Study Predicts that Most Great Lakes Schools will be FAILING by 2014
"Most schools in the Great Lakes region will labeled "failing" by 2014, according to a study released by the Great Lakes Center for Educational Research and the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University.
"The Impact of the Adequate Yearly Progress Requirement of the Federal No Child Left Behind Act on the Great Lakes Region, is the first multi-state research to use actual state data to predict how schools will fare under the No Child Left Behind law's current Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) requirements."
The findings here should not surprise anyone. The simple fact is that NCLB is a political solution to a non-political issue. Education is a complex social/cultural enterprise that is not about single test scores or national standards that assume a one-size-fits-all posture. Education, to be effective, must be understood as a local issue, based in the community that is served, in order to address the socio-cultural requirements of the given community. To assume that a child in rural Georgia and a child in Urban New York City have the same set of experiences is foolhardy. To assume that teaching the child from Georgia and New York in the same way, testing them with the same test, and holding them to the very same set of standards is counter to good educational practice. NCLB, rather than leveling the playing field, is so disruptive to local initiatives that the only option, in the end, is failure. The arbitrary nature of NCLB requirements, the fact that these requirements change on an annual basis, and that federal legislation trumps local decision making dooms the act to failure. The problem is that failure produces the loss of a generation of bright, curious children who are the future of our republic. I am afraid that the future looks bleak.
Zoundry
No comments:
Post a Comment