"No Child Left Behind," meet Reality

Quote of note:

"Parental choice in the abstract sounds great, but in the practical application if your child ends up in a school that is now grossly overcrowded, that's not so great for the child either," said Assemblyman Steven Sanders, a Manhattan Democrat who is chairman of the Education Committee.

Oh, hell, here's another. I'm feeling generous.

That list classified as failing 43 additional schools that receive federal poverty money and therefore fall under the transfer provision of the law. The list brought the total number of failing schools in the city to 497, or more than 40 percent. Because the federal government judges schools not only on how they fare overall but also on the performance of different segments of the school population, the list of failing schools includes schools with good reputations.

New York City Will Limit Chance to Leave Failing Schools
By ELISSA GOOTMAN

New York City, which last year allowed every child who wished to transfer out of a failing school to do so, will drastically reduce the number of students allowed to move this year, education officials said yesterday.

The decision comes after a year in which some principals complained that an influx of students transferring under a new federal law, No Child Left Behind, had overcrowded and undermined the city's more successful schools and run up millions of dollars in busing and other expenses.

Last year, city officials said, more than 7,000 students transferred to better schools. Next year, however, the city will probably allow fewer than 1,000 transfers, with priority going to poor children with low test scores.

The schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, said in a statement yesterday that "this year's plan to implement the transfer provisions of No Child Left Behind will provide increased educational opportunities for students in struggling schools, while ensuring that the transfer process does not destabilize other schools within the system.''

Posted by Prometheus 6 on July 17, 2004 - 10:12am :: Education
 
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I think the only two things I like about NCLB are:

1. School choice. It may cause chaos administratively at first, but kids in truly failing schools shouldn't have to wait a few years while administrators try to figure out how to make those schools better. Why should any children be in piss-poor schools just because their parents can't afford to move? Even if only a small fraction of those kids choose a different school, isn't it worth it?

2. The provision that makes schools report the test scores across different racial groups. Yes, "good" schools might find themselves on the "failing" list, but that's because they've been caught practicing latent discrimination. NCLB will root out the predominantly white schools where white kids do very well and minorities do very poorly. Or those where middle- and upper-middle-class kids do well and poor kids do poorly. Those schools will be forced to change their practice of offering different educations for different groups of kids.

The biggest problem with NCLB is that it doesn't address why bad schools are bad or why certain groups within an otherwise "good" school don't do well. So in the end, all this testing and reporting and accountability may end up not fixing anything.

Posted by  bhw (not verified) on July 17, 2004 - 9:51pm.