No Child Left Behind

[uplinktruck]

Ft. Myers, FL - An on-line forum I frequent has several vehement Bush hater members. Their latest cause for jubilation is that many Republican members of the House and Senate have banded together to overturn the no child left behind act.

Here's part of a Washington Post article on the subject:More than 50 GOP members of the House and Senate --

Comments

[tlatoani]

Don't know enough about No Child Left Behind to engage on it in detail.

Do know something about the Japanese educational system. Those kids who are outperforming US kids? They're a selected subgroup of the smarter kids, being compared with all US students. Because the Japanese do tracking -- strictly -- while the US doesn't. US scores include everyone, including those in vocational or remedial tracks. Japanese scores include the people in the, for lack of a better word, academic track; they don't count the vocational and "slow" schools.

Also, the Japanese system does discourage innovation and creativity in favor of rote repetition and memorization. (Ask someone who's taught English over there.) And it's pretty much got to do the job of part of college too, because once Japanese students get out of the pressure cooker of cram schools, high school, etc. and get into a decent university, they pretty much cruise. Japanese students who come over here to good American universities are very rare and have a really rough time

[uplinktruck]

In cases of an academic contest, what you say may be true. However, even if we use the case of an academic contest, the fact that our "best" are still posting double digits in the rankings should be considered a national disgrace.

But let us remove the academic Olympiads just to level the playing field. Take a look at average US students stacked up against average Belgium students:To give you an idea of how competitive American schools are and how U.S. students performed compared with their European counterparts, we gave parts of an international test to some high school students in Belgium and in New Jersey

[tlatoani]

Without going out and doing a lot of digging, my comment would be to be very careful about interpreting statistics when someone's using the term "high school" to refer to a non-US school population. The words that are being translated into "high school" in some European countries and Japan really refer only to the track that's for people who are going on to college. They use a different term for the vocational equivalent, and those aren't counted in the stats.

[uplinktruck]

[Continued]

Now compare that to United States high school graduation rates.

• Only 70% of all students in public high schools graduate, and only 32% of all students leave high school qualified to attend four-year colleges.
  
• Only 51% of all black students and 52% of all Hispanic students graduate, and only 20% of all black students and 16% of all Hispanic students leave high school college-ready.
  
• The graduation rate for white students was 72%; for Asian students, 79%; and for American Indian students, 54%. The college readiness rate for white students was 37%; for Asian students, 38%; for American Indian students, 14%.

Manhattan Institute

And take a look at what's happening with our inner city schools...WASHINGTON - Students in a handful of big-city school districts have a less than 50-50 chance of graduating from high school with their peers, and a few cities graduate far fewer than half each spring, according to research released on Tuesday

[tlatoani]

(Incidentally, the thing about tracking is true to a large extent for the European countries who outperform us as well. France has, I think, three different classes of "high schools" and we get compared against the top one. So the message might be: screw NCLB, lets get a tracked system in place, and the "left behind" kids can get the lesser education they are more suited to.)

[uplinktruck]

Actually, I'm not entirely opposed to the system you described. Sorting students into high schools that deliver services particularly suited to the student body sounds great to me.

However I see an enormous flaw in your plan. When the vast majority of the students attending the "lessor academic" high schools start coming from the inner city, the ACLU and every two bit lens hound with his collar on backwards will be screaming racism at the top of of their lungs.

[tlatoani]

And rightfully so, because it would mean we weren't spotting the smart inner city kids in time to track them into the high-performance schools.

[uplinktruck]

I woke up this morning with your argument about tracked high schools in my head and the answer that eluded me through yesterday's fatigue. When I read your responses, I knew there was something fundamentally wrong with it, but I just could not put my finger on it.

Today it is clear to me that you are overlooking one very important item when presenting your argument.

All of our high schools are supposed to be college prep schools.

So what did I miss here?

[anonymous]

I couldn't agree more on the condition of our educational system! I've long held that students should be tested and graded on a straight scale (either they know the material or they don't) and teachers should be graded on a curve described by those test results (thereby giving us a snap-shot of who's teaching effectively and who's not).

Not only is this anathema to NEA, but the unions won't even let us test teachers for competence in the subject they are teaching! That's right ... there is NO requirement that teachers be subject-qualified.

One only need listen to Ward Churchill to see the exponential effect of accepting the demise of critical thinking in our educational system ... those who accel at lazy academics go on to teach the next generation.

Keep up the good work and tell all "hi" for me,
Russ

[paltergo]

Well written. I have enormous problems with the way that our education system is currently run and while I don't necessarily believe that adopting the entire method of another country is the correct solution to our current problem we should be looking at what is working and make changes.
~Patricia