Reply to Two of DCPS's biggest challenges going forward

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Reply to "Two of DCPS's biggest challenges going forward"

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[quote=Anonymous]I think the greatest challenge to DCPS and public school systems across the country is No Child Left Behind.  The evidence is prima facie: allocating resources based on high-stakes testing puts a serious bind on schools dealing with socioeconomic factors way beyond their control.

Schools that do well are the ones with the autonomy and flexibility to address the needs of students who attend.  That means giving principals, and especially teachers, more room to assess what those needs are and create the solutions to meet them.  But under NCLB, the more challenges in your student population, the more limits are placed on your ability to innovate instruction and pivot from programming prescribed by some policy maker who's at 3,000 feet - not on the ground and at the desk side of students who need the most help.

Accountability standards require schools to show Annual Yearly Progress, aka AYP, and there's nothing wrong with putting such standards in place. But the problem comes with the response to a school's ability to meet those standards.  Slide 6 in OSSE's Accountability Classification Overview ( http://osse.dc.gov/publication/dc-osse-accountability-classification-overview ) shows what happens to schools that don't meet goals for Annual Yearly Progress.  They get lower autonomy and lower flexibility in their use of funds.  So a "priority" school has no choice but to dedicate resources to what's prescribed by an authority outside that school. Meanwhile, "rising" and "reward" schools have the ability to bring in staff, programming and extracurricular experience that make learning what it should, can and [i]needs [/i]to be:  interesting, fun, exciting and - most of all - [u]rewarding[/u].

You want kids to find reward in going to school. But in lower-SES areas, the environment is nothing but drudgery and punishment.  The facilities are dilapidated, the staff are demoralized, and everything about the environment tells a student "this shitty place where you're forced to show up everyday is exactly what you deserve because you simply cannot learn."  Kids as young as second grade know and internalize the label "FAILING."

We need to abolish NCLB and give educators the flexibility and resources they need to create environments where kids are expected to learn, where they [i]can [/i]learn, and where learning leads to productive and rewarding citizenship in our society. NCLB does nothing but punish students AND educators who can't meet a one-size-fits-all standard.

An exacerbating factor is our culture's belief that failure is a result of "values."  Poor people don't value education, don't want to learn, don't want to succeed, don't want to be good citizens, don't want to work, don't want to pay bills, don't want to take care of themselves in any way shape or form.  This is something repeated over and over on this forum: that success is the result of binary decision making - if your life sucks, it's because you made the wrong decisions.

But education should be about expanding choices.  Not every parent is able to expand those choices, which is why precisely why public education needs to step in and provide that bridge from poor circumstances to - at the very least - survivable outcomes.  Public education has always about creating and training a workforce.  We went astray when we decided it was about who deserves to get ahead.[/quote]

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