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     jfburch Citizen Username: Jfburch Post Number: 1195 Registered: 6-2001 |
How to Measure Student Proficiency? http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/31/education/31DIST.html "The community around South Charlotte Middle School is one of the richest in North Carolina, and the school boasts the kind of test scores that seem to go hand in hand with wealth. Last year, more than 95 percent of its students passed both the state reading and mathematics tests. A few miles away in a similarly wealthy community, the students at Fort Mill Middle School cannot make the same claim. More than half failed the state mathematics test, and three-quarters failed the reading test. The difference? Fort Mill Middle School is in South Carolina. Two recent studies show that such anomalies are widespread, as states have set widely different standards for measuring students' progress under the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind. Three-quarters of children across the country would fail South Carolina's tough fifth-grade test, one study shows, while seven out of eight would ace the third-grade tests in Colorado and Texas. ... The divergent standards also have ramifications under the federal education law, passed in 2001. Schools deemed failures eventually face stern consequences, including loss of students and reorganization. And in some states with high standards there could be lots of failing schools. In other states with low standards, schools with equally poor performance could be left alone." The accompanying graphic shows that on the national NAEP test, profiency rates range from 20% to 43% with the higher rates in New England. (NJ was not included in this study.) | ||
| nan Citizen Username: Nan Post Number: 1073 Registered: 2-2001 |
This is important stuff to be informed about, boring though it may be to many, because it looks to be the way the government is laying the groundwork for a national curriculum--which many feel would be a disaster. I've been following a discussion of the recent NAEP scores on Gerald Bracey's litserv where it has been the hot topic since November. It's interesting to see how the experts debate such topics. I'll share some of the responses here, editing out the email addresses, irrelevant remarks, etc. There is a lot of material so I'll only post what I think is the most useful. The first thing everyone should be aware of is how controversial NAEP scores are in the first place. For a good summary of that see: www.america-tomorrow.com/bracey/EDDRA/EDDRA30.htm An analysis of why the NAEP achievement levels are off appears at www.america-tomorrow.com/bracey/EDDRA/EDDRA9.htm. ------------------------- AWFUL NAEP ACHIEVEMENT LEVELS AND POVERTY ----- Original Message ----- From: gerald bracey Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2003 11:23 AM Subject: Awful NAEP achievement levels As some of you prepare stories and others of you get prepared for stories about the first NAEP report on all 50 states, I hope you will keep one thing in mind: The NAEP Achievement Levels are no damn good. It is not I alone who speaks thusly. The following quotes are taken from reports by the National Academy of Education and National Academy of Sciences. The quotes raise the question: why on earth are we still using these things. It is unethical. Someone should ask Dr. Paige about it. "The potential instability of the levels may interfere with the accurate portrayal of trends. Second, the perception that few American students are attaining the higher standards we have set for them may deflect attention to the wrong aspects of education reform. The public has indicated its interest in benchmarking against international standards, yet it is noteworthy that when American students performed well on a 1991 international reading assessment, these results were discounted because they were contradicted by poor performance against the possibly flawed NAEP reading achievement levels the following year." National Academy of Education, 1997 "NAEP's current achievement-level-setting procedures remain fundamentally flawed. The judgment tasks are difficult and confusing; raters' judgments of different item types are internally inconsistent; appropriate validity evidence for the cut scores is lacking; and the process has produced unreasonable results. National Academy of Sciences, 1998. Both statements have appeared in the body of NAEP reports ever since. I got them this time from pages 14 and 15 of the 2002 Reading Report Card. Of course, even though they provide great working definitions of "no damn good", no one pays any attention to them. In a paper in February, 2002, I predicted that states would differ wildly on the proportion of students judged proficient on state tests (hardly a risky divination in view of existing evidence to that effect). This would lead, I felt, to increased pressure to adopt the NAEP definition of proficient as the only one that would be uniform, and thus comparable, across all states. Now that we have all states forced to participate in NAEP, we'll see if that happens. If it does, it will be a disaster. As Bob Linn, co-director of the Center for Research on Evaluation, Student Standards and Testing (CRESST) observed while president of the American Educational Research Association, it would be an incredible challenge just to get all students to the NAEP Basic level. Given the supposed "dismal" performance (dismal is a favorite word of education reporters) at the NAEP proficient level, for-profit education companies will rush forward and legislators will offer bill calling for vouchers as the only way back to the garden. Jerry Bracey ------------------------- Subj: [eddra] Latest NAEP report Date: 12/18/2003 9:18:19 AM Eastern Standard Time From: Mark Trentacoste Dear Gerry, My initial impression is that this report shows that poor or black kids in urban areas don't do much worse than poor or black kids anywhere else. Is that your take as well? If so, perhaps our problem, what causes the large gap between our world class affluent suburbs and our poor areas, is not urban schools but, rather, poverty. If that is the hypothesis, how does it account for what I understand to be the relatively high performance among even poor Asian-Americans? One final issue. In looking at reading scores for subsidized eligible students, it appears that the improvement from 4th to 8th grade is about the same order of magnitude regardless of the district (or the spending level in the district). Mark Trentacoste ------------------------- Subj: [eddra] naep and poverty Date: 11/18/2003 11:32:29 AM Eastern Standard Time From: Gerald Bracey . . .I haven't found a way to chart all states except one at a time--I've asked NAEP if there's anyway of pulling a table for all 50 states at once. I've looked only at 5 states, VA, TX, MN, WI, and ME. In those states, the highest scores for black students are 226 in Texas and lowest 209 in WI. I checked MN, because their black kids used to score low, but they came in at 219. VA's black kids were at 223 and Maine doesn't have enough black kids to register as a separate group. For whites in those states, the low was MS at 236. TX had 248, VA 246, WI 243, MN, 243. What this means if the results are similar for the rest of the states is that much of the variability in state level scores comes from differences in the proportions of the ethnic groups. In Mississippi, blacks are 55% of test takers, but 26% in VA, 12% in WI and 8% in MN. Interesting indeed. What is the educational significance of a 710 point difference? Well a 10 point difference is 1/5 of a standard deviation. In the middle of a normal distribution, that's a difference of 8 percentile ranks. At the extremes, it is much less than that. Interesting. JB ------------------------- From: gerald bracey Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2003 10:07 AM Subject: [eddra] naep and poverty Mark, I think poverty is a bigger issue than the "urban school" condition. In the Progress in Reading Literacy Study from April, this year, American students in schools with fewer than 10% of the kids in poverty scored much higher than the highest country. Those in 10-25% povert outscored the highest country but by a little. Those in 25-50% poverty schools, had they formed a nation, would have ranked fourth in the world among the 35 countries in the study (mostly developed nations). Those three categories include 58% of all students. Only kids in 75%+ poverty schools fell below the international average. I don't know that we can say too much about low-income Asians. For some, their low income here is a function of immigrant status only. A study from ETS about 5 years ago showed that Asians overall were by far better educated and wealthier than the nation as a whole, even Southeast Asians who scored lowest on the wealth and education indices. It gets further complicated by waves of immigration. The "boat people" came with their Confucian tradition and extended families. Later arrivals such as Hmong from the mountains of Cambodia have little education--and are subject to ethnic slurs within Cambodia. It's the later waves--I've heard, have no data on--that make up the Asian gangs. No question, though, as a teacher from IL responded to your initial post, many Asians bring that Confucian value of education--and also hard work--to this country. While I think the Thernstroms' solutions to the ethnic gaps reported in their latest book are invalid, when they say "culture counts," they're right. I'm not sure what you're looking at for you final note on gains for subsidized kids. Seems to me that students eligible for meals are 35-40 points below non-eligible kids in 4th grade and gain about 7-10 fewer points by 8th grade. JB -------------------- From: gerald bracey Sent: Friday, December 19, 2003 1:22 PM Subject: Fw: [eddra] naep and poverty More on NAEP urban results. The NAEP urban results released yesterday seem to have been something of a projective test. Winick, head of NAGB, tried to put a positive spin on it, but got tangled up in the old problem of local norms. He said that if you adjust for SES type variables, cities do just as well. Unfortunately, this is like saying "we'd do just as well as the suburbs if we didn't have all these poor kids to deal with." But they do have all those poor kids to deal with. Checker Finn, on the other hand, called the cities performance "horrendous." (In his same post, from "The Education Gadfly", checker penned "The day before vouchers." I encourage all readers to write Checker and urge him to stick to prose). I'd say it's between those two judgments, but we can't really be sure because we don't have the right data. We need to know what the national average is without the cities included and we don't have that (at least, I haven't been able to manipulate the NAEP Data Tool to produce that number). For instance, for 4th grade math, the nation's public schools scored 234, compared to 224 for "large central city," a new category based on census figures. Thus cities score 10 points lower (there's another category for mid-size central city) But here's the kicker: the "large central city" numbers are part of the national average. If we had an average for the nation minus the large central cities, there's be a difference somewhat larger than 10 points. Large central cities make up 16% of all data while mid-size are another 13%. I estimate that without the large cities, the national average would be around 237. Thirteen points is not insignificant in terms of growth on NAEP. What follows are some stats from Bill Fletcher in Wake County, NC. His graphs show a strong relationship between poverty and scores within that county, but one that becomes smaller over time as the schools worked toward a particular goal. Of course, what the graphs cannot show is the degree to which the increasing achievement would generalize beyond the specific tests that NC uses in its state accountability program. As Norman Frederiksen wrote back in 1984 "Accountability systems involving currently used tests are likely to improve the educational process only in the narrow sense that they perpetuate the teaching of what is measured and make it more effective." (American Psychologist, March, 1984). Second, without diminishing any of Wake's improvements, we should note that none of its schools has what many places would call a high incidence of poverty. On most graphs, the most impoverished schools contain about 50% of the kids eligible. Nationally, 36% are eligible and in Chicago, it is 88% (Atlanta 78%, Boston 71%, LA 65%, etc.). Wake County schools would have to be considered more tractable vis a vis poverty that many schools in cities. JB ------------------------- Subj: Re: Fw: [eddra] naep and poverty Date: 12/20/2003 9:18:54 AM Eastern Standard Time From: Dick Allington But it looks like the exclusion rates vary substantially between cities. How can anyone interpret what any of this means what with both differing exclusion rates and different flunking rates (presumed)? Both actions distort the data and enhance the reported scores. When Miami, for instance, flunks 40% of its 3rd graders, their reported 4th grade scores should "improve". But having kids who've been in school for 6-7 years by the time they tale the 4th grade NAEP doesn't mean schools are doing better. Dick Allington University of Florida -------------------------- Date: 12/20/2003 10:30:49 AM Eastern Standard Time From: Jimmy Kilpatrick Bush’s pal Darv Winick is in charge of NAEP. He worked with former DOE Beth Ann Bryant and under U of Texas’s Regents Chairman and multi-millionaire Charles Miller in charge of NAEP. Beth Ann is now working under Sandi Kress the author of NCLB. Jimmy Kilpatrick Senior Fellow, Alexis de Tocqueville Institution Editor & Chief, EducationNews.org -------------------------- From: gerald bracey Sent: Friday, December 19, 2003 12:56 PM One of the predictions I made about two years ago--just as NCLB had come into being--was that eventually only NAEP would be acceptable for defining "proficient." In his latest newsletter discussing yesterday's release of NAEP large city data, Checker Finn says it would be nice if everyone would use NAEP instead of the hodgepodge of state assessments. Look for a rising tide of this sentiment soon. Using the NAEP definition of proficient will, of course, be a disaster. Jerry Bracey | ||
| jfburch Citizen Username: Jfburch Post Number: 1196 Registered: 6-2001 |
I don't know much about the NAEP, and I do have a hard time believing that so few of our students nationally are proficient--though that's clearly a matter of definition, but a couple of researchers have used NAEP scores as a reference point for modern job readiness and there is a problem. The book is Teaching the New Basic Skills by Frank Levy and Richard Murnane. There's a short interview with them here: Some salient exerpts: "DAVID GERGEN: But the schools, themselves, have improved over the last 20 years, but the skill, the need for higher skills has increased dramatically faster than the improvements in the schools? FRANK LEVY: That’s right. And that’s what makes the problem so hard to diagnose. Schools today are a little better than they were 15 years ago, but the job market skills have just escalated much faster than that. I mean, we have an example in the book, "Looking At a Modern Automobile Plant," and about half of today’s high school graduates couldn’t make the cut-off to be a production worker at a modern automobile plant. DAVID GERGEN: That fact just jumped right off the page in your book. Now, let me ask you, Dick, what kind of skills does the high school graduate need today to qualify in the outer world, in the competitive world? RICHARD MURNANE, Co-Author, "Teaching the New Basic Skills:" To qualify for a job that will pay a middle class wage as minimum the graduate needs to be able to read well enough to understand training manuals, basically ninth grade, able to do the mathematics that’s typically included in training manuals, fractions and decimals and line graphs, mastery of that, the ability to problem solve, to take a problem and find what will work, to shape it, to design a solution towards it, and two kinds of what we call soft skills, the ability to communicate effectively both orally and in writing, the ability to work productively with people from different backgrounds, and enough familiarity with computers to have the self-confidence and the knowledge to learn to use new software. You might say these skills are extremely modest, and they are in one sense, and there are lots of jobs that require, that pay good wages that require a lot more than these skills, but there are almost none, outside of professional sports, that do not require at least these new basic skills and also, remember, in terms of whether this is a challenge for schools to provide this, roughly half of American high school seniors are graduating without these new basic skills. RICHARD MURNANE: If they can get the skills, they have a chance at acquiring middle-class jobs and have access to subsequent training when they need it. And these aren’t jobs that will be jobs for--that one holds for twenty-five or thirty years. To a large extent, those jobs have disappeared from the economy, but it will be the opportunity to move from job to job and to earn enough to support kids. DAVID GERGEN: I was interested--Frank, there’s a--there’s a notion in America today that in order to get a job in the middle class, have a ticket to the middle class, one needs a college degree. You’re saying that’s not true, what you need is a skill, and you can get that from a good high school. FRANK LEVY: Right. What’s happened is we structured the situation so that we made college into a necessity. When you look at the gap in wages between college and high school graduates, you have to remember who it is that’s going to college in the first place. It’s typically the kids with the higher than average basic skills, the higher reading ability, the higher math ability. When an employer is looking for somebody with those skills, they can’t rely on a high school diploma because that doesn’t tell you anything, so increasingly, they’re using a bachelor’s degree to find people who they know have these skills which really could be and should be learned by the 12th grade. " | ||
| nan Citizen Username: Nan Post Number: 1074 Registered: 2-2001 |
I'm not sure I buy what these guys are saying, except the part about having to be flexible in an unstable job market. I don't see why companies such as the automobile plant described should expect high schools to do their training for them--if the kids have the basics the companies should be willing to train for the rest. Historically, business has always complained that kids don't have the skills they need as a ploy to get free training. I also don't think that there are lots of good paying jobs for those with just high school diplomas and I think that situation is getting worse as competition increases. I think employers are more likely to take a college graduate (with any degree) over those with just a high school degree. I think the number of well-paying jobs for everyone is shrinking. This notion is consistent with my personal experience of late and with the Bob Herbert column in last week's Times. Herbert described how good jobs are getting shipped to low cost providers oversees. To me, that means that any kind of job paying a middle-class wage will be in high demand, and college grads will taking what's available--even those that might have gone to those with just high school diplomas. Here's some of Herbert's column: The White-Collar Blues By BOB HERBERT . . .A couple of million factory positions have disappeared in the short time since we raised our glasses to toast the incoming century. And now the white-collar jobs are following the blue-collar jobs overseas. Americans are working harder and have become ever more productive — astonishingly productive — but are not sharing in the benefits of their increased effort. If you think in terms of wages, benefits and the creation of good jobs, the employment landscape is grim. The economy is going great guns, we're told, but nearly nine million Americans are officially unemployed, and the real tally of the jobless is much higher. Even as the Bush administration and the media celebrate the blossoming of statistics that supposedly show how well we're doing, the lines at food banks and soup kitchens are lengthening. They're swollen in many cases by the children of men and women who are working but not making enough to house and feed their families. I.B.M. has crafted plans to send thousands of upscale jobs from the U.S. to lower-paid workers in China, India and elsewhere. Anyone who doesn't believe this is the wave of the future should listen to comments made last spring by an I.B.M. executive named Harry Newman: "I think probably the biggest impact to employee relations and to the H.R. field is this concept of globalization. It is rapidly accelerating, and it means shifting a lot of jobs, opening a lot of locations in places we had never dreamt of before, going where there's low-cost labor, low-cost competition, shifting jobs offshore." An executive at Microsoft, the ultimate American success story, told his department heads last year to "Think India," and to "pick something to move offshore today." These matters should be among the hottest topics of our national conversation. We've already witnessed the carnage in manufacturing jobs. Now, with white-collar jobs at stake, we've got executives at I.B.M. and Microsoft exchanging high-fives at the prospect of getting "two heads for the price of one" in India. It might be a good idea to throw a brighter spotlight on some of these trends and explore the implications for the long-term economy and the American standard of living. "If you take this to its logical extreme, the implications for the entire middle-class wage structure in the United States are terrifying," said Thea Lee, an economist with the A.F.L.-C.I.O. "Now is the time to start thinking about policy solutions." But that's exactly what we're not thinking about. Government policy at the moment is focused primarily on what's best for the corporations. From that perspective, job destruction and wage compression are good things — as long as they don't get too much high-profile attention. "This is a significant problem, much greater than we believed it was even a year ago," said Marcus Courtney, president of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, an affiliate of the Communication Workers of America. Accurate data on the number of jobs already lost are all but impossible to come by. But there is no disputing the direction of the trend, or the fact that it is accelerating. Allowing this movement to continue unchecked will eventually mean economic suicide for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of American families.. . . The whole story available here: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/29/opinion/29HERB.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditoria ls%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists%2fBob%20Herbert ---------------------------------------- I find this very disheartening and depressing. What this means for education is anyone's guess--but it seems that the most prevalent jobs in the future are going to be in the service sector, which is perfectly good and interesting work--but unfortunately often not enough money to live on (and few benefits). Meanwhile the business community education "experts" are still bashing schools as not having high standards and not giving the kids enough skills, etc. (see Bracey for more info on this: http://www.america-tomorrow.com/bracey/EDDRA/EDDRA23.htm). All the while slipping the jobs out the door. And the government continues to push the ridiculous mandates of NCLB as though scoring proficient on a test would guarantee employment in such a market. Could be the kids learning how to knit at Seth Boyden are really the ones learning the job skills of the future! | ||
| jfburch Citizen Username: Jfburch Post Number: 1198 Registered: 6-2001 |
I agree about the offshore jobs thing--and I don't think they considered it--or that it was quite as much of an issue--especially for white collar jobs--as it is now. But I know at least one reason companies started going to India in the 90s was the shortage of programmers here, even at high salaries--once they found there was a supply of good ones and cheaper, it's not surprising they are increasingly looking there for more cheap white-collar labor. And, yes, that is going to spell big trouble down the line. And, it may make some of these issues moot since even if we make educational improvements, we are going to have a hard time providing labor at competitive prices with India or China. Their point is that the basic skills they are talking about are things that we assume are taught in HS--basic math and literacy--and increasingly companies are testing for these things as a pre-requisite to hiring--and then training. So a college degree is becoming the new pre-requisite even for jobs that don't require post-secondary education. Not because the college education has added anything essential, but because it is a sorting mechanism: kids who go to college will have at least the basic level of skills required. In your "spare" time, you might really enjoy looking at the book. There are also several examples of interesting approaches to school reform. | ||
| nan Citizen Username: Nan Post Number: 1075 Registered: 2-2001 |
Not much spare time these days (except for this week), But, I always enjoy checking out a another book on education--and sometimes the ones that irratate me are the most fun. Getting back to the NAEP scores, I'd like to focus more on the issue you brought up to start this thread--the way the state scores don't align very well with the NAEP scores and what that means now and in the future. It seems to me that the next step in the discussion will naturally be, "well since the scores don't jive we need to drop the state scores and just use the NAEP." But, this is not what the NAEP scores were intended to be used for. We have already seen abuse of the NAEP scores by the NIDCH folks when they claim that 40% of 4th graders can't read. Here's the next installment of the Bracey discussion on the topic, where you will see there are some who think more Federal involvement in education is the best idea since sliced bread. Others think it will stifle any kind of progress, creativity, democracy and finally destroy public education. ------------------------------------------------------ Subj: Re: [eddra] RE: Date: 12/20/2003 4:42:25 PM Eastern Standard Time From: Susan Harman If/when NAEP becomes the National Test, it must follow as the night the day that there will be a National Curriculum (as I predicted about 12 years ago). Is it time to stand up yet? Susan -------------------------------------------------------- Subj: [eddra] prediction of a natinal curriculum Date: 12/20/2003 4:59:42 PM Eastern Standard Time From: Gerald Bracey It is worth noting in connection with Susan Harman's prediction of a national curriculum, that when NAEP was first proposed in the mid-1960's, every educational organization opposed its creation and that the primary reason for that opposition was that NAEP would lead inexorably to a national curriculum, along with federal control over education. Other objections were that it would stifle creativity and lead to cheating. It would lead to ruinous competition among states and schools, it wouldn't be feasible, and American kids were already tested too much. Some even objected that the group who put the proposal together had an "Eastern, ivy-league foundation syndrome" (the leading movers were, indeed, Harvard men). The only way that Frank Keppel and Ralph Tyler could get it through the legislature was to house it at a state-level policy agency, the Education Commission of the States in Denver. In addition, NAEP was forbidden by law to report any level of aggregation smaller than "region." In 1988 the law was amended to permit state-level NAEP. I don't know when the law was changed to permit the district-level results out this week or if such a change were needed (or, if such a change were needed but Paige and Bush and the rest said to hell with it let's do it anyway). Jerry ------------------------------------------------- Subj: Re: [eddra] RE: Date: 12/20/2003 8:04:28 PM Eastern Standard Time From: Marion Brady If/when NAEP becomes the National Test, it must follow as the night the day that there will be a National Curriculum (as I predicted about 12 years ago). Is it time to stand up yet? Susan, It's way past time to stand up. I wrote my first letters to the DOE in the early 90s, laying out the same argument I've made in books, journal articles, and (directly or indirectly) in dozens of my newspaper columns, an argument which I think sort of cuts the legs out from under the current "standards and accountability" movement. Unfortunately, the argument is at odds with the conventional wisdom, therefore comes across as esoteric, and esoteric positions don't lend themselves to bumper stickers, sound bites, and the kind of political support that can counter ill-advised policy. However, I see it as doing a kind of "end run" around our problem by pointing out an absolutely fundamental problem with what's being done in the name of "education reform." I slid the argument (again) into my 11/6/03 Orlando Sentinel (Knight-Ridder) column written in the form of an open letter to state and federal legislators. I invited "co-signers." (Thus far, I have 15 single-spaced pages of signatures.) Marion Brady _________________________________________________ An Open Letter to Federal and State Legislators: Over the last decade, for all practical purposes, you’ve taken over American education. Convinced, as you apparently are, that education professionals lack standards, and don’t want to be held accountable, this is understandable. In your new role, there are several things you should keep in mind. First, you’ve taken on an awesome responsibility. The future of about 53,000,000 students is now primarily in your hands. As adults, they’ll sit in judgment on your decisions. Second, the human brain is the most complicated thing known. That its capabilities and potential can be measured by the machine-scorable tests your policies mandate is a cruel myth. Third, your power and influence in support of education are essential. But as Soviet-style central planning surely demonstrated, "top down" change strategies are rarely effective. Reform is tough under the best of circumstance. In education, with its myriad layers of management between you and students, "top down reform" is probably an oxymoron Fourth, you’re blaming teachers and students for education’s ills. When you scapegoat, not only are you unfair, you close your mind to other, even very obvious, explanations of poor performance. Fifth, you’re assuming that market forces—choice and competition, reward and punishment—can work the magic in schools they sometimes exhibit in the marketplace. A few days spent in a real classroom would show you that, for both teachers and students, the satisfaction of doing something worth doing, and doing it well, motivates far more effectively, for far longer, than promises of money or the shame of publication of test scores and school rankings. Finally, you need to know about a problem which, because of its centrality, must be addressed before any other reforms can possibly make much difference Educating is about what’s taught and learned—the curriculum. Goals 2000 and No Child Left Behind freeze in place a curriculum designed in the late 19th Century for different people, facing different problems. In the name of "accountability," you’re forcing teachers and students to do the wrong thing better. In 1984, John I. Goodlad and a team of esearchers completed a massive study of American schools involving 27,000 individuals. Summing up his findings in the book, A Place Called School, Prospects for the Future, he wrote "The division into subjects and periods encourages a segmented rather than an integrated view of knowledge. Consequently, what students are asked to relate to in schooling becomes increasingly cut off from the human experiences subject matter is supposed to reflect." Your own educations were no doubt of the "subjects and periods" sort, prompting you to think that a fragmented approach to knowledge is acceptable. Reflecting that assumption, you’ve demanded "standards"—not standards describing the kinds of people students should be and become, but standards for each school subject. Schools are in the knowledge business. Knowledge is "all of a piece." Humans learn seamlessly. But the thousands of state standards you’ve caused to be written ignore this fact. Those who wrote them for various school subjects obviously didn’t talk to each other, much less recognize and take advantage of the mutually supportive nature of knowledge. The result is perpetuation of a "mile wide and inch deep" curriculum, a curriculum acceptable not because it makes sense, but because its familiarity has caused us to stop thinking about it. For evidence of its superficiality, consider how little most adults can recall of what they once "learned" at great state expense. When, in the 1980s, the direction of K-12 education began to be set by leaders of business and industry rather than by professional educators, fresh thinking about what’s taught stopped. For example, a promising approach to the study of history, science, language arts and other subjects, based on World War II-spawned general systems theory, was emerging. You've made its further development pointless because standardized tests can’t measure the quality of the complex mental processes involved in systems thinking. The initiative has been abandoned. Your "reform" legislation ignores the integrated nature of knowledge, reflects a simplistic view of how students learn, imposes measures of accountability which emphasize minimum standards rather than maximum performance, and slam the door on innovation. Left in place, that legislation will bring not merely educational but societal disaster. Revisit the No Child Left Behind legislation. And this time, talk to educators. To add your signature to mine: http://www.PetitionOnline.com/gmd4285/petition.html -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subj: Fw: [arn-l] [eddra] prediction of a natinal curriculum Date: 12/23/2003 1:50:35 PM Eastern Standard Time From: Gerald Bracey The lower message from Leo Casey was sent to me with no indication that it was intended for EDDRA. Since he now accuses me of censoring it, I send it along with a similar post he addressed to the Assessment Reform Network(ARN). Jerry Bracey ----- Original Message ----- From: Leo Casey Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2003 12:40 PM Monty Neill raises the question which appear on the EDDRA list, concerning NAEP and the emergence of a "national curriculum." Below was my reply to the thread, which never saw the light of day on EDDRA, as one must either agree with Bracey or being an obviously uninformed right wing foil to have one's messages sent on -- an intelligent question about received wisdom is just too much. I believe these comments on the horrors of a national educational system are simply a not very thought out appeal to what is perceived as a basic American prejudice, that education must be controlled by states and localities at all costs. Tell that to the African-Americans who were subjected to a century of Jim Crow schools in the South. Tell that to the parents of the children who attend public school in Mississippi today, which ranks 49th or 50th among American states [I forget which] in spending on education, a pittance compared to most states. Tell that to the parents of inner city students across the United States, who see their states provide them with a far inferior education to that received by their suburban counterparts. Yes, a national system of education would not be a magic bullet for all of the ills of American education, although it would almost certainly lessen the extent of inequality [it would be hard to imagine it getting much worse]. And it is certainly not the demon suggested by these threads. Leo Casey (Here is his second version) In a message dated 12/20/2003 4:59:41 PM Eastern Standard Time, Gerald Bracey writes: It is worth noting in connection with Susan Harman's prediction of a national curriculum, that when NAEP was first proposed in the mid-1960's, every educational organization opposed its creation and that the primary reason for that opposition was that NAEP would lead inexorably to a national curriculum, along with federal control over education. And why federal control of curriculum be such a terrible thing? Countries with nationally directed education systems, such as France, have a great deal more equity than the US. The federal government was the engine of progressivism in the New Deal and in the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s. It is not necessarily so all the time, but it also sure as hell is not automatically and unquestionably a bad thing. Leo Casey --------------------------------------------------- Subj: RE: prediction of a national curriculum Date: 12/23/2003 4:09:45 PM Eastern Standard Time From: Jeffrey Leverich To The Group: The acclaimed historian of education, Carl Kaestle, noted that the primary dynamic informing developments in public schooling is the tension between local and central control. This suggests that the focus of discussion about standards, then, ought to be on the question of where central control (state or federal) is needed, what its nature should be, and what is best left to local communities. Following Casey's point below, most would agree that increased state involvement in equalizing school funding, for example, was a laudable activity. Yet, heightened state involvement in other forms, such as school consolidation, was often decried by local districts as being anti-democratic. Many individuals like myself, who believe common schooling has a democratic value, would also reject calls for a federally-imposed national curriculum (McGraw Hill is already salivating), while still supporting federal guarantees of equal rights. The debate should thus not be about favoring or opposing federal control, but instead should be about identifying what is best done by local districts, what is best done by central authorities, and how to best structure that relationship. This question is at the heart of the standards debate, ESEA, and the potential use of NAEP scores to sanction local districts. Jeffrey Leverich Research Coordinator Wisconsin Education Association Council -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- Subj: RE: [arn-l] [eddra] prediction of a natinal curriculum Date: 12/24/2003 9:41:02 AM Eastern Standard Time From: Mike Martin Maybe you should point out that Casey's logic is warped. The suburban schools he lauds in comparison to the others were and are almost all governed by local parents elected to the governing board. Conversely, the urban schools frequently are either controlled by the city government or so large that individual parents have little or no influence. The Jim Crow schools were not locally controlled by parents, indeed the whole point of the Civil Rights Movement was voter registration. As for Mississippi, his confusion over whether it ranks 49th or 50th is because Arizona ranks 49th or 50th from year to year. Arizona ranked in the 30s until the state legislature imposed a top-down funding model and it began sliding into oblivion soon afterward. As for his stupid statement that it can't get much worse, PIRLS showed that the suburban schools with locally elected governing boards ranked number one in the world in fourth grade reading and writing, far ahead of other countries. So it actually cannot get any better than being number one. It can certainly get worse than beingnumber one, and it likely will if the power of local governing boards is taken away. Mike Martin Research Analyst Arizona School Boards Association 2100 N. Central Ave, Suite 200 Phoenix, Az 85004 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Subj: Re: [arn-l] [eddra] prediction of a national curriculum Date: 12/24/2003 9:41:07 AM Eastern Standard Time From: Marion Brady Jeffrey wrote: ......The debate should thus not be about favoring or opposing federal control, but instead should be about identifying what is best done by local districts, what is best done by central authorities, and how to best structure that relationship. This question is at the heart of the standards debate, ESEA, and the potential use of NAEP scores to sanction local districts. I'd respectfully suggest that there is an even deeper issue "at the heart of the standards debate"---at least for me. I struggle for a brief, easily understood way to say it, but my opposition to federal education mandates---an opposition I expressed in unanswered letters to policy makers in the DOE more than a decade ago---comes down to something like this: 1. The main purpose of formal instruction is to expand understanding of reality. 2. Reality is systemic. 3. Individual and collective understanding of reality expand as systemic relationships are discovered. 4. Federally mandated discipline-based standards ignore the systemic nature of reality. 5. Standardized tests based on those standards institutionalize a false conception of reality. 6. Mandated education "reforms" based on a false conception of reality will ultimately destroy education. Marion | ||
| breal Citizen Username: Breal Post Number: 290 Registered: 6-2002 |
Nan--Say what YOU want to say. In your own words. We don't care about Marion's views. She doesn't live here. Marion has no familiarity with our kids or our schools. You do. We want to hear from you. Not poor Marion, who means well, I'm sure. | ||
| jfburch Citizen Username: Jfburch Post Number: 1200 Registered: 6-2001 |
(NLCB is not just a local issue.) January 2, 2004 Some School Districts Challenge Bush's Signature Education Law By SAM DILLON READING, Pa. A small but growing number of school systems around the country are beginning to resist the demands of President Bush's signature education law, saying its efforts to raise student achievement are too costly and too cumbersome.... http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/02/education/02RESI.html | ||
| nan Citizen Username: Nan Post Number: 1077 Registered: 2-2001 |
breal, I'm so surprised and pleased to hear that you are interested in what I have to say. We are talking about the problems of NCLB, and the possiblity that they may lead to vouchers and a national curriculum. I'm trying to make sense of it all and I'm doing that by reading up and trying to become more informed. How do you feel about all of this? As an ACE member I would guess you would be a big supporter of NCLB, given the Ed Trust presentation a few months back. Ed Trust wrote much of the NCLB legislation and are the primary cheerleaders for it. The Times article cited by JBurch gives a good description of some of the problems we face trying to comply with NCLB. Here's another article giving the low down on who is benefiting financially from this legislation--and it's sure not kids in schools. Is this where you think we should be putting our money to help kids? Critics Say Education Dept. Is Favoring Political Right By Michael Dobbs Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, January 2, 2004; Page A19 When Arizona schools superintendent Lisa Graham Keegan and a group of predominantly conservative educators launched the Education Leaders Council (ELC) in 1995, their proclaimed goal was to upset an educational establishment long dominated by the Democrats and left-leaning teachers unions. Nearly a decade later, Keegan and her allies have become the establishment -- and the left is crying foul. People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group, recently released a report depicting Keegan's group as the center of "a network of right-wing foundations" that have received more than $77 million in U.S. Department of Education funds to promote their "school privatization" agenda. The report noted that a co-founder of the council, former Pennsylvania education secretary Eugene W. Hickok, is now the second-ranking official at the federal department. While there is a tradition of Republican and Democratic administrations rewarding allies, critics argue that the amount of money steered toward conservative educational groups by the Bush administration far exceeds the practices of the past. "It's a farce," said Kathleen Lyons, spokeswoman for the National Education Association, the largest teachers union in the country. "On the one hand, we have the Bush administration claiming that its education reforms are all scientifically based, and on the other hand, we see the administration providing a grab bag of Santa gifts to conservative groups." The People for the American Way report "exposes a stealth campaign by the administration to reward groups that support its private-school voucher agenda at the expense of strengthening public schools," said Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.), ranking Democrat on the Senate education committee. "Balderdash," said Education Undersecretary Hickok. If there were any favoritism, he said, it was "favoritism in the sense that we support those organizations that support No Child Left Behind," a law President Bush signed in January 2002 that aims to raise educational standards through high-stakes testing and better-qualified teachers. "Welcome to the vast right-wing conspiracy," laughed Keegan, chief executive of the ELC, who was a candidate for secretary of education after Bush was elected. Education Department records show that the ELC received $13.5 million over the last two years for its "Following the Leaders" project, which develops computer programs to monitor implementation of the No Child Left Behind law. A further $45 million in grants has been awarded to groups closely associated with Keegan's organization, such as the National Council on Teacher Quality and the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence. The bulk of the money the department gave Keegan's network has gone to developing alternative forms of teacher certification. The No Child Left Behind law stipulates that every student has the right to a "fully qualified" teacher, a requirement that has strained traditional teacher training colleges. Keegan said it is only natural that the Bush administration should want to correct a liberal bias in American education by giving grants to groups that share its philosophy. While she rejects the "right-wing" tag, she says "it is necessary to be ideological in education these days if you want to promote academic standards, school choice, and new routes to certifying teachers that work against the grain of current ideas in education." Keegan said she founded the ELC in opposition to "an alphabet soup" of groups with close ties to the Clinton administration and the liberal education lobby. The most prominent of these was the Council of Chief State School Officers, founded 95 years ago to give state school systems a Washington voice. The council has subsequently sought to remake its image as a nonpartisan group. This year, it received $3.5 million from the Education Department in contracts to help implement No Child Left Behind in all 50 states, significantly less than the $9.9 million in grant money that went to the ELC. Contracts generally carry more conditions and reporting requirements than grants. Hickok said only some of the money awarded to the ELC came from the secretary's discretionary funds; the most recent $9.9 million grant was a congressional earmark. He said the publicly announced award of $35 million over five years for the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence must still be appropriated by Congress. According to Hickok, there is a tradition at the Education Department of awarding discretionary grants. The money is channeled through the Fund for Improvement of Education, the size of which varies from year to year depending on appropriations. Officials said Education Secretary Roderick R. Paige had $25 million in discretionary resources at his disposal this fiscal year, out of an education budget of $56.5 billion. Other groups that have benefited from Education Department grants include K12, a for-profit company founded by Reagan administration education secretary William J. Bennett to promote home schooling, and the Black Alliance for Education Options, which provides information about vouchers and school choice. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A48083-2004Jan1?language=printer | ||
| breal Citizen Username: Breal Post Number: 291 Registered: 6-2002 |
Where should our education money be going? Well, I wish our district would buy a core reading program, k-3. Sorry to be repetitive, but it should include scope-and-sequenced-based, direct, explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics in K and 1 especially. It should include immersion in enriching literature. I think such a purchase would provide good value for our district. I think we'd end up with more kids able to contend as readers. I think we'd have fewer behavior problems. I think the teachers would end up teaching better. Even the new ones. I think such a purchase would help narrow the achievement gap. I think the inference-or-bust curriculum we rely on now hurts kids with relatively impoverished "word backgrounds." Kids who have never even heard a certain word are never going to be able to guess it from context clues or from the illustration. It would help them to be able to decode it. I am against vouchers. I am for accountability in public education, and to that extent I like NCLB. The NYT article I would cite is the one by James Traub couple weeks ago, in the magazine. Did you see it? I agree with Traub that NCLB is flawed but still worthy. Happy New Year. | ||
| Montagnard Citizen Username: Montagnard Post Number: 327 Registered: 6-2003 |
One advantage of buying a commercialy available program is that new teachers will be familiar with its concepts and able to use it effectively with little additional training. Our home-grown program may have many advantages for the established teachers, but given our current turnover, we have to recognize the cost of training new hires. I would like to see the teacher's efforts focused on understanding my child's needs, not struggling to master the District's curriculum. | ||
| nan Citizen Username: Nan Post Number: 1079 Registered: 2-2001 |
Breal, Well, McGraw Hill (and the current administration which has close ties to the McGraw Hill family) will be glad to hear you feel that way. I'm not so sure so many teachers and students would agree, according to this article from the California Educator (Dec 2003). Bring back the joy of teaching and learning Sherry Posnick-Goodwin http://www.cta.org/CaliforniaEducator/v8i4/Feature_1.htm Here are some highlights: . . .CTA President Barbara E. Kerr says the biggest challenge facing schools is that the joy of teaching and learning is hard to find in today's classrooms. "Testing mania has gotten way out of hand and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act further exacerbates the problem," says Kerr, who taught first grade and kindergarten in Riverside for more than two decades. Everywhere she goes, teachers share the same concerns. In growing numbers of schools, scripted learning programs take up most of the school day and the rest of the day is lost to pre-testing and testing. . . .Teachable moments? Class discussions? Hands-on learning? Field trips? Physical education? Music? Art? In all too many schools, they are fond memories of the good old days. Even recess has been eliminated in many places. As a result, teachers are frustrated and often unhappy, which may in itself have a trickle-down effect in the classroom. And many students are turning off to school. The problems have raised concerns throughout the entire country. "If we allow ourselves to become script readers rather than teachers, we can become at least uninspired, and ultimately dangerous," warns Carol Ann Tomlinson, a professor at the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education. . . ."Children have a lot of differences, and you can't look at them as statistics," says Avera, a member of the Vallejo Education Association. "Children have hearts and souls and creative minds. When you try to make them all the same through rigorous left-brain learning and dill-and-kill, you can lose that individuality, squash their self-confidence and kill their love of learning." Not so long ago, says Avera, things were different. "We understood that some children develop faster and some develop slower, and that children need to go at their own pace. Children were valued for having creative genius in the arts, music or other avenues." . . ."But there's no room for that anymore. There's no time to pull that shining intelligence out of children in different ways." When teachers were allowed to use creativity in teaching the basics, she recalls how well thematic units were received. When she taught about the rain forest, for example, she brought in books and puzzles and had students build a tepee. "I had students who said to me, years later, that they remembered making a tepee and putting it up. I don't think today's students are going to remember filling in the bubbles very fondly." As school has become, in many cases, drudgery, Avera says she has seen the behavior of children change. "It's heartbreaking to see, but I am watching some kids just give up. They put their heads down and become obstinate and angry. They don't know what to do with their anger, and they lash out. They are disengaging. School has become like the corporate world where some people rise to the top and others fall behind." . . .In previous years, he recalls, teachers would collaborate on lesson plans that got students excited about learning. "Now, instead of talking about what's best for kids, teachers obsess about things like, "Where on the wall should we post the standards?' I can't count the number of staff development sessions that dealt with how to write an agenda on the board. Administrators think it's teaching us to be better teachers, because an agenda shows we're planned and organized. But kids don't care about any of that stuff. . . .Another San Diego teacher who did not wish to be identified says it's harder to motivate students now that enrichment has been eliminated throughout her district and most schools have scripted programs. "Administrators feel that if something is not related to the standards, it's frivolous, so there goes music and art. There is nothing wrong with standards-based education - students need to have certain skills when they leave school. But to say that all students must learn in the same fashion and have a one-size-fits-all education doesn't seem logical. When they are adults, will they be able to work in a flexible workplace and be creative and innovative? Will they be thinkers?" . . .Children with high academic abilities need to be challenged, but scripted programs and rote memorization have them rolling their eyes, says Debbie Petinak, a second-grade teacher at Cutler Elementary School near Visalia. When high-achieving students are bored, they tend to do just the minimum amount of work required, which can result in mediocrity, says Petinak, a member of COUTA. "They know they can get by with that because there is little incentive to be creative." . ."We most definitely need to bring happiness back into education," says Robert Ellis, a first-grade teacher at King Elementary School in Richmond, a high-crime and high-poverty area. "It's hard to feel happiness when children are coming from fairly depressing conditions at home, and then see depressing conditions at school." . . .He is working hard to raise test scores. Direct Instruction, a scripted reading program, takes up most of the morning. He prefers the program to Open Court, which is used in other Richmond schools, "but I hate the thought that I can't have a creative idea and run with it." . ."I believe in having standards, but the pendulum has swung too far," she adds. "I think we need to look realistically at testing because right now it's not providing a true picture of what a child can do. We need to get politicians out of education. We need to get teachers in the political arena to say, "No, what's happening is not child-friendly. This is not compassionate.' . .Public Agenda, a non-partisan policy research group, found teachers to be "committed, but dispirited." . . .It's no wonder, says NEA President Reg Weaver. "Many teachers believe that the new testing mandates eliminate their ability to utilize best practices for good teaching and learning. The flexibility and creativity they need to provide their students with what will help them most - an individualized approach - has been taken away." . .The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (also known as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001) provides ample cause for despair all by itself. Last year, it classified nearly 70 percent of California schools as failing to meet new federal standards. It requires each school to show Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) not only as a whole, but for each subgroup - ethnic minorities, English language learners, special education students and students living in poverty. If any subgroup fails to meet AYP, the entire school fails. The frustration for teachers is palpable. "We raised our API 52 points, but have not met our AYP," says Debbie Petinak, a second-grade teacher at Cutler Elementary School and a member of the Cutler-Orosi Unified Teachers Association.. . . . ."I love the job itself," says sixth-grade teacher Tom Hernandez, a member of the Visalia Unified Teachers Association. "It's the politics that's so frustrating." | ||
| viva Citizen Username: Viva Post Number: 332 Registered: 5-2001 |
read "Your Child's Growing Mind -- A Practical Guide to Brain Development and Learning from Birth to Adolescence" by Jane M. Healy This book addresses the most fundamental of the issues of learning which need to be deeply understood before we can make the progress we seek. | ||
| nan Citizen Username: Nan Post Number: 1083 Registered: 2-2001 |
The Illionois School Board Association is fighting NCLB: IASB delegates seek sweeping reform of federal NCLB Act Board members vote for push to scrap NCLB sanctions against local school districts Illinois school boards have agreed to seek a major reform of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) on grounds that the law is based on inconsistent standards and unrealistic requirements. Representatives of more than 280 Illinois school boards, convening at the annual conference of the Illinois Association of School Boards (IASB) on November 22 in Chicago, voted to seek fundamental changes in NCLB, including new provisions to: -Focus the law on professional development for teachers and administrators; The proposals-contained in two separate resolutions-were approved by the IASB Delegate Assembly at IASB's three-day joint conference with the Illinois Association of School Administrators (IASA), and Illinois Association of School Business Officials (IASBO). IASB delegates representing local school districts voted unanimously in favor of the reform of NCLB, including a proposal to request lawmakers to provide schools with "necessary resources of funding, professional knowledge and organizational focus." "Moving problems around within the system will not solve them," the resolution stated, a clear reference to NCLB's student transfer provisions. "Simply creating negative consequences for underperformance will not change the system," the IASB resolution added. In their annual business meeting, local school board representatives voted on resolutions that set policies and lobbying directives for their Association for the coming year. The meeting was part of IASB's Joint Annual Conference, which drew nearly 11,500 people to Chicago and featured workshops, clinics, speakers, exhibits, and more than 100 panel discussions. http://www.iasb.com/files/nb1203.htm#a1 | ||
| jennie Citizen Username: Jennie Post Number: 15 Registered: 5-2001 |
Is it really a surprise that school districts are against greater accountability? | ||
| Cato Nova Citizen Username: Cato_nova Post Number: 20 Registered: 12-2003 |
The sole purpose of NCLB is to defund public education and transfer the funds to private/religious schools. Only an idiot can fail to see that. Under the guise of "accountability" the feds will strip all federal funds from public schools, who will still be forced to spend outrageous sums for special ed and special needs students, becoming a dumping ground for poor students. And yet the credulous morons that make up this great nations suck up this crap like fine wine. | ||
| nan Citizen Username: Nan Post Number: 1087 Registered: 2-2001 |
Not true. Some of those funds will also be transfered to large publishing companies. ------------------------------------------- To the editor From Gerald Coles Submitted to New York Times but not published (01/03/2004) Re "Some School Districts Challenge Bush's Signature Education Law"(front page, Jan. 2): Add Reading First, a core portion of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), to the reasons why the law has failed to raise academic achievement. Purportedly based on scientific evidence, NCLB mandates pre-packaged, building blocks, skills-heavy, "teacher-proof" reading instruction as the sole method for schools seeking NCLB funds. However, several analyses, including my own, have revealed the vacuousness of the research used to justify Reading First teaching. The instruction is not superior for teaching skills and comprehension. It provides no advantages for poor children, at-risk children, or disabled readers. It is one more fiction undercutting public schools, driven by a political ideology that substitutes simplistic bootstrap answers for comprehensive social policy. Most grievously, it creates false expectations in parents whose children will never achieve the glowing academic success the Bush administration assures them will be theirs. | ||
| jennie Citizen Username: Jennie Post Number: 16 Registered: 5-2001 |
"And yet the credulous morons that make up this great nations suck up this crap like fine wine" Are the credulous morons the product of a public school education?  Maybe the idiots believe there is something inherently unfair about a system of education that varies widely based on where you live and your ability to move. Maybe the stupid parents, with no vested interest in the education establishment, don't care whether money is diverted from the public school payroll (or Newark slush fund or politician's brother's computer company for that matter), to a tutor, or book company, or even another school, as long as their kids benefit and the benefit is demonstrable. Do public schools really foresee a mad dash to the door if parents are given a way out? Why so little confidence in their product? As far as "outrageous" amounts spent for special needs kids, you'd think that enlightened taxpayers along with the wine swilling dunces would see the injustice of the big black hole that is currently special education. Outrageous sums ARE spent, yet the benefit to the child is often negligible (kinda like the Abbott districts). Buckets of money are spent on teams of administrators who wear nice suits and sit in endless meetings and write up reports and collect paychecks while the kids rot, with no consequences. So the schools are against bad consequences for their inability to effectively serve students and don't want to lose a nickel of funding, even if they lose kids. No kidding. nishment can be very effective and is used by educators all the time in the classroom. The important thing is the consequence to the kids. It's not a bad thing to have schools scrambling to ensure that every group of students makes progress (even if the community only really cares about Merit scholars and providing interesting electives). You'd think that people could get past the education establishment propaganda and Bush hating to see that it is actually a "liberal" goal that kids should not be trapped in lousy schools, while the bureaucracy grows fatter and failure is rewarded with more funding. | ||
| Cato Nova Citizen Username: Cato_nova Post Number: 21 Registered: 12-2003 |
I could solve the education dilemma easily, as could any intelligent, clear-eyed person (i.e, not anyone in power presently): provide funds sufficient for every K-8 student to be in a class with only 8 students. Provide the funds in the form of direct grants to school districts, based on student population. How much could this cost? Billions, likely, but in the federal budget, far less than most military programs. We can fund it via a reinstatement of the estate tax for estates over $2.5 million as well as marginally higher tax rates for earners over $250,000. Of course, this will never happen, even though it is obvious, equitable, and of great public importance (indeed, of greater public importance than most other gov't programs.) Not enough really rich people or large corporations will benefit. And our selected President would rather focus on programs that shift funds from public schools to religious ones so that we can move closer to theocracy. | ||
| lumpyhead Citizen Username: Lumpyhead Post Number: 591 Registered: 3-2002 |
It's a wonder how anyone ever learned anything in the past without spending billions of dollars. Accountability is a horrible thing. I wish I wasn't held accountable for my job. I mean, I work for a corporation and everyone knows how evil and corrupt they are. I have complete trust in an educational system that the government runs. Anyone know what the economies of scale would be to spend billions of dollars and have 8 children in a classroom?? |
