01-01-2017, 01:40 AM
(12-31-2016, 10:33 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Teaching to the test, no child left behind and common core approaches are also failures, it seems to me. More active involvement by parents and other interested citizens in school boards might work.
No Child Left Behind has had interesting effects. It actually has done what it was intended to do: increase the focus on the weaker students. I have a kid who is below average in reading and above average in math. She is in third grade, the first grade level where standardized testing affects teacher pay. The school and her teacher are very interested in improving her reading, because No Child Left Behind grades them - grades the teacher and school, that is - based on how many people meet the grade level standards, for which she is borderline in reading.
In contrast, the school has shown no interest in helping her work on math, and her current teacher has criticized us parents for spending time at home on helping her continue to improve in math. A previous teacher explicitly told me she thought it was a bad idea for students to try to exceed grade level. It's pretty clear what's happening here: the teachers get no benefit from improving skills that are already above average, and every minute "wasted" on further improving her math is a minute that isn't spent helping them get their raises by improving her reading. No Child Left Behind has also become No Child Gets Ahead.
However, this does teach us something: the school system responds strongly to the legislated incentives of NCLB. If we have to work within the constraints of public schooling, the key is to legislate the right incentives. If instead of incentives that focused on weak students to the exclusion of strong students, we had incentives focused on the student body average, teachers would try to improve all students, wherever they stood. I strongly suspect that would result in the average student exceeding the common core progression - which in principle is sound, even though the state by state implementations are mostly faulty - by 20-50%.
I'm pretty sure the teacher's unions will managed to gut standards based education entirely, though. Unions are all about avoiding performance based evaluation. And in this case, they seem to have managed to ally with the "don't teach my kid evolution" crowd, thus giving them strength on both the left and the right.