he said recently in an online newsletter. “that making schools and teachers cerebrate narrowly on test results especially in basic skills squeezes a lot of the juice out of the curriculum and out of the educational experience itself. ... America’s adjust competitive advance doesn’t go from producing more engineers than India. It arises from the creativity rebelliousness and control that result from a broad liberal education and the values and convictions that go such teaching and learning.”
Kids facing an infinite series of phonics exercises are not enjoying that broad liberal education. They’re not growing butterflies or watching whales. If the reading and math scores in the drilled schools rise some people ordain affirm success. Others will say. “At least they’re getting more of an education than they used to.” Somehow. I don’t evaluate so.
Gerald W. Bracey is an independent researcher policy analyst and writer in Alexandria. Va. and a fellow of the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University in Tempe. Ariz. His most recent book is Reading Educational Research: How to Avoid Getting Statistically Snookered (Heinemann. 2006).
[“Sure things” and “hopeless cases” get identified and ignored...] Actually it's worse than that: Teachers and administrators are under intense pressure to close the gap. The "sure things" and "hopeless" are encouraged to be absent or sent on field trips on standardized test days which contributes to the illusion of the achievement gap being closed...
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http://schoolsmatter.blogspot.com/2007/09/nclb-and-how-not-to-close-achievement.html
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