Under the new NCLB lowest 5% of schools will be punished more harshly...

madfloridian

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Sun Mar-14-10 10:21 PM
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Under the new NCLB lowest 5% of schools will be punished more harshly...

than before. It appears that the lower 5% of the schools might be closed each year. At that rate it won't take long to get the agenda of the corporatization of education in place. This replaces the AYP, Adequate Yearly Progress.

Seems to me that no matter what the schools do...if they are in the bottom 5% they are doomed. It's called grading on the curve.

As long as I am a member of this forum, I will continue to post about the hijacking of public education. If people disagree, the inevitable will happen. But I will have tried. 33 years of teaching gives me a right to a voice.

First from the Washington Post Answer Sheet:

Obama and NCLB: The good--and very bad--news

George Bush could have not realized how much of a friend President Obama would be to his No Child Left Behind initiative.

Obama bashed NCLB when he was running for president, saying that obsession with high-stakes standardized tests was no way to run an education system. But Saturday we learned the vision that Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, have for the post-NCLB era, and, unfortunately, it doesn’t look much different.

Now that Obama lives in the White House, he seems to have developed a certain fondess for some of the key concepts of NCLB that essentially doomed it to fail: the high-stakes standardized testing regime, the punishment for the lowest-achieving schools, the arbitrary deadlines for success.

Here is the problem:

The accountability system known as “adequate yearly progress” — the measure of how much progress schools, school districts and states made annually based on a cockamamie formula involving standardized test scores — will end. That’s good. Under AYP, even excellent schools were deemed to be failing.

But another arbitrary accountability system will be put in its place — and the current standardized testing schedule put in place by NCLB will remain. Very bad. The lowest achieving 5 percent of schools in every state will be punished even harder than under NCLB, according to my colleague Nick Anderson, who reported about the Obama plan today.

Here is more about it from the blog of the NYC Public School Parents:

An even more punitive approach for our poorest schools, but with a nicer name?

Here, from the AP story is the “spin” from the administration, of a supposedly less punitive approach:

In the proposed dismantling of the No Child Left Behind law, education officials would move away from punishing schools that don't meet benchmarks and focus on rewarding schools for progress, particularly with poor and minority students.

Yet what the administration is really proposing is even more punitive, to expand the pro-privatization and destabilizing policies represented in its "Race to the Top" slush fund, including school closures, charter takeovers, and/or supposed “turnaround models”, where at least half the staff would be fired, to all of the nation’s lowest performing schools, or else risk having their Title one funds being withheld:

…the bottom 5 percent of schools would be forced to use the department’s four turnaround models that now govern the Title I School Improvement Grant program. The next-lowest 5 percent would be on a “warning” list and be required to take action using research-based interventions, although the department would not mandate one of the four turnaround models.

More on the new NCLB from educator Jim Horn at Schools Matter:

Obama's NCLB 2.0: Worse Than the Bush Version

What no one outside the Walton, Gates, and Broad camps could have imagined, however, is that NCLB 2.0 would be even more draconian than the torture of AYP under the original NCLB. At least with AYP, there was always some small chance that your low class school could cram, pray, or cheat its way to making the cut score for the never-ending annual tests.

Now with the Oligarchs' new plan, the bottom 5 percent of schools will be targeted each year for "turnaround," and it doesn't matter what the poorest schools do, because the poverty that assures them their status at the bottom of the barrel makes them sure targets for conversions of urban schools into apartheid charter chain gangs, either that or the second-most popular option of firing all the school staff.

Because the annual testing will continue unabated under the Oligarchs' plan that Obama will present, this new system will pit the poor against the poorer and the poorer against the poorest, because the only thing that will keep your school off the shutdown, er, turnaround list is some other school in your vicinity that is doing worse still.

I write about education because it was my life for 33 years. I fear there is a trend to make it hard to write truthfully about the topic.

I hope not.