Re: AYP celebrations

["Tauna Rogers" <taunar@plateautel.net>]

Diane,

My .02 is that you are right on the money. Celebrating making AYP serves to 
legitimize a mechanism designed to discredit and ultimately destroy public 
education, although I can easily understand how relieved the schools must be 
to get off the dreaded list. Keep up the good fight. They may mean well but 
celebrating making AYP sends exactly the wrong message. Stick to your guns, 
you're doing the right thing!

Tauna

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Diane Aoki" <dkeikoa@hawaii.rr.com>
To: <arn-l@interversity.org>
Sent: Monday, January 21, 2008 2:28 AM
Subject: [arn-l] AYP celebrations


> Please help me out on this. I had a recent outburst at a union meeting 
> about
> plans to honor schools that made AYP after being in restructuring. This is
> how I feel: Making AYP is the result of many factors that have nothing to 
> do
> with the teachers at that school and the quality of their teaching. These
> factors could be: whether or not that school is large enough to be 
> required
> to count the subgroups; whether or not that school focused their time and
> resources on the test at the expense of other subjects  - "teaching to the
> test;" the schools may have focused on the "bubble kids," at the expense 
> of
> the others who are too low or too high to make a difference on the test.
> Those are my main points - are there others?
>
> My reasons for being upset are: The NCLB reform program of which AYP is an
> integral aspect is not meant to improve public education, but to destroy 
> it,
> so we need to be critical of it. By celebrating AYP, we are saying that 
> NCLB
> is working. By celebrating AYP, we are sending a message out to the other
> schools, if they can do it, you can too.  But the way it is set up (100%
> proficiency by 2014), we will either all fail, or all be Stepford schools,
> shaped into such by private companies who got lucrative contracts to do
> this.  By celebrating AYP, we are being divisive, setting the AYP schools 
> in
> opposition to the non-AYP schools, a heirarchy based on test scores that
> don't necessarily mean better schools. By not recognizing the truth of it,
> we are blurring our vision, which should be focused on, what IS a quality
> school, how CAN we take back our profession, how can WE be the determiners
> of what a good school is and celebrate that.
>
> In the room of about 11 people, only 3 seemed to get what I was saying. 
> And
> these were union leaders. They said things like, "we need to be more
> positive," "it gives us hope," "it's all we have."
>
> Please help me out. I need to know if I am off my rocker or on the money. 
> Is
> what I am saying so off base? Or is it just one of those things that are
> hard to be honest about, so people would rather cling to the illusion.
>
>
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