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Testing Requirements Can Be Impossible To Reach

December 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment

One of the first laws that president George W. Bush got passed that had a resounding effect on the nation as a whole was the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). Most parents, teachers and students know it simply as No Child Left Behind” and it has become somewhat a cartoonish villain for those who work in the education system. The NCLB was set up to make sure that students were receiving the same sort of education as their peers across the country and perhaps foolishly it set out a system of funding education in order to meet its goals.

Of course what any federal education act doesn’t take into consideration is the very real and very different circumstances that face a child going to school in urban Chicago compared to a child who is attending classes in rural Iowa. The circumstances are simply not the same and no matter who says they should be that will not be changing any time soon. Where NCLB truly fails is that there is really no mechanism for determining the different circumstances or metering out when a school may not have met its standards but has still met or surpassed what would be the realistic standards of that school, student and classroom.

The NCLB instituted a nation-wide system of testing that was designed to determine whether or not a school, a teacher and a school district was meeting the requirements that were set forth by the federal government. If these schools were able to meet the requirements of the testing, then they continued to receive federal aid at a level they had grown accustomed to. Should they fail what had become extremely subjective testing criteria, they would have their funding reduced and cut off all together. What this boiled down to was that schools which were struggling continued to struggle while schools that were successful continued to have success.

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Educational Habitat and the Quality of Education

December 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Study after study, survey after survey and test after test show that the quality of student’s surroundings directly equate to how much and how well that student will learn. If a school is falling down around the student, in effect the school district is saying they don’t really care what sort of state the buildings are in, the students will be far behind their age level peers in schools that have better upkeep. Teachers that are scraping the bottom of the barrel for text books and supplies will find students who are either barely attending classes, not attending at all or when they do attend could care less about the subject that is being taught.

Not surprisingly, most of the educational habitats that are negative for both the student and the teacher are occurring more and more in urban areas with high population base and a high poverty rate. Even public schools that have higher donations by student families as well as better funding from the city, county and state in urban areas do quite a bit better that schools that may be located just a few miles away but is suddenly located in the magical bad part of town.

Students can tell when they are being ignored or not cared about and most of those students will respond by not caring about their school or their own academic achievements. Educational habitat means more than just where they go to school, it means the feeling they get when they enter that school or the classroom. If a feeling of apathy surrounds the school, it should not be on the student to break through the torpor. If a school is falling down around a student’s ears it is not something that fools students into thinking the school district cares about them. The apathy is catching and it’s catching quickly.

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Public Vs. Private Schools

December 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment

We are in a crisis situation in this country when it comes to education. One test after another shows that we are lagging behind other countries when it comes to education ranking and worse yet is the fact that we do not seem to know how to fix it. No matter what we do, it seems, our schools in inner cities continue to deteriorate while private schools in this country tend to look like cathedrals. There is a reason that private schools in is country always have higher collective test scores than public schools, especially, in urban areas do. That reason is not because they continue to put god in the classroom.

The reason that private schools have developed academic dominance over public schools in inner city areas is because they have the money to devote to top notch education. Students test better in private schools not because people who are better of financially are inherently smarter. Students in better neighborhoods and better schools test better because they have better and more access to tools that will allow them to learn faster and retain more.

Private schools are also able to pay their teachers more, meaning that the really good teachers, unless they are driven by a need to help people are migrating to private schools in order to have a better life for themselves. This means that teachers who cannot get jobs at the better schools are being shunted to the lower quality school districts because those are the only areas willing to hire them. Poorer teachers, poorer school districts and some of the poorest kids in the country all team up to churn out some of the poorest test scores in the world. This of course leads to less federal and state funding, which only exacerbates and continues the problem for years to come.

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