States Help Schools Hide Minority Scores

[deadparrot]

States are helping public schools escape potential penalties by skirting the No Child Left Behind law's requirement that students of all races must show annual academic progress.

With the federal government's permission, schools aren't counting the test scores of nearly 2 million students when they report progress by racial groups, an Associated Press computer analysis found.

Minorities — who historically haven't fared as well as whites in testing — make up the vast majority of students whose scores are being excluded, AP found. And the numbers have been rising.

"I can't believe that my child is going through testing just like the person sitting next to him or her and she's not being counted," said Angela Smith, a single mother. Her daughter, Shunta' Winston, was among two dozen black students whose test scores weren't broken out by race at her suburban Kansas City, Mo., high school.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060417/ap_on_go_ot/no_child_loophole_1

[TechBear_Seattle]

1. Only rich, white, educated students count

Anyone who gives proof to the Junta's lies must be excluded. Just ask the Junta.

[DUHandle]

2. Exceptional Ed Kids

are rolled into the general counts.

[Selatius]

3. You'll never help the poor if you refuse to recognize them at all.

This isn't what Martin Luther King Jr. or any man of good conscience fought and struggled for. If we're going to get there together, we're most certainly not going to do it by leaving those of us behind who need help the most.

It is akin to saying that "Black people don't exist." It is akin to saying "Hispanics don't exist," and it is saying that poor people with few opportunities to get a better life don't exist, and I would say this policy is an insult to the suffering of people in this country for racial equality and for the poor in general.

This isn't the kind of bigotry people ran into with water hoses and police dogs 40 years ago, but it's bigotry nonetheless. It's the bigotry of lowered expectations, and I would say it is just as damaging.

[MervinFerd]

7. It's not saying that at all.....

The law says that unless Hispanic kids get the SAME score on the SAME standard test as the affluent Anglos, their school gets screwed.

Never mind the language and cultural differences. They all got to know the same history.

[Rex]

4. So what was the point of waisting MILLIONS on this broken system?

Who got paid for the idea and why still do it?

[NYC]

5. Doesn't Neil Bush make some money

from the testing?

[MervinFerd]

6. It's a dumb law.....Skirt it, Shirt it, Pant it, Kill it.....

NCLB requires a multitude of defined groups--handicapped, blind, deaf, mentally retarded, Non English Speaking, Black, Not Black--to get the the SAME score on a standardized test written up by some vast educational bureaucracy. It ain't gonna happen and there is no reason it should. The enforcement is rigid and produces irrational and counterproductive results--Bring in affluent white kids into a mostly black school, create a 'Gap', get scewed.

The secondary effect is to impose rigid curriculum requirements on all the public schools. Leaving no room for specialization or experimentation or adjustment to the developmental stages of the kids.

The goal of the Republican Right is not to FIX the public schools, but to abolish them. NCLB contributes to that goal by giving the schools impossible requirments and then providing no funds to cover the additional costs.

[Moderator]

8. Kick

[Kerrytravelers]

9. AP: States Omit Minorities' School Scores

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060418/ap_on_go_ot/no_child_loophole]

AP: States Omit Minorities' School Scores
By FRANK BASS, NICOLE ZIEGLER DIZON and BEN FELLER, Associated Press Writers
33 minutes ago

States are helping public schools escape potential penalties by skirting the No Child Left Behind law's requirement that students of all races must show annual academic progress.

With the federal government's permission, schools deliberately aren't counting the test scores of nearly 2 million students when they report progress by racial groups, an Associated Press computer analysis found.

Minorities — who historically haven't fared as well as whites in testing — make up the vast majority of students whose scores are being excluded, AP found. And the numbers have been rising.

"I can't believe that my child is going through testing just like the person sitting next to him or her and she's not being counted," said Angela Smith, a single mother. Her daughter, Shunta' Winston, was among two dozen black students whose test scores weren't counted to judge her suburban Kansas City, Mo., high school's performance by race.

(MORE AT LINK)

This is so offensive at so many levels. As a teacher, I educate ALL my students, not just the ones with the lightest skin color. However, I can certainly see teachers, on the brink of school closings and losing their job, focus their lessons on the white kids and make a judgment call that some kids just won't be educated as much because their scores won't be counted, and those children will most likely be the minority students since those are the scores allowed to be tossed out. What a great message to send to our children. How dehumanizing. This is a travesty. NCLB has been a disaster from the word go. I had a guy from Texas (who claimed his sister is a teacher there) tell me that in Texas, they are serious about NCLB. I just laughed. I said "seriously in denial that it actually works."

[KingFlorez]

10. If the scores aren't good, I can't blame them

[Kerrytravelers]

14. So, if your kid were forced to sit through two weeks of testing all day,

every day (which is what it has been in the two CA districts I have worked in) and you found out it was basically for nothing, you wouldn't be a slight bit pissed? What if your child's education became less important because of the color of their skin? NCLB is, once again, leaving children behind. That is why teachers hate it so much. It puts us in these terrible decisions where we know what we're doing is wrong, but we get forced into making.

[Pale Blue Dot]

11. NCLB was never about education.

I would even argue that your article is exactly the kind of thing that that stupid law was designed for.

[MadMaddie]

12. Have I said that race relations in this country have been set

back 20 years by this Administration...

No Child Left Behind....(unless you are a minority)
another failed * policy.....

[Auntie Bush]

13. NCLB is a sham if I ever saw one. Another bush brainstorm!

NOTHING the man has ever done has been successful! And they have the livid gall to count the program as successful! Just as Iraq is successful. They also don't count the huge increase in dropouts which raises their averages.

[LiberalFighter]

15. Calling it a brainstorm is farfetched

[LibDemAlways]

16. In my local district students on the

low end of the grade totem pole are urged to stay home on testing days. If they aren't tested, their scores can't count.

[Kerrytravelers]

17. I've seen this where I currently teach.

[OneBlueSky]

18. damn! . . . is there ANYTHING in this country that isn't crooked? . . n/t

.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

19. Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations

This must have been what Molly Ivins was saying about NCLB when referencing how Bush's "Texas Miracle" was "acheived" in regards to education in that state while he was governor(encouraging low performing students to drop out and using "creative" bookkeeping). Isn't this the so-called "soft bigotry of low expectations" that he famously denounced during the 2000 election?

[MervinFerd]

20. Actually, I think they just cheated on the grading.....

There was a scandal about that.

[noonwitch]

21. NCLB was a stupid and underfunded idea

Bush was right that we needed educational reform in this country, but wrong in how he went about doing it.

You can't get poor kids to test as well as rich and middle class students. Race is a factor in poverty in this country-if Katrina did nothing else, it should have opened people's eyes to the situation.

Poverty is a factor in education. Not just with the underfunding of the schools, because good teachers deal with that every day. Poor people don't value education the same way middle and upper classes do. My parents valued education-they attended every parent-teacher conference, they read our homework assignments, made sure we got to the public library on a regular basis, and monitored our attendence. We knew if we skipped a day, we were in trouble at home. For my parents and their parents, education was the ticket out of the poverty they experienced during the depression.

A lot of parents, faced with poor schools and kids with attitudes, basically give up on their kids getting a good education. They feel trapped, they feel like their kids are stuck in the same trap, and they don't see that getting a second rate education is any better than no education at all. Bush's mistake is to focus only on the teachers and the curriculum, and not at the other things contributing to the problems with our schools.

[xilet]

24. Poverty and Education

True some low income families do not highly value education. Many on the other hand very much want to see their kids succeed. I grew up in an area that the school system was split between high income lake suburbs and low income housing. Yes the middle and upper income parents did attend more things, however the lower income parents came when possible, however when both parents are working 2 jobs each to make ends meet there is not much time there to go to PTA meetings. That is a massive part of the divide, so many low income people need to spend all of their time working, there is not nearly as much time to give to their children, so the children do fall behind. However the parents are working 4 jobs between the two of them because their goal is to give their children a better life then they have had.

[KamaAina]

22. Same thing happens with kids with disabilities

sometimes they aren't even tested!

Then again, I guess we're a "minority", so the headline applies to us anyway.

[wellst0nev0ter]

23. Sounds Like What Happened In Houston

When Bush first implemented that stupid plan as the governor.