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Originally Posted by Ponine
The parents whom send their children, or will, to this school in 05/06 are notified that their school is now program improvement, and they have the option to move their children to another school.
Great.. so the families with the abilites to take their children elsewhere, will. Leaving behind the kids who might not have the parent support, and I feel thereby, decreasing the schools chances to get out of T1:PI.
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Bingo! That's what is happening here and it happened immediately. The schools that were initially in trouble are now severely in trouble, like ghost towns. The savvy parents took their kids and split. The kids that are left have no real parental support, are often the most poor, or don't speak English. The kids whose parents paid attention, volunteered in the schools, etc., all split, taking their kids and their support with them.
The high school kids (maybe middle schoolers, too, I'm not sure) get paid Trimet busfare, so they are bused in to better high schools. My neighborhood high school is the second more desirable school in Portland. The parents are involved, the kids are generally good kids, no campus trouble, and educationally a strong school There's a huge Trimet bus stop/transit center near us, and everyday I see the NCLB kids (I'm estimating about 100 of them) after school everyday waiting for buses to head back to their neighborhoods and these kids look just like the kids that already went to the high school. I guess what I'm delicately trying to say is that these kids are well-dressed, well-behaved, and um.....primarily white.
Edit: Also, when the district report card came out last month, our high school's enrollment had increased by more than 100 kids, and the overall GPA had only dropped by .04%. And test scores were largely unchanged. These kids who transferred from the troubled high schools have pretty much the same test scores and grades as the kids at our local high school
Are these the kids NCLB was written for?
I'm a substitute teacher and have been to several of the hollowed out schools this year. There are no parents around. There are no fund-raisers planned. There is a feeling of resignation in the air and in general, these schools are not pleasant places to be.
The funding is not there to support these schools, the staff, the students. It's so frustrating to see Special Education budgets get slashed federally, state-wide and then locally (remember, I'm a special ed teacher). Today in the paper, I read that the district will mostly lose $600K in support services for English Language Learners. The school that is in the most dire need/trouble is going to lose 35 staff members next year. Not because they're not good teachers (they'll most likely be re-assigned, then those with seniority will keep their jobs, while they bump out newer teachers), but because the staff-child ratio is too high. Teachers will be moved all over the district and they're proposing to cut 335 staff positions.
Now, of course, not all of that is due to NCLB, but it sure doesn't seem to help. It puts un-due and un-realistic standards in place....teachers are literally teaching to the test. I see it everytime I'm in a school. All I hear is fourth grade teachers sweating ten year olds on test taking skills. It's awful!
I don't see how NCLB is a good thing. Can someone point me in the direction of a district that is flourishing with this mandate? I've done a ton of searches, but the news is all bad it seems.
This wasn't at all what I was going to write....I had some different sites I've been looking at that I was going to comment on, but Ponine hit on the point that's been at the heart of all my concerns over NCLB. Savvy parents are pulling their kids and their support out of struggling schools and the schools are just tanking further. It's such a frustrating downward spiral, and yet I don't see a way out of it as long as NCLB exists.