Rorysm

Honestly, I think programs like No Child Left Behind should be scrapped after a while and something else brought along. All the good teachers will keep the best parts of the old system anyway and learn something new along the way. It can be frustraiting as a teacher to have to put up with wave after wave of change to what we do, but if we can take the best practices and incorporate them into our teaching system the kids can benifit. So I won't shed a tear when NCLB become extinct, but I will take some emphasis of it with me through the next wave of reform.

And yeah, if special ed kids were exempted I'm sure some principals would start moving lower performers over into the non-testing category by any means. Principals are nearly as likely to cheat as their students if the only thing that matters is their grade (or making the required scores). This is probably the biggest single problem with education, we value the grade more than we value learning.

"My classes were discussion-based. We had assigned reading, then we discussed it the next day."

This is a painful experience in non AP classes (and in AP classes too nowadays!). Student's just don't do the assigned readings. You wind up making the handful of kids who did read have to carry the entire conversation while the others tune out. I remember my AP class in high school being predominately note based, then outside readings required, then a movie maybe once a month and a discussion. Then of course we had to practice Document-based-questions. I know every AP teacher in the school pulls their hair out over student's not doing the reading. I love dicussion, but you wind up leaving out so many of the kids who just tune out. Getting them to read nowadays has become very, very difficult.

As for writing skills, one thing Kentucky required was a technical piece. You had to make either a brochure or letter describing a process, something that was much more likely to be encountered in the workplace than a paper on an assigned topic. But guess what? They scrapped the portfolios (which was the end result of the writing emphasis) and non of it is required as of last year.

Mainstreaming also helps reduce the need for special ed teachers, which are the hardest to find.

You know, I don't want to start anything but from my point of view, the ADHD label is slapped on way too many kids. It's to the point where you can really tell a difference between those who have it and those who are labeled with it wrongly. (Or maybe there are different levels of it and that explains it). The problem is that once a kid is labeled with it, it can be hard to shake it. I had a kid one time that in his IEP it was noted that he was last tested as a fourth grader and had ADHD. You know how they tested him? They had someone observe him in class. As he would rather look at the window then read, talked to his classmates rather then listen to the teacher, and passed notes during outloud reading he was marked down as having ADHD. He was never tested again, but as a Sophomore he still had an IEP which basically said the teacher needed to restate all questions to him, give him extra time to finish his work, and make his multiple choice questions easier by eliminating two of the three wrong answers, amongst other things.

Oh, and by the way, lots of parents get their kids diagnosed with ADHD or other issues so they can get them on medicines to make them behave better when their left alone. Then they get to draw checks on the kids if its serious enough. I know this isn't all of them, but it is a pretty big chunk.

Now I want to add my two cents on the side conversation of technology in schools, etc.

You know what you can't do in a high school classroom anymore... give lectures. Every principal I know has pretty much stuck to the rule of "Don't give notes that take more then 1 minute per year of age of your student." That means Freshmen should get no more then what, 14 minutes of notes. Now that includes the 5 minutes of interuptions, the five minutes of explaining, and the four minutes of waiting for everyone to write down the notes in awkward pauses after every line. Ugh. As soon as the notes are over you get to show a short clip (that took the teacher probably three hours to discover) that the students will ignore anyway. Then you get your hands-on activity (that took the teacher hours to plan and money out of their own pocket to buy supplies as the classroom fund of $100 was spent long, long ago in the semester) in which the kids just half-ass or let a smart kid inthe group finish while they chat. Then you switch gears and give the kids a reflective writing assignment about what they learned from the activity, to which little johnny writes "Nothing, this was stupid."

This is part of a trend that says "kid's don't have good attention spans, so rather then work on lengthening the attention span we should just accept it and deal with by giving them hands on activities." You know what, hands-on stuff is great. It really helps some kids. However, it isn't a magic cure. You're just as likely to have a kid come back a month later and say "can we make another thing with the baloons like that last time" as they are to say "I remember the distances between planets because of the representation we made in the hall with balloons."

My point is this: high schools are babying students to deal with their short attention spans, then when they hit college it's all notes and we wonder why they don't make it? When the non-college crowd (which is much smaller then it should be) hits the workworld they can't focus on their tasks at their job either. Also, there's a huge lack of communication between colleges and high schools. I had a professor of a Master's course in history as me why none of his Freshmen seemed to have a basic understanding of the early American republic. He was quite suprised when I told him it was because in the state of Kentucky the last time you have US History pre-Civil War was 8th grade, seven years before you take US History as a college sophomore. He was shocked to find this out.

Don't even get me started on IEP's (Individual Education Plans, which require teachers to make modifications to give each student a personalized education based on their ability or disabilities. Including helping hyper kids by not requiring them to try to focus).

By the way, for the most part I like my job. Having two months off in the summer to regain my senses helps quite a bit too.

My Two Cents:

I am a high school teacher in Kentucky. What's more, I was a high schooler in the 90's when Kentucky lost a lawsuit about how they fund schools. When told the usual way of funding schools wasn't legal (basically, the counties with coal were getting more money as part of the coal severance pay--where the counties that have to put up with the problems--ie. road damage, noise, sinkholes, etc got more money and Louisville and Lexington wanted more money as they had more students) the state switched to state standardized testing.

Guess what? Education improved greatly. Kentucky went from the second worst state to breaking the top 40 in a few short years and breifly became the poster child for education reform. More importantly (and something that didn't show up on national rankings) Kentucky put an emphasis on writing and our students generally were better writters then those of other states.

Well, No Child Left Behind was pretty much the same thing for the whole nation. However, there were some stupid parts of it like...

1) States like Kentucky were forced to do NCLB and since the KATS test (Ky's own, earlier version) was part of a long-term project they felt compelled to keep it too. Meaning schools now had two different tests they had to do.

2) Teachers teach to the test. There's no way around it... teachers started only teaching what they thought would be on the test, which is a crap shoot as you are not told what will be on the test, just some general areas.

3) If your school had special ed students who weren't reading at the regular class level, you were considered to be non-compliant. Yep, if your special ed kids weren't reading as well as non-special ed kids you were failing. Think about that. Oh, and smaller districts like mine could avoid that failing designation if they had fewer then a certain number of special ed kids. So the fewer you had the less you had to worry about their scores. Weird system.

4) There was no accountability to the kids. In other words, students didn't have to try. In the early days you could bribe them with rewards, but even those got cracked down on pretty hard. What you couldn't do is fail anyone for not trying. Imagine if a pro sports team were told: no matter how little you try, you still get paid and you get to come back next year, but your coach might get fired.

5). The whole concept is flawed as how can you judge how much kids have learned if you only test that group once and then you move on to testing a different group the next year. You have smart classes and you have less smart classes. However, since you're expected to improve your scores every year (and this is the KATS test I'm talking about) you had better hope that you keep getting stronger and stronger classes.

In summary: trying something helped for a while, however, the flaws in the system can hurt the education system over time. The Kennedy/Bush NCLB was probably good for education in those states that didn't have other testing systems, but it was not perfect.

Wait from the talk early in this thread, did the fan's cover cd not get finished? I kind of left the forum about the time it was gettting put together and didn't find out how it turned out.

They're now going for less then 30 bucks at half.com

http://product.half.ebay.com/Billy-Bragg-Wilco-Man-in-the-Sand_W0QQtgZinfoQQprZ3345174