The Federal Government. Hmmm. What comes to mind when you read those words? When it comes to education, the feds are clueless, like usual. Let me put some flesh on all these educational acronyms and buzzwords you've been hearing in the news.
Let's start with No Child Left Behind. Here's a lovely little program started by bureaucrats. Those guys live in Washington and know everything there is to know about education, right? Well, NCLB essentially calls for "Highly Qualified" personnel to be in every classroom in America. Have you ever been to the four corners area, specifcally around Arizona and New Mexico? Good luck getting highly qualified anything to teach there. Next, NCLB calls for a formalized, standarized assessment of all kids. I don't have a problem with getting the best people in the classroom or testing kids to gauge their progress. But, as I will show you later, NCLB, like all government programs, fails to acknowledge the human condition in education.
AYP (aka Adequate Yearly Progress): If you've been following the news, the AYP list for each state was just released. Schools are graded based on whether or not students passed the mandated standarized tests, which includes multiple sub groups, like lower socio-economics, race, and special education. Schools are also rated on attendance percentages and if every teacher is "highly qualified." A school can fail to meet AYP for dropping below standards in any of these categories.
Here's the truth behind AYP. If you live in rural areas like the Texas Panhandle or parts of New Mexico, for example, or perhaps in high-crime urban centers, or even cities that border Mexico, you will find it difficult to recruit teachers into those areas. Let's face it, when you can teach in a school that has little crime or social issues and live in cities that provide lots of opportunities, why would you want to live anywhere else? AYP doesn't take that into account. Nor does it factor in kids that live in horrible homes, with lousy parents, and boyfriends that abuse them. AYP just looks at cold, hard data and then makes judgments based on the results. So, you've got whole school districts in Texas and New Mexico that didn't meet AYP standards.
The punishment for failing to meet AYP comes in stages. At level 1 you get the warning. Level 2 is another warning and possible monitoring by the government, and at level 3 the school is taken by the government and staff is replaced. Good luck replacing everyone out on the reservation. Where will you find those replacements? I think Nancy Pelosi would make a fine substitute teacher.
Highly Qualified: A component of No Child Left Behind is the notion that every teacher will be highly qualified in their teaching subject. Like I said, good luck finding qualified math, science, and reading teachers out in rural areas. Some school districts in the Texas Panhandle will never meet this standard. So, are the feds going to fire them all? Highly Qualified, like everything else in NCLB is a pipe dream. Once again the authors of a federally mandated act wrote fiction, and fantasy fiction at that.
Most of the people we have running our government couldn't even measure up to what they want our schools to do. Most of these people send their kids to private schools. I guarantee you they have no clue what goes on in a public school. Yet, we in the profession are the beneficiaries of the fruits of their nightmarish dreams.
I am not anti-government. Let's get that on the table right now. I believe the government exists to provide a better quality of life for the citizens of our country. They have failed at that horribly. If we held our Congress and Senate to the same set of standards they hold our schools, they would all be fired.
There is no constitutional provision for the federal government to enact educational mandates to the states. Education should be a state-run entity, with the majority of that power being passed to local districts. States have the right to tell the government, "No thanks, we don't want your money." The problem is so many in state government have prostituted themselves to the feds and need that money to survive.
So, as a taxpaying voter, get out there and tell the government to mind its own business when it comes to our schools. We know what's best for our kids and our teachers are smart enough to handle things like assessments. We need less No Child Left Behind and more "quality" parent and community involvement. Less AYP and moreTLC. And we really need more "highly qualified" parents raising their children with the values and life skills required to survive in a troubled and broken world.
I hope that sheds a little light on the meaning of those confusing acronyms you see on TV and the real story behind them.
Read it for yourself at the U.S. DOE's web site: http://www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/guid/states/index.html
God bless you all.
Ever forward!!!
--TFR
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