February 09, 2004
THE BIG TEST (via mc):
Educators Decry Law's Intrusion, Not Its Cost (Jay Mathews and Rosalind S. Helderman, 2/08/04, Washington Post)
Area school officials said the Virginia House of Delegates was half-right when it called the federal No Child Left Behind law intrusive and expensive and asked that the state be exempt.
Educators said that their objection to the law is over being told how to determine whether their students, and their schools, are performing well, and that they are less concerned about the expenses involved -- mainly the costs of the intricate record-keeping the law requires for tracking the test scores of several ethnic and economic groups of students."Our big beef has been less about the money and more about intrusive new rules," Virginia Department of Education spokesman Charles Pyle said. "We want to protect the good job we have been doing for accountability in Virginia."
U.S. Education Secretary Roderick R. Paige, in a letter sent Thursday to Virginia legislators, said they are entitled to ignore the law as long as they also forfeit all federal education funds, most of which support programs for disadvantaged students.
NCLB represents a kind of elegant test for states, as well as students. States have just one question to answer: do they dislike federal regulation more than they like federal money. Given that they get far more money than the program costs to implement, anybody wanna bet on what the test scores end up looking like? Posted by Orrin Judd at February 9, 2004 09:36 AM
Mostly the "educators" will decry the searing light that is about to shine upon them when the public reviews the results and especially the breakdowns by economics and race. I hope the backlash against the education lobby is immense, because it's well deserved and long overdue.
Posted by: Mike M at February 9, 2004 10:07 AMWhat they will discover is that a family's economic status is a much bigger factor in a student's grades than is their race.
Posted by: Bartman at February 9, 2004 10:26 AMThat's funny. That's not what every single study ever undertaken has shown. But, hey, keep the faith.
Posted by: Timothy at February 9, 2004 10:34 AMCite YOUR study Tim. I think Bartman is correct, at least based upon the data I've seen.
Posted by: BB at February 9, 2004 10:37 AMSaw a blurb on CNN (or maybe MSNBC) yesterday where a teacher was complaining that the law was putting too much of a burden on teachers, because now they had to worry about how students took tests. My, my, my. Accountability is a difficult pill, isn't it? The piece in the WSJ last week about districts shuffling good students' scores around, depending on which school needed a boost, was also instructive. When parents begin to realize just how politicized and ossified the government school system is, vouchers will come in like the tide.
Posted by: jim hamlen at February 9, 2004 11:06 AMIf you believe that testing is going to expose the flaws in the education system, I have another view for you. A few years ago, Arizona implemented the AIMS test that all high school student had to pass in order to graduate. Most of them didn't pass. So the government pushed back the deadline and dumbed down test. Most still dind't pass. There were gripes by educators AND PARENTS. Every year there has been a significant "re-scoring" of the test. And the test will continue to be dumbed down until 90+ percent of the high school students pass. Then it will be meaningless.
That is what will happen to the NCLB act. Just give it time.
Posted by: Brandon at February 9, 2004 11:07 AMCheck out Abigail Thenstrom's No Excuses or John McWhorter's Losing the Race.
If it were a question of income, then liberals would be right, and more money would be the answer. But it's not, and they're not, and the problem is much more thorny than that.
Thank you Timothy, you beat me to it.
Posted by: h-man at February 9, 2004 12:48 PM