No Child Gets Ahead March 13, 2005 Lauren How underfunded is your state for No Child Left Behind? The National Priorities Project can tell you. My state, Indiana, is actually doing quite well compared to some other states. It is only underfunded by $167 million. via Shari
Jesus God. Reckless freaking abandon. I was already seething about this the other morning. That’s just disgusting. And of course, here in Lafayette, we’re closing four city schools, and building three or four more in the “county” district. The superintendent of LSC was quoted just today as saying “Well, TSC (the county schools) won’t give us students, because they’d lose funding.” It’s amazing how important self-interest is, even to a piddly little position like school board. They won’t move their students to another district despite how much sense it makes, becuase it lessens their district’s income, which is to say it lessens the power wielded by the board. And any talk of consolidation or something is immediately squashed, becuase that would put school board members out of work. Is there a way we can take this shit to court or something? It just seems to be as idiotic locally as the feces-riddled policy coming out of Washington. So Lauren, sweetie, do you have a way to manually add a TrackBack? I *swear* I properly tried to ping your post about the plants through the form I use to add items to my blog. But when I checked back to see if the TB ping had registered, nothing had shown up on your post. I did, as always, include links in the body copy, but… *sigh* I guess it’s one more thing to go troubleshoot, eh? Peace 🙂
Chuck use: http://www.aylwardfamily.com/content/tbping.asp As for the No Child programme. All attempts at positive inclusion are invariably a disaster and actually self-defeating. No child left behind can be reworded as ‘No child gets ahead’. Rather than pushing the quality of education forward, it holds everyone back. Rather than streaming education and classes by ability so the brightest stars can shine, it bundles everyone into the same class, this leaves the intelligent children feeling bored, and it makes the less intelligent more self-conscious that they have sawdust from brains. Still it is no consolation to you but the british system is going down the pan just as quickly these days. One can apply some blame to some facets of feminism – which has made education more modularised and more coursework-oriented, supposedly to make it more girl-friendly, a lot to all the political correctness crowd, some more to spineless politicians, and a whole heap to those people too incompetent to do real jobs that they become beauracrats and keep making more beauracrats to solve the mistakes they made, who make more things worse, so they make more beauracrats to fix it.. and so on.
Hmmm, here in Virginia, we were supposed to have gotten $409million and only got $224. Nice. Like Monjo said, it’s more appropriately named “No Child Gets Ahead” for all the reasons already stated in the post. My son is in kindergarten, where they now have the SOL’s, and they do teach directly to the test, even if some of the kids don’t quite get it. It’s frustrating because the teacher isn’t allowed to take those kids aside and catch them up by working with them harder, etc., and the kids who are ahead have to stick around and do busy work while the other kids figure the stuff out.