Re: AYP celebrations

["Nancy Patterson" <patterna@gvsu.edu>]

It is unfortunate that the union leaders are so misinformed about AYP and NCLB.  AYP is a huge scam and rather than celebrating schools that reach AYP after restructuring, we should protest.  AYP is almost exclusively based on standardized test results.  And the really weird thing about those results is that they do not measure one continuous group of students from, for example 10th grade through 12th.  Rather, the scores are report on different sets of students, for example 10th graders.  And whether a school reaches AYP in any given year often depends on how many special education students took the test.  

And the truly sad thing about suddenly making AYP after "restructuring" is that any semblance of a rich and varied curriculum was destroyed in the name of test preparation.  Out go the inquiry approaches to the curriculum and in come practice tests, workbooks, and all manner of skill and drill.  Any writing that is done is often highly formulaic because that's the easiest to score.

Worst of all is that students who traditionally have not done well on standardized tests continue to fail.  A district will adopt some sort of restructuring plan, often commercial, apply the whiz bang approaches, see a bump in scores, and then see those scores in a year or two settle back down to where they were before the whiz bang approaches killed any joy and/or meaningful approach to learning.  The heart of the issue is probably that schools (and NCLB) fail to address the real issues because, one, they do not recognize the home languages, discourse/rhetoric, and learning traditions of the cultures they serve.  And, urban and rural students, who tend score the lowest on standardized tests, have the least amount of money behind them--as much as 50 percent less than their suburban peers.  No classroom libraries, poorly stocked school libraries, old computers, over-crowded classrooms, in-experienced teachers, no markers, paper, books, etc.

NCLB promised to close the achievement gap, but it only maintained it. Many in the anti-NCLB movement believe the plan all along was to privatize public schools.  Union officials need to do their homework.  A good place to start is www.fairtest.org.

Nancy

Nancy Patterson, PhD
Literacy Studies Program Chair
College of Education
Grand Valley State University 
920 Eberhard Center
301 W. Fulton
Grand Rapids, Michigan 49504
616-331-6226
patterna@gvsu.edu
http://faculty.gvsu.edu/patterna

>>> Diane Aoki <dkeikoa@hawaii.rr.com> 1/21/2008 4:28 AM >>>
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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