K-12 Teaching Standards and Cheating Administrators and Sources of Corruption.
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STATE OMITTING MINORITIES TEST SCORES
A loophole in the No Child Left Behind Act not mentioned:
An Associated Press computer analysis has found that nearly 2 million children whose scores aren't counted when it comes to meeting NCLBs requirement that schools track how students of different races perform on standardized tests. The AP found that states are helping public schools
escape potential penalties by skirting that requirement. And minorities -- who historically haven't fared as well as whites in testing -- make up the vast majority of students whose scores are excluded. The Education Department said that while it is pleased that nearly 25 million students nationwide are now being tested regularly under the law, it is concerned that the AP found so many students aren't being counted by schools in the required racial categories.Under the law signed by Bush in 2002, all public school students must be proficient in reading and math by 2014, although only children above second grade are required to be tested. Schools receiving federal poverty aid also must demonstrate annually that students in all racial categories are progressing or risk penalties that include extending the school year, changing curriculum or firing administrators and teachers. The law requires public schools to test more than 25 million students periodically in reading and math. No scores can be excluded from a school's overall measure. But the schools also must report scores by categories, such as race, poverty, migrant status, English proficiency and special education. Failure in any category means the whole school fails. States are helping schools get around that second requirement by using a loophole in the law that allows them to ignore scores of racial groups that are too small to be statistically significant. Suppose, for example, that a school has 2,000 white students and nine Hispanics. In nearly every state, the Hispanic scores wouldn't be counted because there aren't enough to provide meaningful information and because officials want to protect students' privacy. State educators decide when a group is too small to count. And they've been asking the government for exemptions to exclude larger numbers of students in racial categories. Nearly two dozen states have successfully petitioned the government for such changes in the past two years. As a result, schools can now ignore racial breakdowns even when they have 30, 40 or even 50 students of a given race in the testing population.
Patrick J. Buchanan: Corruption in the Schools
http://buchanan.org/blog/?p=682 3/07
Bush-Kennedy No Child Left Behind Act mandates "that all children should reach a proficient level of academic achievement by 2014."
Fifty years ago this October, Americans were jolted by the news that Moscow, one year after drowning the Hungarian Revolution in blood, had put an 80-pound satellite into Earth orbit.
In December, the U.S. Navy tried to replicate the feat. Vanguard got four feet off the ground and exploded, incinerating its three-pound payload. America was humiliated. Khrushchev was Man of the Year. Some of us yet recall the Vanguard newsreels and the humiliating laughter.
Stunned, America went to work to improve education in math and science, and succeeded. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores of high school seniors began to rise, reaching a high in 1964.
However, test scores for high-school students have been falling now for 40 years. In 1984, the Reagan administration issued "A Nation at Risk," documenting the deterioration of American public education.
More trillions of dollars were thrown at the problem. And if one judged by the asserted toughening up of courses and rising grades of seniors, it appeared we had made marvelous progress. On March 4, The Washington Times reported: "In 2005, 17 percent of graduates had completed a 'standard' curriculum, 41 percent completed a 'midlevel' curriculum, and 10 percent completed a 'rigorous' curriculum. Fifteen years earlier, the percentages were 9 percent (standard), 26 percent (midlevel) and 5 percent (rigorous). Grade point averages (GPA) increased, as
well. The average overall GPA increased from 2.68 in 1990 to 2.98 (virtually a B level) in 2005.
However, it is all a giant fraud, exposed as such by the
performances of high school seniors on the National Assessment of Educational Progress exams known as the "nation's report card." An NAEP test of 12th-grade achievement was given to what the New York Times called a "representative sample of 21,000 high school seniors attending 900 public and private schools from January to March 2005."
What did the tests reveal?
* Since 1990, the share of students lacking even basic reading skills has risen by a third, from 20 percent to 27 percent.
* Only 35 percent of high school seniors have reached a
"proficient" level in reading, down from 40 percent.
* Only 16 percent of black and 20 percent of Hispanic students had reached a proficient level in reading.
* Among high school seniors, only 29 percent of whites, 10
% of Hispanic students and 6 percent of black students were proficient in math.
This is only the half of it. Among the kids whose test scores on reading and math were not factored in were the 25 percent of white students and 50 percent of black and Hispanic kids who had dropped out by senior year. [see pushed out]
Factor the dropouts back in, and what the NAEP test suggests is that, of black kids starting in first grade, about one in eight will be able to read at the level of a high school senior after 12 years, and one in 33 will be able to do the math. Among Hispanic kids, one in 10 will be able to read at a high-school senior level, but only one in 20 will be able to do high-school math.
Why are so many Americans ignorant of the depths of failure of so many schools? As Sailor explains, it is due to government deceit. "Not surprisingly, practically ever single state cheats in order to meet the law" mandating a rising academic proficiency.
"For example, Mississippi ... recently declared that 89 percent of its fourth-graders were at least 'proficient' in reading.
"Unfortunately, however, on the federal government's impartial National Assessment of Education Progress test, only 18 percent of Mississippi students were 'proficient' or 'advanced.'"
Hence, a huge slice of the U.S. educational establishment is complicit in a monstrous fraud that, if you did it in business, would get you several years at the nearby minimum security facility.
This is corruption. Teachers are handing out grades kids do not deserve. States are dumbing down tests to make themselves look good. Voters are being deceived about how much kids are learning.
As the Washington Times noted, according to the Digest of Education Statistics, spending for public education, in constant (inflation-adjusted) dollars, rose from $6,256 a year per student before "A Nation at Risk" to $10,464 in the 2002-2003 school year.
Taxpayers are being lied to and swindled by the education industry, which has failed them, failed America and flunked its assignment - and should be expelled for cheating.
Education INDUSTRY Statistics
The Condition of Education 2007 report by the U.S. Department of Educations National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The general increases in credits earned since the early 1980s are, in large part, a product of more graduates taking more advanced courses. The Condition of Education is a congressionally mandated report that provides an annual statistical portrait of education in the United States. The 48 indicators included in the report cover all aspects of education, from student achievement to school environment and from early childhood through postsecondary education. The report shows that enrollment in U.S. public schools is becoming increasingly diverse. Minority students make up 42 percent of public school enrollment. Twenty percent of school-age children speak a language other than English at home. The rate of college enrollment immediately after high school increased from 49 percent in 1972 to 69 percent in 2005. About three-quarters of the freshman class graduated from public high schools on time in 200304.
Source U.S. Census
A HALF-CENTURY OF LEARNING: Historical Census Statistics on Educational Attainment in the United States, 1940 - 2000
Source: U.S. Census
2006 New Report, National Spending Per Student Rises to $8,287. U.S. public school districts spent an average of $8,287 per student in 2004, up from the previous year's total of $8,019. In all, public elementary and secondary education received $462.7 billion from federal, state and local sources in 2004, up 5.1 percent from 2003." Summary Direct to Federal, State, and Local Governments 2004 Public Elementary-Secondary Education Finance Data.
TAKE ADVANTAGE OF NCLB TUTORING
FEW CHILDREN TAKE ADVANTAGE OF NCLB TUTORING NYT
Four years after President Bush signed the landmark No Child Left Behind education law, vast numbers of students are not getting the tutoring that
the law offers as one of its hallmarks, reports Susan Saulny. In the nation's largest school district, New York City, fewer than half of the 215,000 eligible students sought the free tutoring, according to figures from the city's Department of Education for the school year that ended in June 2005. Yet New York's participation rate is better than the national
average: across the country, roughly two million public school students were eligible for free tutoring in the school year that ended in 2004, according to the most recent data from the Department of Education, yet only 226,000 -- or nearly 12 percent -- received help. City and state education officials and tutoring company executives disagree on the
reasons for the low participation and cast blame on each other. But they agree that the numbers show that states and school districts have not smoothed out the difficulties that have plagued the tutoring -- known as the supplemental educational services program -- from its start as a novel
experiment in educational entrepreneurship: largely private tutoring paid for with federal money. Officials give multiple reasons for the problems: that the program is allotted too little federal money, is poorly advertised to parents, has too much complicated paperwork for signing up, and that it has not fully penetrated the most difficult neighborhoods, where there are high concentrations of poor, failing students.