Last Thursday, Senators Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Johnny Isakson (R-GA), Richard Burr (R-NC), and Mark Kirk (R-IL) introduced a series of five bills to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Sadly, these bills are replicas of the same rhetoric and philosophy introduced by their colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives--aimed at limiting and restricting the role of the federal government in education. Although we at NCLR agree that we must take swift action to reauthorize ESEA, I simply can't think of another strategy that would take us further away from the intentions and underpinnings of this law.
ESEA in its very essence is a civil rights law. And that includes its current version, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which was designed to achieve education equity for low-income and minority students after decades of neglect by states. Prior to NCLB, states had no incentive to fix failing schools and many, quite frankly, didn't care to do so. Once NCLB was signed into law, it shed light on the fact that poor Latino and Black children were at the very bottom of the achievement gap. Moreover, it did something unprecedented and applied labels to schools that publically displayed what was happening in classrooms across America. What these labels described were failing schools, especially in communities with high concentrations of minorities living in poverty.
I suppose for some, having too many schools labeled as failing is a scary thought. But, from my perspective, this label accurately describes classrooms whose seats are filled with children of color every day--especially considering that only 17% of fourth grade Hispanic students are at or above proficient in reading. That is failing.
The federal government doesn't have to dictate rules for every school and school district, but it must set and maintain aggressive goals in order for states to live up to the promise of providing equal opportunities for all children. That means focusing on all schools--not just the bottom 5%--and that means setting aggressive goals for closing the achievement gap between subgroups of students. History tells us that states, if left on their own, will continue to mask the glaring challenges in schools throughout the country. This means that a strong, smart federal role is needed to improve our public education system. Legislation to weaken the federal role in education would be a step backward for the Hispanic community and a serious mistake for legislators.
Let's not shy away from real education reform out of fear of attaching labels to schools. Instead, let's continue to have high expectations for all of our nation's children, and put politics aside to take our public schools from "failing" to "great."
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This was first posted to the NCLR Blog.
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No, I disagree. The 'failing' label is absolutely not accurate.
First off, in 2014, a school with 99.9% proficiency will be labeled failing, and if NCLB continues, after 5 years of 99.9% proficiency, that school's entire staff can be fired, or it can be converted to a charter school, or turned over to the state, or something similar, as punishment for its 'failure'. That is ridiculous.
Furthermore, the 'failure' label metric is not an absolute, rather, before 2014, it is only a comparison of whether a school is 'on track' to make 100% by 2014. Whether it happens to be above or below that progress line any time before that has no bearing on what it will have achieved by 2014 or even in the years before that. There are many schools that have no chance of making 100% proficient by 2014, but today are still not labeled failures. And there are many schools who are suddenly being labeled failures not because they did something worse or different, but because the bar was moved faster than they were able to move.
If you truly believe that 100% is a proper and realistic goal then you should set that as the bar immediately and begin punishing all schools until they reach it. That would at least assign some fixed meaning to the 'failure' label, but of course that would be almost as ridiculous as what NCLB is trying to do today.
We elect the school boards and pass or nullify referendums. (Actually, very few of us ever bother to vote in such elections, which is one of the reasons we have ceded control.)
We decide how our children will approach their education: as an opportunity for which they must be prepared to take full part or as a place to goof off because no one at home cares, either.
We are the only ones to blame for the pathetic state of American public education. We have to pay attention, value education and take part in the entire process if anything is to ever improve.
http://blogdredd.blogspot.com/2011/09/there-our-flag-was-still.html
This assumption is incorrect. The family and associated home environment is the primary educator and educational environment of children.
A school is not failing simply because most of its students are below grade level. The children may have entered school 3 years behind children from families that paid attention to preparing their young children for school.
Blaming teachers and schools for factors outside of their control is both unjust and useless.
Education and educational readiness of children is strongly correlated with the education of the mother. By age 3 you can largely rank the educational level/readiness of children by their mother's education: college grad > some college > high school grad > high school dropout. And the ranking doesn't change much over the next 15 years.
But she is very disciplined and hard working and is preparing for an engineering career.
You know what we should do? We should look into that system, to see what they're doing that the rest of the districts serving low socio-economic-status students can emulate.
And no is not good at all to call a school "failling.", hurts the kids, community, and teachers. How about using your bully pulphit for a call for social services and jobs, something that might really help schools.