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On 6/14/09, Mr. Ed/7th/GA wrote:
I have
> watched as NCLB has seriously impacted the gifted program
> at my school.

You're lucky that it's just "seriously impacted" the gifted
program. In Illinois, most of those programs are long gone.
You can still find some sputtering gifted programs in the
wealthiest districts that chose to fund them on their own, but
state funding went away for those programs several years ago.

All the emphasis in NCLB is on the bottom of
> the pile. All the smaller classes are focused on the
> bottom of the pile.

It depends on where you are. I'm a Special Ed administrator.
While state and federal law requires a certain level of
service. However, most of my kids are written off by High
School because they are not going to pass the ACT/PSAE, which
is our state AYP test. It's a college acceptance test and
we're giving to to kids who read at the 4th grade level. Yeah,
more than 90% of our kids with IEPs don't meet standards every
year.

> The middle learners, the majority of
> the students we teach are packed into the largest classes,
> receive much less intervention and extension in the
> classroom and suffer under NCLB.

Now my experience has been that any discretionary spending has
been spent on them. The lower end students, both sped and
non-sped have been written off. The higher end students are
going to meet or exceed state standards anyway, so they don't
get much, but the middle kids are the ones you can impact. So,
it's drill-baby-drill to do well on the test... and not much
else. It doesn't matter if the kids don't know there was a
World War II, as long as they have the vocab and reading skills
to pass the test.

In any event, I think we can agree that NCLB is terrible. It's
an attempt by non-education people to quantify something
unquantifiable like education. The Bush Administration was
very business minded. They wanted to look at education like a
business and quantify learning into something concrete, like
percentages. So, School A is fine because X% are
meeting/exceeding AYP standards, and School B is doing poorly
because Y% are not meeting standards. Easy, simple.... but wrong.

Also, NCLB was an attempt to subvert money to private,
RELIGIOUS schools, which the Right-wingers who wrote the bill
love. Ultimately, they'd love to send their wealthy,
Christian, mostly-white children to a Christian school with
other white Christians and have it paid for with a government
voucher. Then public schools can become the "Medicaid" or
County Hospitals of education. A place for poor, mostly-brown
people to learn how to operate a cash register or lawn mower
and receive basic, sub-par education. This is the ultimate
goal of NCLB.

The quality of middle
> learner education has seriously eroded as the time goes by
> with us strapped by NCLB.
>
> At the top of the pile sre the gifted students, the
> students with the most potential and the students who have
> the best chance of being our movers and shakers in this
> upcoming generation. All research shows that gifted
> students need smaller classes where they receive continual
> motivation, encouragement, correction, refocusing, and
> original thinking time. In my state, Georgia, the class
> limit for gifted used to be 21 students. In practice this
> worked very well, giving the teacher the flexibility to
> work individually with students in an environment conducive
> to the learning potential of the students. Georgia, due to
> the financial crisis we all face, increased the minimum
> class size for gifted students to 23. My school district
> took an even more dramatic approach. They eliminated the
> minimum size for gifted classes. Some schools have chosen
> to follow this standard, some have chosen 28 as a minimum,
> and my school has decided upon 25 students. All of the
> situations seriously impact gifted education and, in the
> process, have reduced the level of service to gifted
> students by their teachers. There is less time and
> potential for individual extensions and remediation to
> enhance the learning of highly intelligent students who
> will potentially be our future business and political
> leaders, our engineers, our scientists, our doctors and
> nurses, and our artists. Why? All because of the emphasis
> NCLB places on the bottom of the pile. One school in my
> district has even eliminated gifted science completely,
> while the current administration's priority in teaching is
> science and math. How can that be justified by this school?
>
> Gifted education is in serious peril as long as NCLB
> exists, and regular ed students suffer even more as all the
> emphasis is on testing, testing, and more testing. In
> addition, the lock-step policies of schools to ensure that
> specific information is taught at a specific time to match
> the timing of the abhorent tests takes away all teacher
> flexibility and innovation. NCLB must be eliminated and
> the education community needs to come to its senses.

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