No Child Left Behind Act

Well I would be all for it if I thought it was going to work as maybe some folks intended, ie bring research based reading programs to classrooms. And it has in some cases. What I think it is actually doing is bringing more test taking to classrooms as well as tricks to learn to take tests.
Some ld kids are having to take tests that should not, as they do not have the skills to take them and can’t handle the situation.

I haven’t seen anything that suggests that such misinformed ideas as Whole Language are moving away. In fact, given all the extra test taking there may be MORE resistance to not using it. It may be the one little block of creative teaching that the teachers get all day.

Do I htink the whole idea is an inherently bad one with bad motivations. No. I think it is underfunded and not going to work because the basis is on more testing.

—des

It is teaching that test taking skills are paramount. It is teaching that life is a multiple-choice test and it is encouraging teachers to teach “to a test.” Where is the research that shows that good multiple choice test takers do well in life?

Amen.

I prefer to refer to this legislation as “No Child Left Untested”. IMO, we are leaving behind exactly the students that this law supposedly targets. One example, our English for Speakers of Other Language program typically pulls students from the regular classroom during their language arts time for small group instruction designed especially for English language learners. For the last 2 months of school, these students will sit in their regular classrooms instead, unable to understand, because their teachers must administer testing to each English language learner in the school to prove that they as a group are making progress. This requires 1:1 for many of the beginners and therefore is time consuming in a school with a large ESOL population. So the children who need it most will miss weeks of instruction right before summer break. Then they will be home for the summer speaking their native language, and likely return to us speaking less English than they did in June.
Our low income students are often the ones who need more time and practice to learn the concepts being taught, since many of them started school behind, lacking appropriate pre-school experiences. Instead of intensive reading instruction or hands-on learning experiences, the teachers must rush them through a curriculum of facts to get ready for the tests.
Grrrrrrr!

THen there’s “No Child Left” —though I don’t agree with much of what the fellow who coined that phrase (and the website www.nochildleft.org, I think)…
One thing I’ve realized through the years — it doesn’t matter how good an idea is, when it gets institutionalized, adminstrators have a way of mangling it. On the other hand, without people who know how to run things, we’d be up a creek (it’s just that so few adminstrators actually get to understand what the trenches are like, or are subject to political pressures so the kids get lost in the shuffle).

YIKES Sue, I read some of that site! It is whole language mecca. If you want to see what the other side thinks.

BTW, there is a PA lesson described that is so bad and mind numbing I would be against it too if it were presented that way!

—des

I will have to say, though, that no one much cared about the LD kids academic progress until NCLB. Because someone is now looking at those kids’ scores, the schools are actually having to think about offering them some research-based instruction! (Wow, what a novel idea! )

I’m sorry for the flaws in NCLB, but it is the first thing I’ve seen in the last 20 years that gives me hope that LD children just might have the chance to receive effective remediation.

Janis

I agree with Janis. After all, look at the other thread on this site where a mother was just told “Well, some children can’t learn”. Even a few stupid tests are better than that, aren’t they?

Yes, I’m afraid the “No Child Left” reasoning is that since testing would hold someone accountable, it must be a bad thing.
Only trouble with accountability is that sometimes it means that even more effort is taken away from teaching, in order to create a false appearance of progress. It’s sorta like the kiddoes who learn amazing strategies to mask their deficits, but they don’t really compensate for anything, they simply mask the deficit so even less is learned in the long run.

Though the whole point of NCLB is to get research based techniques in the classroom, but the *result* is goign to be mostly to get more testing into the schools.

I don’t think in and of itself that the testing would be a bad thing, if it really resulted in real accountability.

—des

We’ve been testing in Texas for over 10 years. What happens is Testing is all that is taught starting from kindergarten even though the first test isn’t until 3rd grade. The districts study each test (after they are released) and analyze what the questions are like, what areas they focus on, everything, document it and then work on it the next year. It happens gradually. You don’t notice it at first and then boom, you realize all that is happening in the classroom is test-prep.

NCLB only wants 5% of kids exempt from the testing. In my Aunt’s school, they house the district-wide special ed program of the most seriously handicapped - wheelchair bound with a developmental age of an infant. So that whole class is exempt, of course, but they took up the entire 5% so no one else in the school can be exempt, ie mostly mainstream special ed due to LDs for instance. So this year they had all these kids taking the test who didn’t in the past due to disabilities that were not as severe as others.