No child left behind: the turn

As in this is when education began to turn

Teachers in Florida have been doubly impacted by this “well intentioned” legislation. Florida was one of the first states to jump on board attempting to meet the mandates since little brother Jeb was our governor when big brother George brought it to Congress. Our state had already developed standards years before, so a test to measure the students’ success in meeting those standards had to be written, field tested and adopted. Two tests were administered to our students; the FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test) and The NRCT (Norm Referenced Criterion Test). The FCAT measures actual growth in meeting the state’s standards and the NRCT was used to measure our student’s academic growth against other students in the nation. The NRCT was eliminated two years ago because our state could no longer afford the cost of administering it and having it scored. This is a great loss to classroom teachers because every state has developed their own standards and assessment test (and we have no idea how the degree of difficulty of those tests might match to the FCAT), so the NRCT was the only tool we had to see how our students were progressing nationally.

The test began to be linked to money available to districts with schools that made an A receiving additional funding and schools that scored a D or F also receiving additional money to improve their academic programs. But there were also consequences tied to those Ds and Fs which could include replacing administration and faculty to closing the school and opening a new school, possibly charter, in its place. So districts began to hire more people to oversee the progress of all their schools, but especially the low performing schools. This has impacted the amount of money that actually makes it to the school level.

Then NCLB kicked in another component known as AYP (Annual Yearly Progress). This is a measure of each subgroup of students in a school (by ethnicity, socioeconomic status, ESE, etc.) to make sure no subgroup of students was being left behind. There are several problems with this plan; one being that once again the states set their own standards and way to be measured so a school not meeting AYP in one state very well could in another. But the public is unaware of how this works. So a state with higher standards could appear to have lower performing public schools then a state with lower standards. Go figure!

And a school in Florida could receive a grade of A from the state but still not meet AYP and then be under state supervision to improve the AYP status. This guarantees that the district will become even more involved in that school’s academic progress, even though it is an “A” school. So now more funding is being spent at the district level to meet the mandates of NCLB and enormous amounts are being spent at the state level, but more and more children seem to be “left behind”…