Re: [eddra] [ HuffingtonPost.com ] Recommendation: The Zero Percent Chance of 100 Percent Success

["Monty Neill" <monty@fairtest.org>]

I fear the obvious fact that the NCLB goal is impossible does not matter to a number of people who cannot be decried as privatizers out to wreck public education. Rather, some see NCLB has a means of putting attention on schools and the need for progress, thus the goal as a valued aspiration. As such, it would not do much harm. It is the the combined reduction of the goal to test scores and the sanctions attached for failing to make AYP (not make the impossible) that render the goal destructive. 

Thus, we need to be more effective than we have been in two areas: First, so long as high stakes are attached to tests, corruption of teaching and undermining learning will occur, to the detriment most of all of those students whom the law is most intended to help and whom these unnamed proponents of NCLB (civil rights folks, mostly) seek to help. Second, there are rational ways to push states and districts to more funding equity and adequacy, to deployment of resources, to having rational expectations for learning progress as indicated by multiple sources of evidence. Such an approach must focus on assistance rather than punishment. 

I think the Forum on Education Accountability document Redefining Accountability has done the best job thus far on point 2 (http://www.edaccountability.org/pdf/FEA-CapacityBuilding.pdf). There is a lot on point 1 available.

Questions thus are, how best to reach and persuade some of these folks (mostly civil rights activists, but some others as well) so they will not simply call for renewing this destructive law. And what ways of phrasing this issue will they hear and understand, positively react to. The more such folks we win over, the easier it is to win the battle over whether NCLB is or is not a "civil rights" law.

Monty Neill
FairTest


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: gbracey1@verizon.net 
  To: eddra@yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 4:25 PM
  Subject: [eddra] [ HuffingtonPost.com ] Recommendation: The Zero Percent Chance of 100 Percent Success



   
  gbracey1@verizon.net has just sent you a piece from HuffingtonPost.com

  A couple of days ago Bob Linn told legislators reaching 100% proficiency was impossible. Here's a play off that hearing. Jerry 
  Gerald Bracey: The Zero Percent Chance of 100 Percent Success

  Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/../../gerald-bracey/the-zero-percent-chance-o_b_43506.html

  "There is a zero percent chance that we will ever reach a 100 percent target," said Bob Linn at the March 13 joint House-Senate hearing on the No Child Left Behind law. ... Read the rest at HuffingtonPost.com 

  © 2006 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. 

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