Why No Child Left Behind is a Good Law

It is obvious that you are a lawyer and not an educator.Just because a policy was wrong in the ‘70’s doesn’t ment that its antithesis corrects that policy. I’m not going to debate you because it is obvious you care about law, not the child. No Child… is very harmful to children who would benefit from being “left behind.” If you can’t figure that out, I question your intentions writing the article and representing your plaintiffs. PL-142 eliminated discrimination. No Child.. brought it back. And my reasons are directed to each child as an individual.. Yours are directed to the group. No point in trying to treason with you-you’d never understand

In your perspective, you may have many problems with NCLB… lots of us do! However, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a legal side to it as well - worth reading about. You seem to have concluded that there’s no way to get good from the law… so please, feel free to hold that opinion, but I hope you don’t mind that I’d be interested in hearing a second opinion (from somebody with a solid history of doing good to - yes, honestly - individual children- with the law).

The article mentions specific benefits to specific individuals, using NCLB. I guess it can be used, then, by people who are willing to bother to read and learn.

School administrators have special skills in taking laws to protect and serve and subverting them to serve their own wants. It often takes a lawyer to subvert that subversion.

Before you bash and flame folks, you might want to read a little more.

Although I am violating my own advice about replying to a post which falls under the realm of “under-bridge dwellers” I will briefly reply to your post…

No, I am not a lawyer, I am an accountant, and a good part of my job entails auditing. As such, I work with cost-benefit evaluations, which does indeed give me a different perspective than some about the value of providing appropriate services to children with extraordinary needs.

I am also the parent of a beautiful red-headed boy, autistic non-verbal, who was denied his FAPE by an LEA which cared more about buying new football uniforms and giving raises to administrative personnel than they did giving him the type of program which has proven to be successful with children who have his condition. I wish I could have sued the schools to provide compensatory services from a private provider who actually was trained and experienced to work with young autists. In my boy’s situation, his mother and I were forced to vacate our right to litigation because we refused to leave him in their care for the length of time necessary to exhaust the internal administrative corrective measures because in the 10 weeks they had him his behaviors deteriorated to the point he was getting out of control. Despite the fact that we chose to go it alone with him, conversations I had with parents of other autistic children who left their children in my LEA’s care has confirmed that we made the right choice for my son’s well being. He has passed every other autistic child we know in my town (18 and counting) in both cognition and communication, including those who were higher functioning than he to begin with (4 of the 18 have now been placed into residential care, including one child who is only 8 years old; I cannot say that what the schools have done to him are responsible, but knowing the teacher that poor child had, I can say she did nothing to help).

The brief history of Federally mandated Sped services has seen Congress attempt to steer the States into providing the quality of instruction that children such as my son and yours with the quality of services needed for them to maximize their potential. The States have done a very poor job overall, and the fact that we have come to the point of NCLB’s necessity speaks far more about this than any words I may write here.

NCLB is NOT the “antithesis” to IDEA, it actually (for the most part) lines up very well with the intent of IDEA, just as IDEA ‘97 augmented the original IDEA. What NCLB does is finally put a little teeth into the ovesight of what the States are doing.

Under IDEA, the States played fast and loose with the data which could be used to measure the output of the services they provided. One example is the over-reliance on the 2-year discrepancy formula to qualify students for services. By using this gatekeeper, schools could drag their heels with those children who were struggling with reading, and thereby miss the window of greatest opportunity to take advantage of brain plasticity, which drops off sharply about age 8 (typically 3rd grade). By forcing the states to demonstrate that children around that age are on track with “the herd”, it can push them to indentify children needed extra attention earlier.

Another example is the dreaded social promotion, which despite what some “feel-gooders” may wish to believe actually does not work any better from the child’s perspective than simple retention (those “experts” who claim otherwise generally have a vested interest in the status quo). Social promotion is actually geared more towards “teacher’s esteem” than the child’s esteem (anyone who does not understand that a child who knows all too well that they cannot read or do the math but gets promoted to drop out age regardless is being set up for lifetime problems is invited to discuss this particular idea at greater length).

NCLB was designed and put into place as a Bi-partisan effort of Congress and the Bush Administration because our National leaders know all to well that failing to teach a child basic literacy is simply creating fodder for lifetime dependancy upon public assistance or prepping yet another body for incarceration. The days that a person who cannot read can get a blue collar job that will support a family are gone in America. We no longer have the luxury of only teaching the A and B students; we continue to move into a high-tech informational society, and those who cannot achieve 8th grade achievement will be effectively disenfranchised from the American Dream.

Many of the problems currently associated with NCLB are not in fact intrinsic to the law, but stem from the States’ interpretations of what they need to do to avoid penalty. Teaching to the test is one example - no where does it state anything like that, nor is there a National curricula requirement; each State sets its own standards.

Nowhere in NCLB does it eliminate the individualized attention dictated by IDEA. It does recognize that the goal of IDEA is not to lead children to an early plaeau (the soft prejudice of low expectations) but the goal is to help those students overcome their social disadvantages and/or disabilities and achieve basic proficiency. The fact that NCLB introduces the notion of “scientifically validated methods” to the Federal mandate is one of the greatest things to happen to Sped students since PL 94-142. I think it is tragic that the Supreme Court decided that the schools should be assumed to be using appropriate methods when the history of their output over the last 30 years stands at odds with that precept.

NCLB also directly addresses the problem of “less-than-qualified” personnel being placed into the classroom, again overwhelmingly in the poor, inner city (minority) schools and in the Sped programs. In 2001 NYC was found to have 25% of their teachers uncertified, with a whopping 38% of Sped teachers being so. Just last fall DC was found to have 22% of their teachers uncertified, some never having been to college at all. To me, that is unnaceptable.

Oh, and by the way, I did not write this piece. It was produced by the team at Wrightslaw, who, although admittedly lawyers, have proven themselves to be some of the hardest working and successful advocates for children with LD’s and other disabilities we have in the US.

Have a nice day…

I stand corrected. I thought (as our President did), you were implying that NO with the emphasis on NO, child should be left behind. Sorry :(

I do believe that NO child should be left behind. Each child is worthy of the attention it will take to bring them as close to basic proficiency as possible, with just a very few exceptions. I do not believe in accepting predetermined early plateau, nor do I believe that we should cut our losses and accept assigning children to the allowable loss column before we have made every effort to reach, remediate and recover.

In the long run, it is cheaper to pay tens of thousands attempting to elevate all children even if we only reach half than it is do do little and pay hundreds of thousands for incarceration and disability residential placement.

“A society is best judged by the manner in which they treat those member least able to serve themselves” - M Ghandi

We’ll have to agree to disagree. I too have an LD chid. I am also a teacher who gets all the LD students in the grade mainstreamed into my class as requested by the LD teachers. There are external factors that can not be controlled by $ or teaching that make retention the best option for a student. The deficiencies may or may not be academic proficiency.

We’ll have to agree to disagree. I too have an LD child. I am also a teacher who gets all the LD students in the grade mainstreamed into my class as requested by the LD teachers. There are external factors that can not be controlled by $ or teaching that make retention the best option for a student. The deficiencies may or may not be academic proficiency.

Retention isn’t the same thing as being left behind. It’s a different issue.

An awful lot of children are left behind when expectations are lowered or just removed. It doesn’t have anything to do with what grade they’re placed in.

gotcha-checked out the site

In fact, with the Superintendent’s permission, I was the only teacher in the school who taught heterogeneous classes. I taught to the top. Of course. I was resented by the other teachers.

[quote:0e421bd1da=”Sue”]Retention isn’t the same thing as being left behind. It’s a different issue.

An awful lot of children are left behind when expectations are lowered or just removed. It doesn’t have anything to do with what grade they’re placed in.[/quote]

In fact, children got left behind most commonly by being pushed ahead despite failing. Dimple retention doesn’t work, but social promotion is not one whit better. What we need are more aggressive identification of problems at as early an age as possible and then target the deficits with proven programs and therapies.

Too many people think that standardized testing is the answer, when in truth, the tests are typically so slanted, that they result in low expectations and misplaced class levels.
I blame the over-reliance on these tests to be primary obstacle in NCLB.

I agree… I remember dealing with admins who wanted a policy that no special ed child could get a failing grade. Period. I had middle schoolers who *needed* the message that I expected them to work and learn. (For both of them, it worked.)
The bad side was that they’d work their way into regular ed classes, and pass… but regular ed teachers tended to be reluctant to fail the LD kids, but also had no idea how to teach them.
Garnett’s article on INclusion on this site has some excellent insights about the realities of students doing butt time and thinking that’s what school is about.

H ow about the teachers who give the LD kids who do nothing all quarter a C grade because they behaved themselves?

A lot of them end up here at teh Community College, sincerely expecting the same… not necessarily an LD issue, but if there’s LD on top of “they passed me for behaving” then you get the “Well, if I behave ***and*** try, they have to pass me!” belief.
The sad part is that they’ve come by it so honestly. It’s what teachers have taught them.