| February
21, 2004
"Is our
children learning?" Part II
By Erika Robles/HispanicVista.com
Since the 1970s, poor schools have been
in court fighting for equality, trying to
close the spending gap between rich and
poor public schools. Children from
low-income families are always more
expensive to educate as they don’t
always show up at school ready to learn.
Poor children more
often than not attend under funded
schools. These schools need the Title I
money –federal dollars dedicated to
economically disadvantaged students- to
survive. If one disaggregated subgroup
–African-American, Hispanic,
economically disadvantaged, special
needs- fails to show progress on the
standardized tests imposed by the NCLB
Act, the school is sanctioned and the
districts are required to spend 5 percent
of their Title I Part A allocation to
provide or pay for supplemental
educational services.
This all sounds very
nice and beneficial to the children who
need extra help, but with an already
under funded program, where are the
districts supposed to get the money from?
Under these new standards, already 28
percent of America’s schools in 2003
have “failed” to make
adequately yearly progress and many aren’t
receiving the additional support they
need to improve. David Shreve of the
National Conference of State Legislatures
estimates that 70 percent of all schools
will be labeled In Need of Improvement
(INOI) in the coming years
Fearing further funds reductions,
teachers now spend their time teaching
the kids the test, “this law has
taken away all the creative part of
teaching. We teach to the test. We’d
be idiots not to. But school, real
education, is not just about taking
tests. Teachers know that. And so do the
students. The politicians don’t,”
an elementary school principal in the
Mississippi Delta said.
These INOI schools are then required to
offer their students the option to
transfer to another public school that
did make adequate yearly progress (The
lowest achieving students from low-income
families -as determined by the district
for Title I allocation purposes- enjoy
priority), leaving those low-performing
schools with even less funds to improve.
In a study done by Harvard University
“The Civil Rights Project” (Feb
2004),in the school districts they
studied, “the NCLB transfer
provisions failed to provide economically
disadvantaged students with opportunities
to move to schools with high achievement
levels and low poverty rates.Schools that
were chosen to accept transfers didn’t
have substantially higher achievement
levels or lower poverty rates, on
average, than schools required to offer
the NCLB transfer option. As a result,
many students who transferred went from
one school with low achievement levels to
another with similarly low achievement
levels.”
Districts must provide transportation to
each student who requests a transfer,
adding up to the already tight budget.
Moreover, no one has given any attention
to what happens when large numbers of
children leave INOI schools for more
successful ones. The arriving students
could raise the average class size from
22 to 29 students. This alone could
easily transform a successful school into
a failing one. And what kinds of test
scores will the arriving students
bring? The legislation demands that
schools give priority to the neediest
students--those with the lowest test
scores. The arrival of large
numbers of low-scoring students might
well convert a successful school into a
failing one.
By the year 2014, all students (100%) are
expected to pass the state tests. If any
subgroup (special education, English as a
Second Language, low income, etc.) fails
to pass the test at the established
level, the school and/or district is put
on the Academic Early Warning System. .
(Military schools are exempted from the
requirements of the act).Some of the
provisions of NCLB seem unattainable.
Expecting that every child--no matter
what his intelligence or
environment--will meet the rigorous state
standards seems a bit far-fetched.
Children come to schools from all sorts
of backgrounds and with all levels of
intelligence, strengths and weaknesses.
Yet the best instruction in the world isn’t
going to help an emotionally troubled
child from a deprived environment succeed
or a child with an IQ of 80 performs at
grade level.
Answering Bush’s widely quoted
question: “Is our children learning?”
Yes. At least some of them “is”.
Wealthy schools that do not depend on
Title I funds will continue to provide
kids with an enriched curriculum and
learning experiences. The ones who are
not are the “neediest” children
Bush said he wanted to help.
Finally, I’d like to congratulate
Karl Rove for coming up with such sweet
names for such machination acts. (See
also “Patriot Act”)
__________________________________________________
Erika Robles, a
contributing columnist to
HispanicVista.com (www.hispanicvista.com),
is a writer and translator now living in Eugene,
Oregon. She was educated in Mexico City; London,
England; and Melbourne, Australia.
Contact at: erikare77@hotmail.com.
Web page: http://www.geocities.com/oakspublishing
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