Lesson Plans and Classroom Resources for Teaching To Standards Page 1
PAGE 2 LEARN ABOUT YOUR STATE TEACHING STANDARDS BY SUBJECT AREA
Teaching to State Standards
"Everyone has the right to education."
Article 26 Universal Declaration of Human Rights December 10 1948
Silver and gold will rot away but a good education will never decay.
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THE MEME POOLHAVE YOUR OWN MEME? What Is a Meme? |
- How the Brain Works or how to Improve Thinking?- Multiple Intelligences- Lead and Learning
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Iowa is the only state that does not have state standards or statewide same testing. We use the Iowa Test of Basic skills and then we either buy or develop our own that get approved from the state. They use the National Science Standards in the science department and most other departments use their national standards too.
The Fulbright Commission, admits that the UK high school education system is superior to the American one.. In this advice to British Academic's on exchange visits to the USA the commission implies that UK junior high is equivalent to US senior high. The US High School System was orignially modeled on that of Scotland.
The Scottish 'High School Diploma' - known as the 'Higher
Examinations' are taken at age 17 and used instead of SAT to test student ability for college. It's taken in 5 to 8 subjects (you would need passes a A or B in 7 for a place and Scottish 'Ivy League' such as Glasgow or Edinburgh)
Some sample MODERN - this year, examination papers.
It's is directly comparable to a US High School Diploma.
- Maths <> Chemistry <> Accounts and Finance <> French <> Georgraphy <> Politics
- Certification exam for American teachers from 1895
2007
NCLB PUBLIC DEBATE Ask the Office of Communications and Outreach any questions:
Director, Intergovernmental Affairs -- Rogers Johnson, (202) 401-0026, mailto:Rogers.Johnson@ed.govDeputy Director -- Marcie Ridgway, (202) 401-6359, mailto:Marcie.Ridgway@ed.gov
Program Analyst -- Adam Honeysett, (202) 401-3003, mailto:Adam.Honeysett@ed.gov
MAJORITY WOULD LIKE "NO CHILD" LAW LEFT BEHIND
Nearly two-thirds of American adults want Congress to re-write or outright abolish the landmark No Child Left Behind Act that mandates nationwide testing of elementary students to determine if public schools are performing adequately. Opposition is especially high among people most familiar with the law, according to a survey of 1,010 adults. Controversy about the law has grown in recent months as Congress begins the debate on whether to re-authorize the measure that President Bush has touted is one of the most important achievements of his administration. Dissent against reauthorization has developed within President Bushs own party. Fifty-two Republican House members and five GOP senators are calling for a repeal of the law in favor of a more flexible system of achievement standards to be negotiated between the U.S. Department of Education and individual states. Only about a third of poll respondents said they think the law has had a positive influence on public education while slightly less than half said it has had a negative impact and a fifth were undecided.
Ask the Office of Communications and Outreach with any questions:
Director, Intergovernmental Affairs -- Rogers Johnson, (202) 401-0026, mailto:Rogers.Johnson@ed.gov
Deputy Director -- Marcie Ridgway, (202) 401-6359, mailto:Marcie.Ridgway@ed.gov
Program Analyst -- Adam Honeysett, (202) 401-3003, mailto:Adam.Honeysett@ed.gov
2007 The Education Research $ Gravy Train questioned!!
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-04-10-education-science_N.htm
More than five years after President Bush's No Child Left Behind law told educators to rely on "scientifically based" methods, the science produced is often inconclusive, politically charged or less than useful for classroom teachers. And when it is useful, it often is misused or ignored altogether, reports Greg Toppo in USA TODAY. As the 88th annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) takes place this week in Chicago, critics say the USA's huge community of education researchers -- 14,000 are attending -- often studies topics that do little to help schools solve practical problems such as how to train teachers, how to raise skills, how to lower dropout rates and whether smaller classes really make a difference. Others defend AERA's work and that of researchers in general but say the patchwork system of public schools makes it hard even for relevant research to reach the classroom.
2006 REFORM
NCLB - C-SPAN - No longer works -- http://inside.c-spanarchives.org:8080/cspan/cspan.csp?command=dprogram&record=195639523
The No Child Left Behind Act 4/13/06
American Enterprise Institute hosted a controlled, polite, dog and pony show that should have been made available as a video podcast but that is just too much to expect from education officials, examples of all the education officials left behind.
The No Child Left Behind Act by the American Enterprise Institute - Washington, District of Columbia (United States)
ID: 192042 - 04/13/2006 -www.aei.org, www.ed.gov,
Haycock, Kati Director, Education Trust
Hess, Frederick M. Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute,
Education Packer, Joel Manager, National Education Association, Elem.& Second.Educ. Policy
Hickok, Eugene W. Deputy Secretary (2004-, Department of Education
Cain, Alice Johnson Senior Aide, House Education & Workforce Committee, Education
Petrilli, Michael J. Vice President, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, National Programs and Policy
Frederick Hess and Michael Petrilli discuss their book No Child Left Behind Primer, published by Peter Lang in February 2006, and what the future holds for the No Child Left Behind Act. In this citizen's guide to a complex law they trace the origins of the act, explain how it's many provisions work, and identify the effects of-and challenges to-its implementation. They are joined in a panel discussion moderated by Frederick Hess to discuss the future of the law that is due for reauthorization in 2007. The panelists are: Kati Haycock, director of The Education Trust;
Alice Johnson Cain, senior education aide to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce;
Joel Packer, manager of NCLB policy at the National Education Association; and former Deputy Secretary of Education Eugene Hickok (originally a PA Dept. of Ed lawyer who worked for PA Gov. Ridge and that is how he got to Washington)
Facts from the show included:
1) 68 out of 100 kids graduate High School - almost 1/4 of the children drop out.
2) fewer than 1/2 of all minority read well at fourth grade.
3) 70% of children in all high school children are taught math by teachers that do not have any credentials to teach math.
4) Failing schools are getting Supplemental Services which is really stealing what money is available to schools to pay for what Hickok called "free" tutoring which isn't getting funded at all. Politics are driven by the election cycle and the emphasis on education started behind policy is the desire to OWN education policy in politics but not to do anything much about it if you can't stay in office long enough to get anything done. Hickok came to the office because of 9-11 when he went with the PA governer to the head up the dept. of Homeland Security. The "American Dream is the eradication of the Achievement Gap" ~ Hickok, but his concern is that the standards policy will erode away. Reauthorization of the standards (funding) will be up again for radication in 2007 when 58% of the local LEA's will lose title 1 funding.
September 18, 2006
To members of the Aspen Institute’s Commission on No Child Left Behind
My name is Marion Brady, and I live in Cocoa, Florida. I’ve spent the last seventy-four years in education as a student, high school teacher, college professor, county-level administrator, publisher consultant, writer of journal articles, textbooks, professional books and newspaper columns, and visitor to classrooms across America and abroad.
You may or may not be surprised to hear me say that No Child Left Behind is an educational train wreck..
I’m no defender of pre-NCLB public education. When the legislation took shape, although the education train was still on the track, it was barely moving. What it had going for it was mostly potential. Thoughtful educators were pointing out that General Systems Theory as it had emerged from World War II, and research clarifying how the brain organizes information, could, together, move student intellectual performance to levels not previously thought possible. The train was creeping, but it was going in the right direction.
The unduly alarmist 1983 publication of “A Nation At Risk” stopped it cold. Fearful leaders of business and industry pushed educators aside, took control of “reform” and, working through politicians, set the train in motion. Backwards. Really fast.
A wreck was inevitable. Picking through the present pileup as it settles into place, questions for those now in charge arise: CONTINUE
Cheating Administrators
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.
ABOUT CURRICULUM STANDARDS top
Yale Child Study Center says 6 out of every 1,000 preschoolers are expelled each year. Could the reason be all about making preschool more about academics than about socialization and constructive play? Preschools feel the pressure to bump up the academic portion of their programs to better prepare students for kindergarten. For many, though, the push comes too young and the result is frustration and inappropriate behavior. "Maybe Preschool Is the Problem." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/weekinreview/22stein.html
HARD SCIENCE EXPLAINS WHY PLAY IS IMPORTANT
LEARN ABOUT YOUR STATE STANDARDS BY SUBJECT AREA
WHO SETS THESE STANDARDS? top
The Brookings Institution, 1775 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington DC 20036
Telephone: (202) 797-6000 | Facsimile: (202) 797-6004
AWASH IN A SEA OF STANDARDS By Robert J. Marzano and John S. Kendall
Mid-continent Regional Educational Laboratory, Inc. 1998 Abstract Whole Article
Where Did We Get Our Standards? top
No Child Left Behind Act is wasteful and utopian, & no different from other programs, but it requires States to develop uniform curricula for gifted, bright, bright normal, normal, dull normal, morons, imbeciles, and idiots alike.
Most educators cite the 1983 report A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) as the starting point for the current emphasis on education standards. Who will soon forget the chilling words often quoted from that report: "The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people. . . We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament" (p. 5). The concern about the viability of our education system engendered by A Nation at Risk eventually led to the first education summit in September, 1989, during which President Bush and the nation's governors agreed upon six broad goals under the title The National Education Goals Report: Building a Nation of Learners (National Education Goals Panel [NEGP], 1991). (The initial set of goals was expanded to eight goals in 1994). Implicit and explicit in these goal statements was the mandate for American educators to identify rigorous standards regarding what students should know and be able to do in core academic areas. Subject-matter organizations quickly mobilized to establish content standards in their respective areas. Most groups looked to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) for guidance, given the success of their document, Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics. Many of the subject-matter groups were funded by the U.S. Department of Education. To date, standards documents have been published by virtually every national subject-matter organization. Exhibit 1 lists those documents considered the official standards documents in their subject areas.
teaching to state standards, state educational standards, state teaching standard
H.R. 1804 GOALS 2000: EDUCATE AMERICA ACT
www.achieve.org is the nonprofit creation of a group of business CEOs and the National Governors' Association that is currently co-chaired by IBM's chief executive officer, Louis V. Gerstner Jr., and Gov. Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin. Among other things, Achieve is busily posting state standards in English, math, science, and social studies. Building on pioneering work with the Mid-continent Regional Education Laboratory, or McREL, in Aurora, Colo., the standards of each state are "normalized." In simple English, this means that at this moment, 40 states' standards (and one foreign country's) are rendered in comprehensible and comparable "chunks." For example, you can call up all geometry standards for grades 6-8 for a given state. Each state or country can be compared with another in a very useful, side-by-side screen presentation.
Fuzzy Standards by Ferdi Serim
"What we're really measuring is seat time, not ownership of knowledge".
Heritage Foundation's "backgrounder" was at: http://www.heritage.org/heritage/library/backgrounder/bg1200.html
In what the Heritage Foundation calls "Backgrounder" papers, Nina Shokrail, the author, raises the issue of whether the United States Congress should overhaul the Federal Regional Education Laboratories.
She concludes that "Members of Congress interested in streamlining the federal role in education should examine the research conducted in OERI laboratories and demand more accountability in return for the approximately $50 million the labs receive from the federal government every year."
The funding actually goes to well-paid professionals functioning as middlemen, sitting in comfortable offices distant from the classroom, and devoting much of their energy to ensuring that their federal gravy train does not halt on the tracks.
Some of the things wrong with the lab she says are:
- the questionable quality and value of the research:
- " But a 1997 District and State Survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Education found that nearly half of the states and districts that had contact with regional labs found them to be of little or no help in understanding or implementing comprehensive standards-based reform. 21 "
- lack of objectivity,
- the promotion of fads,
- flaws in research,
- failed reform by the Office of Assistance and Dissemination (ORAD) in 1994 (designed primarily to guide and monitor the activities of the regional educational laboratories) by the lobbying efforts of the Council on Educational Development and Research (CEDaR) initially established to represent the interests of these labs.
- A June 1993 analysis of OERI and its labs by Maris Vinovskis, former Research Advisor to the Assistant Secretary at OERI and currently a professor at the Department of History and Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan says,"Labs have different methods of evaluation and place different degrees of importance on research. Yet all use the term "research-based" to describe the programs they promote, even though "[they] don't have the luxury of running controlled experiments," as Wesley Hoover, President and CEO of the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, admits. 29 At the same time, "Direct Instruction," a program which uses memorization and drill and has been proven to be effective in boosting the academic outcomes of disadvantaged students, 30 is not widely distributed or prominently featured by the labs because it is not interesting to the teachers who have to use it. "[The] program will not work," claims Hoover, because "75 percent of teachers in our Elementary schools come from a whole language background. You need something else that `walks them through Direct Instruction.'"
- " The Mid-Continent Regional Educational Laboratory (McREL) emphasizes working "collaboratively with its clients to improve educational policy and practice through the application of knowledge from research, development, and experience." 36 It has produced some useful policy papers, but many are little more than a catalog of research, without adequate attention given to the quality of the work or the diversity of material in the field. 37
- In addition, there are serious flaws in the way the lab tallied the results of a questionnaire it sent to local public school superintendents in the seven states it serves. Although the overall response rate was only 40 percent and varied among the states, the analysts simply grouped all of the returns together to get an overall regional profile. 38
Vinovskis concluded that after spending $811 million of taxpayer money between 1966 and 1991, the labs had little to show for it by way of success.
Warren Buffett's gift of $31 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will double the foundation's assets, bringing it to more than $60 billion, and will increase its annual giving to nearly $3 billion. Never before has an individual given such a large amount of money to someone else's foundation, writes Diane Ravitch. Never before has a private foundation had assets of this dimension. Never before has any individual or foundation had so much power to direct the course of American education, which is one of the primary interests of the Gates Foundation. Educators are waiting with bated breath to see which direction this multibillion-dollar behemoth will take.Diane Ravitch National Standards in American Education A Citizen's Guide
Andrew J. Coulson Market Education: The Unknown History
Are Public Schools Hazardous To Public Education? EDUCATION WEEK "COMMENTARY"APRIL 7TH, 1999
Review of Market Education By Myron Lieberman THE WEEKLY STANDARD, MAY 10, 1999 (p. 35) School’s Out The Case for Competition By Myron Lieberman
Teacher Training
How smart is the teacher?
NCATE Task Force on Technology and Teacher Education
The Standards Development Committee of the NPT Project is now drafting performance-based elementary education standards. For a synopsis of the NPT Standards Development Project, written by Emerson Elliott, director of the NPT Standards Development Project, order the Spring 1997 issue of Quality Teaching.
Teacher Training Agency (TTA) is in England and Whales.
The Association for Information Technology in Teacher Education has a national curriculum for initial teacher training. Annex B is the section which identifies the national standards for the use of ICT in subject teaching. These are also the standards or Expected Outcomes required of practising teachers who undertake the national training programme (NOF - New Opportunities Fund)
Teacher Quality: A Report on
Teacher Preparation and Qualifications of Public School Teachers
A survey examining preservice learning and teaching, continued learning, and supportive work environments.
Investing in Teachers AND Developmental Projects
** ANOTHER POINT OF VIEW -- TESTING AND ASSESSMENT
NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND
NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND
Alan Haskvitz writes: "Only one tenth of the 76.7 million school children attend private school which means that public school performance will continue to be a leading indicator of real estate values.
I encourage you to take a long look at NCLB and decide if you should be involved in supporting it or changing it or eliminating it. There is a lot, literally and figuratively, at stake here both for your children and your finances. And, of course, as more parents think they can avoid public school problems by going to private schools remember the supply and demand lessons from your first economics class and note that those tuitions have increased steadily. You might also seek to find out what you are getting for your money. For example, a very expensive private school in California charges $25,000 a year for day students. Despite this high fee the school's website reports that the just over 80 percent received 3 or better on their AP exams even with class sizes well under 20. As a comparison at least one public high school in the Seattle area district had 89 percent score 3 or better on AP tests and many other public schools report superior scores. In the district I teach in one school did better in the AP calculus test than any other school in the world. So it is essential that parents do no associate expensive schools with high test scores." source
WHO IS RIGHT ABOUT EDUCATION REFORM?
Stanford Alumni Magazine asked two experts for their perspectives on school reform and NCLB testing and accountability policies. Terry Moe says that a consensus of policymakers believes that public schools are not delivering the goods. Why are our public schools so difficult to improve? The answer, he says, rests with two fundamental problems that stand in the way of progress. The first is a problem of incentives. The second is a problem of power. The education system is literally not organized to be effective, yet it can only be reformed through politics, and political power is stacked in favor of employee groups that staunchly defend traditional arrangements. Gerald W. Bracey writes that Americans uncritically accept gloomy statistics about their public schools. He writes that NCLB is to education as Katrina was to New Orleans. He never believed that this law is the idealistic, well-intentioned but poorly executed program that many claim it to be. NCLB aims to shrink the public sector, transfer large sums of public money to the private sector, weaken or destroy two Democratic power bases -- the teachers unions -- and provide vouchers to let students attend private schools at public expense.
NCLB: State and Local Report Cards outline the
information and data that state education agencies are required to disseminate as required by No Child Left Behind.
Official NCLB site.
http://www.ed.gov/nclb/overview/intro/execsumm.html
Three days after taking office in January 2001 as the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush announced No Child Left Behind, his framework for bipartisan education reform that he described as
"the cornerstone of my Administration." President Bush emphasized his deep belief in our public schools, but an even greater concern that "too many of our neediest children are being left behind," despite the nearly $200 billion in Federal spending since the passage of the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA). The President called for bipartisan solutions based on accountability, choice, and flexibility in Federal education programs.
Less than a year later, despite the unprecedented challenges of engineering an economic recovery while leading the Nation in the war on terrorism following the events of September 11, President Bush secured passage of the landmark No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB Act). The new law reflects a remarkable consensus-first
articulated in the President's No Child Left Behind framework-on how to improve the performance of America's elementary and secondary schools while at the same time ensuring that no child is trapped in a failing school.
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.
BONNIE BRACEY SUTTONtop
See the Complete List of her Essays
- BAD TEACHER
- TEACHERS AND TECHNOLOGY
- FIRST GEEKS NTA BRIEFING AT THE WHITE HOUSE
- PITY THE POOR TEACHER IN AMERICA
- TWO VIEWS ON IMPROVING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR TEACHERS
- Infusing Technology into P-12 Education A Perspective on Schools Being Wired
- Rescuing Our Schools from Tougher Standards
