Re: No Child left untested

[aburke5054@aol.com]

NCLB requires high schools to make adequate progress indexed both by 
test scores and by graduation rate.

How do you find such an endless supply of lunatics to supply anti-NCLB 
propaganda?

Art

-----Original Message-----
From: QCao009@aol.com
To: arn-l@interversity.org; fcarforum@yahoogroups.com
Cc: multied-l@usc.edu; azble@asu.edu
Sent: Tue, 8 Apr 2008 4:02 pm
Subject: [arn-l] No Child left untested


No Child Left at All? Report Shows Stunning  U.S. Drop-Out Rate
By Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon
April 8,  2008
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://pandagon.blogsome.com//81600/
_I  shouldn't be surprised to see that this story about the appallingly 
low
graduation rates in the cities of America is being underreported_
(http://nwlc.blogs.com/womenstake/2008/04/question-what-d.html) . 
Reporting
this story is
facing up to the ugly underbelly of America, and the way that the
conservative backlash against the great liberal reforms of the mid-20th 
century
has
quietly managed to recreate the America that Republicans dream of, with 
a  huge
gap between the rich and everyone else, and a large and growing  
undereducated
underclass. The Women's Take post optimistically addresses  attempts to 
reduce
the dropout rate, but I'm going to point out that the numbers  are so 
high
that we have to accept that the high dropout rate in certain cities  is 
a
feature, not a bug, of the various educational "reforms" that have been 
touted
over
the years.
_If you  read the report by the EPE Research Center (PDF)_
(http://www.edweek.org/media/swansoncitiesincrisis040108.pdf) , you'll 
see what
I mean. We
don't have kids falling through the cracks. The crack is the point, and 
the kids

who stay on the surface are the minority. Baltimore, Cleveland, 
Detroit, and
Indianapolis all have graduation rates under 35 percent. That's not 
dropout
rates -- that’s graduation rates. And there are 17 major U.S. cities 
that have
graduation rates below 50 percent. But even more sobering, and what 
shows
what's  really going on here, is the comparison of the graduation rates 
between
cities  and suburbs.
(http://flickr.com/photos/amandamarcotte/2396097156/)
There are numerous, complex factors that feed these alarming drop-out 
rates,
but we can't let the deliberate machinations of the system that 
encourage
dropping out for certain students off the hook. Underfunding urban 
schools is a

big part of the problem, of course, the major one. But there's two big
reforms  that sound good on paper, but in practice appear to be 
sculpted with an
eye
 towards encouraging certain populations of students (the working poor, 

especially racial minorities) to drop out. Standardized testing is one 
of those

mechanisms. "Teaching the test" to improve statistics is mind-numbing
regardless  of your district, but in places where a lot more students 
are
marginal, it
is  bound to increase the drop-out rate. Being bored out of your skull 
and not
 receiving a real education would make anyone toy with the idea of 
dropping
out,  but for kids with a lot more factors in play encouraging dropping 
out,
it's  often going to be more incentive.
Then there's "zero tolerance", another idea that sounds good on paper,
because it makes a rough sense that teachers shouldn't spend all their 
time
disciplining a handful of problem kids to the detriment of the learning 

experience
for everyone else. But in reality, it's going to be selectively  
enforced,
despite the "zero" part of its name. In some parts of the country,  
selective
enforcement of zero tolerance is all but resegregating the schools.  
We've all
heard horror stories of kids being expelled or put in in-school  
suspension for
having aspirin on their persons, for talking in class, or other  minor
infractions. What we don't hear so much is how the kids who get 
selected  for
this
kind of zealous disciplinary action are targeted for classist and  
racist
reasons. Civil rights groups like the ACLU, the SPLC, and the NAACP 
call  it the

"school to prison pipeline" -- the idea being that by hounding certain  
students

with zero tolerance punishments while letting others get off with  
lighter
punishments for the same infractions, you encourage the former group to 
drop
out, which increases the likelihood that they'll get involved in crime 
and  end
up in prison. _The ACLU has a  fact sheet I highly recommend reading_
(http://www.aclu.org/crimjustice/juv/24761res20060328.html) .
This story is not a small one, but a major issue. Dropping out of high 
school
 all but condemns someone to a permanent spot in the underclass, and 
the few
people who do manage to escape that fate usually have other privileges 
to
help  them out. And considering the relationship between the drop-out 
rate and
the  likelihood of going to prison, we must consider the increase of 
pressure to

drop  out provided by zero tolerance and "No Child Left Behind" to be a
feeder into  the prison-industrial complex.
Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular blog _Pandagon_
(http://pandagon.blogsome.com/) .


Quan



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