Tweet
So Predictable
Monday, July 11, 2011
Ron Smith Commentary
I’ve talked about and written about the monstrosity that is the No Child Left Behind Act so many times over the last decade, calling it a fantasy mandating fraud.
A fantasy in that there is no way on this green earth that all children can ever wind up with equal proficiency in, well, in anything, not math, not reading skills, not athletic ability, not looks, not ambition, not…you get the picture.
This proud legislative offspring of President Bush the Younger and the late Senator Ted Kennedy makes the absurd demand that 100 percent of American schoolchildren become ‘proficient’ in math and language skills by 2014.
With severe penalties for schools that fail to meet ever rising standards on tests, the logical result was that cheating would become widespread, and indeed it has.
Here in Baltimore, several instances of cheating have resulted in harrumphing from Schools CEO Andres Alonso, who was rewarded with a new, four-year contract at $ 260,000 per annum, plus a $750 dollar-a- month car allowance. He also can earn bonuses based, I’m not kidding here, on the performance of city kids on these tests.
This is peanuts compared to the recently departed Superintendent of Atlanta’s public schools. Dr. Beverly Hall was paid $400,000 in salary and pocketed half a million in bonuses because her school chillun did so very well on tests that the Atlanta schools were held up as the prime example of how beautifully urban districts could lift the skills of the children under their care.
As you can read in detail in this piece by Jim Goad, Georgia Governor Nathan Deal issued an 828-page report last week detailing massive fraud in Atlanta public schools.
Not only was the cheating widespread, with 82 teachers and principals having already admitted to assisting students in cheating or deliberately correcting wrong answers themselves, the cheating was done so blatantly, so ineptly, that it suggests the ‘educators’ assisting in it were themselves as stupid as the worst of their students.
Suspicions were raised, one would guess, when at one school, eighth-graders whose scores exceeded basic math standards jumped from one percent to forty-six percent.
“At another school,” says Goad, “special-ed students suddenly scored higher than gifted students in math.”
I told you the cheating was done in ways bound to be revealed at the first cursory check of the test results.
Oh, by the way, Beverly Hall was 2009’s National Superintendent of Schools. If there is any justice, she’ll wind up in jail, having instructed her underlings to alter and destroy documents relating to the cheating. But, as we once again learned in the Casey Anthony acquittal, justice itself is an accidental and uncertain byproduct of the justice system.
With 2014 suddenly looming (it once seemed so far away), federal officials are predicting that if standards aren’t lowered, 82 percent of the nation’s public schools could fail to meet proficiency standards this year. Some say that estimate is too low.
Congress is being begged to “reauthorize” NCLB, which means to drastically reduce the standards that cannot be met.
All of this is so predictable. Anybody with a brain knew the law was fantastical and would have to be changed. Countless billions of dollars have been washed down the drain by this feckless thing, and already there is loud whining that the problem is that not enough money was spent on “the children.”
Monday, July 11, 2011
Ron Smith Commentary
I’ve talked about and written about the monstrosity that is the No Child Left Behind Act so many times over the last decade, calling it a fantasy mandating fraud.
A fantasy in that there is no way on this green earth that all children can ever wind up with equal proficiency in, well, in anything, not math, not reading skills, not athletic ability, not looks, not ambition, not…you get the picture.
This proud legislative offspring of President Bush the Younger and the late Senator Ted Kennedy makes the absurd demand that 100 percent of American schoolchildren become ‘proficient’ in math and language skills by 2014.
With severe penalties for schools that fail to meet ever rising standards on tests, the logical result was that cheating would become widespread, and indeed it has.
Here in Baltimore, several instances of cheating have resulted in harrumphing from Schools CEO Andres Alonso, who was rewarded with a new, four-year contract at $ 260,000 per annum, plus a $750 dollar-a- month car allowance. He also can earn bonuses based, I’m not kidding here, on the performance of city kids on these tests.
This is peanuts compared to the recently departed Superintendent of Atlanta’s public schools. Dr. Beverly Hall was paid $400,000 in salary and pocketed half a million in bonuses because her school chillun did so very well on tests that the Atlanta schools were held up as the prime example of how beautifully urban districts could lift the skills of the children under their care.
As you can read in detail in this piece by Jim Goad, Georgia Governor Nathan Deal issued an 828-page report last week detailing massive fraud in Atlanta public schools.
Not only was the cheating widespread, with 82 teachers and principals having already admitted to assisting students in cheating or deliberately correcting wrong answers themselves, the cheating was done so blatantly, so ineptly, that it suggests the ‘educators’ assisting in it were themselves as stupid as the worst of their students.
Suspicions were raised, one would guess, when at one school, eighth-graders whose scores exceeded basic math standards jumped from one percent to forty-six percent.
“At another school,” says Goad, “special-ed students suddenly scored higher than gifted students in math.”
I told you the cheating was done in ways bound to be revealed at the first cursory check of the test results.
Oh, by the way, Beverly Hall was 2009’s National Superintendent of Schools. If there is any justice, she’ll wind up in jail, having instructed her underlings to alter and destroy documents relating to the cheating. But, as we once again learned in the Casey Anthony acquittal, justice itself is an accidental and uncertain byproduct of the justice system.
With 2014 suddenly looming (it once seemed so far away), federal officials are predicting that if standards aren’t lowered, 82 percent of the nation’s public schools could fail to meet proficiency standards this year. Some say that estimate is too low.
Congress is being begged to “reauthorize” NCLB, which means to drastically reduce the standards that cannot be met.
All of this is so predictable. Anybody with a brain knew the law was fantastical and would have to be changed. Countless billions of dollars have been washed down the drain by this feckless thing, and already there is loud whining that the problem is that not enough money was spent on “the children.”
Comment