Reading First Is Last

The news concerning the “No Child Left Behind” program just keeps getting worse and worse. What originally had the potential of revamping the education system in America for the better is now becoming another in the long list of failures of the Bush administration. When it was trumpeted in 2001 by the Bush administration as the answer to the failing education system, it was met with cautious optimism. On the surface it appeared to offer some much needed direction to the lack of standardized measurements of student progress, teacher skill levels, or school accountability. Other components of the bill offered school choice to public school students and parents, federally mandated testing and ratings of schools, and a reading program targeted at low income children.

Children who participate in the $1-billion-a-year reading initiative at the heart of the No Child Left Behind law have not become better readers than their peers, according to a study released today by the Education Department's research arm.

Reading First, aimed at improving reading skills among students from low-income families, has been plagued by allegations of mismanagement and financial conflicts of interest. But the Bush administration has strenuously backed the effort, saying it helps disadvantaged children learn to read. About 1.5 million children in about 5,200 schools nationwide, including more than 140 schools in Maryland, Virginia and the District, participate in Reading First.[1]

I don’t understand how we can spend over 5 billion dollars and have little if anything to show for it. How is it that after all of these years of public education and studies of public education techniques we still don’t know how to educate children from low income families? I don’t believe that the answer is we don’t know how to educate these children, unfortunately I think it is something more insidious than that. I think we do know how to educate these children, but that we don’t want to. A capitalist system needs to have a pool of cheap low skill workers to fuel the astronomical profits of America’s corporations. Keeping low income children uneducated or undereducated provides such a pool. Between the unskilled low income kids and the low skill immigrants flooding across our borders, Wal-Mart will have a pool of workers well into the future.

Reading is the building block of education, if you can’t read you will not be able to learn. So are we to assume that we can not teach our children to at least read? How is it that our best educational minds with a billion dollars a year for the last 6 years still have no clue how to teach our children to read? Every major university in this country has education departments that study and train our teachers and educators. I can not believe that with all the research grants and empirical studies that we are no closer to closing the education gap than we are right now. I understand the complexity of the issue, but I also understand the amount of resources and personnel that we have expended on the problem. Not only have we not been able to close the wealthy versus the low income gap here in America, but we have not been able to close the gap between America and the rest of the world.

Education Department officials said the study will help them better implement Reading First and said the program has the support of many educators across the country. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings recently likened the effort, aimed at improving instruction in schools with children from low-income families, to "the cure for cancer."

During a speech to educators in March, Spellings said that Reading First was one of most effective education programs she had encountered. "If ever a program was rooted in research and science and fact, this is it," she said.[2]

Well, if they are likening this program to the cure for cancer then anyone diagnosed with cancer is in deep trouble. If this program is rooted in science and these are the results it is no wonder we are losing the technology wars. This program despite what the secretary is saying has been riddled with rumors of mismanagement and kickbacks. The No Child Left Behind program has been criticized for emphasizing scores over teaching and for being under funded for the herculean task involved. The results of this study will do little to quiet the controversy.

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[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/01/AR2008050101399.html?hpid=moreheadlines

[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/01/AR2008050101399.html?hpid=moreheadlines

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Dropout Epidemic Fueled By NCLB

It appears that what was rumored by many concerning the No Child Left Behind legislation is being proven true. It was believed by many that one of the side effects of this legislation was that many struggling students were being pushed out of school by administrators in an effort to improve their school’s standing. And if they were not actively pushed to drop-out they were at least quietly allowed to disappear by administrators who were fearful of having their schools labeled as failing. The truth of the matter is that this legislation has fueled the leaving behind of millions of students.

Most troublesome to some experts was the way the No Child law’s mandate to bring students to proficiency on tests, coupled with its lack of a requirement that they graduate, created a perverse incentive to push students to drop out. If low-achieving students leave school early, a school’s performance can rise.

No study has documented that the law has produced such an effect nationwide. Experts say they believe many low-scoring students are prodded to leave school, often by school officials urging them to seek an equivalency certificate known as a General Educational Development diploma.

“They get them out so they don’t have them taking those tests,” said Wanda Holly-Stirewalt, director of a program in Jackson, Miss., that helps dropouts earn a G.E.D. “We’ve heard that a lot. It happens all over the system.”[1]

So rather than encouraging struggling students and providing them with the tools they need to improve, administrators are instead opting to have them removed from their rolls by coercion at worse and neglect at best. So the emphasis is no longer on education, but instead on scores and rankings. The NCLB legislation is just another smoke screen provided by politicians to help to enrich the wealthy at the expense of the poor and middle-class. One of the main routes to improvement in our society is through education. Public education should be one of our most important and well-funded endeavors as a society, however for some reason it is the least. How can this be? It can be because the way to ensure that the wealthy stay wealthy and that there is a large pool of unqualified and unskilled workers is by keeping public education poorly funded and poorly administered.

If we as a society truly valued the improvement of all of our citizens we would be investing the billions we are spending daily in Iraq and Afghanistan right here at home in the improvement of our schools for all Americans. The problem with this is that it would create too many well-educated people. Democracy may demand an educated population, but a well-educated population is the bane of the ruling-class. The same people who send their children to private or upper-echelon schools are the same ones who say we are spending too much money on public education. The best insurance for keeping the inadequacies of our society in place is a poorly funded public education system where the majority of students are poorly prepared for continued education. You would think that after billions of dollars and many studies later that we would have developed a system that actually works to educate the masses, but we have not. The reason we have not is because it is not a priority in our society. We talk about the benefits of education and raising the standards of our children, but the truth be told compared to other programs education is one of our least funded.

Even without the wars, education has never received the amount of funding or critical study necessary to produce adequately prepared students for the future. Rather than focusing in on education our system of education has focused in on conformity and assimilation. As Pink Floyd so adequately stated, “Another brick in the wall.” Another compliant worker bee to feed to the machine of commerce and capitalism has been our chief concern. Any child that does not meet the standard must be drugged or isolated and finally removed from the system. We have some pretty good ideas of what is wrong with the system, but we do not have the desire or the will to improve it. Year after year more and more of our greatest resource are allowed to slip and in some cases forced through the cracks.

I hope for our sakes that education will once gain become a priority not just for the wealthy, but for all of America’s children. We can not afford as a society to continue down the path we are on. As more and more of our children become uneducated they will begin to rebel against a system that has left them unprepared for the world and this rebellion will not be expressed in a positive way. We are at a crossroad in America. This election will determine the direction of this country for years to come. I hope instead of war, fear, and death we choose life and the future of our nation, which is our children. And that the words no child left behind will truly mean something.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/education/20graduation.html?pagewanted=2&hp

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The Elevation of Mediocrity

There is a growing trend in America and it is sure to have profound effects for our future economic and technological viability. The trend is the practice of lowering expectations for our children and as a result ourselves. The practice is in effect “dumbing down” our society so that no one feels snubbed or not special. The goal is to make everyone feel equal, but the reality is that it is to make everyone the same. Making everyone feel the same is not the equivalent of everyone being equal. Let’s face it we are all created equal, but we do not all share the same gifts and talents. Instead of trying to amalgamate these differences, we need to be celebrating them.

The problem began when in an effort to lessen the effects of failure and defeat some genius came up with the idea that we would reward all children the same regardless of their performance. Win or lose everybody gets a trophy and regardless of your abilities everybody gets to play. If all children were in fact endowed with the same abilities in all the same areas, this would be a good idea; maybe. But the truth is not every child has the same abilities in all the same areas. There are some kids that excel in sports, while others may excel in music, and others in writing. For us to try to reduce these natural gaps in talents to keep our kids from experiencing loss is ill-conceived and just plain wrong. It is wrong for a number of reasons to not reward excellence when it is displayed whatever the venue.

Today we reward kids for their participation in an activity, basically for just showing up. Everyone gets a trophy no matter what their performance or effort. I find this attitude inconsistent with the goals of life. What these people don’t understand is that a child learns as much losing as he does winning and in many cases more. How will a child learn perseverance and dealing with defeat, if he never experiences it? Where is the incentive to get better or to work harder if you’ll be rewarded anyway? We are in effect removing the motivation for greatness so that we can reward mediocrity. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t seem fair to me.

The trophy backlash is part of what many experts see as a broader reaction to a culture of coddling. Some educators and psychologists argue that recent moves designed in part to build kids' self-esteem -- giving partial credit for incorrect math answers at school, for instance, or overlooking misspellings -- removes kids' incentives to push themselves. "If you are going to get an award anyway," says Jack Lesyk, a Beachwood, Ohio, psychologist who works with kids who play sports, "the message is you don't really have to try your best."[1]

If this were only about sports or other extracurricular activities that would be one thing, but this mentality has invaded academia. If you are a upper middle-class white person who is going to get accepted into college as a legacy, make C’s, and then be elected twice to be the President of America then this system is working, but for those of us with children that won’t have these advantages the last thing we want is for their inspiration to be dampened. Life for us is a struggle and always will be and we want our children to be prepared for that struggle. The way you prepare them for the struggle is not by coddling them or by lowering the standards. Many of the problems facing blacks as a community are from our kids, especially male children, being coddled by their mothers. Now they can’t even take someone insulting them without getting their feelings hurt and then wanting to shoot somebody.

We now, thanks to the “No Child Left Behind” charade are elevating mediocrity in education. With all the focus being placed on the children that are failing, the children that would have a chance to be exceptional are falling through the cracks. I wish we had recruiters in the inner-city that came around in grade school looking for academic superstars instead of the athletic ones. Do you know that many of our young athletes are recruited and offered scholarships to prestigious prep-schools for athletic prowess while still in elementary school, but none of these fine institutions are providing the same for academics. It is no wonder our kids are more focused on sports than education, these are the ones getting the rewards and accolades.

I’m sorry folks but the truth is the truth and the truth is simply this. Not everyone is as smart as me, as strong as me, or as handsome as me, but by the same token I am not as smart, strong, or handsome as some other people. It’s called life and in life sometimes you fail and sometimes you succeed. We all have to learn to live with our failures as much as with our successes. The thing about elevating mediocrity is that not only do you remove the stigma of failure, but you also remove the gratification for true success. My greatest triumphs came on the heels of defeats and failures. By elevating mediocrity, we have removed the incentive to strive for greatness.

The report challenges the conventional wisdom that cream will always rise to the top. And because the federal No Child Left Behind Act focuses on raising the performance of the lowest achievers to a baseline level known as "proficiency," there is little help for high achievers who fade over time. As this report shows, the odds are that such a "fader" student comes from a lower-income household. Little accountability exists under federal law for the academic performance of these high-achieving lower-income students. This needs to change.[2]

I wouldn’t have a problem with the theory behind NCLB, but what has happened is that in order to qualify and meet the arbitrary standards set by a group whose sole goal has been the destruction of the public school system, we have lowered the standards and spent so much emphasis on raising the lower end of the scale that the upper end is withering and dying. We cannot afford to allow our most gifted to die on the vine due to a lack of stimulus and support. We now have gifted kids having to struggle to stay engaged while marginal students are taking most of the attention and focus of the instructors. The schools are forced to spend so much time and resources on standardized tests that no real learning is allowed to take place. We are developing a population of little automatons they are able to retrieve rote information, but what about independent thought and problem solving skills?

[1] http://www.contemporaryfamilies.org/subtemplate.php?t=inTheNews&ext=news023
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/13/AR2007111301466.html

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Dropping Out Of Sight

Due to my belief in the value of education and my concern that we are at a defining moment in American educational history, particularly for minority students I wanted to do a follow-up to my recent essay, “The Students Aren’t Failing, We Are”. Because the stakes and the cost of failure are so high, I want to continue to press this issue. The importance of this issue transcends race, gender, and economics, because the cost of failing to educate these children will be borne by all of us. It will be borne out in higher crime, higher social service costs, and higher taxes. It will also over time cost us billions of dollars in loss productivity and could result in catastrophic costs for rebuilding cities torched by rioters and looters. The thing about America is that ignoring issues and problems has always been amenable to confrontation and action until it explodes into violence and rage. Then the media creates these nice little banners and theme music wondering what went wrong and why are these people so angry.

One of the topics that is currently not being discussed within the “No Child Left Behind” debate is the drop-outs and what can we do about it. We discuss test scores and assessments for schools, teachers, and administrators, but nothing about the graduation rates. It is incumbent on the black community to come to grips with this epidemic, because the fall-out will affect us first and the hardest. One of the first casualties of means testing and assessments is the failing student and despite current popular belief the main reason students drop out is because they are failing. No one wants to continue in a circumstance that they feel they are failing in with no chance of turning it around, especially if there is little or no support to complete the task anyway.

We know that there are warning signs that indicate students are at risk for dropping out, but due to the fact that so many of our schools in the inner-city are so crowded and place so much emphasis on assessments they are often times ignored and allowed to slip through the cracks. Throw in the fact that many failing students are also troubled students and there is even less effort made to prevent their departure. Unfortunately, because of the over-crowding of our inner-city schools and the emphasis on school assessment performance it seems like there is a built in percentage of students who will be sacrificed for the greater good or the larger number of students. The scores of drop-outs do not affect the overall score for the school’s certification, so if failing students drop-out the test scores of the remaining students may actually improve on paper. If this were a small percentage of students, there could be an argument for justification or evidence of its effectiveness. In the case of too many of our schools the numbers are reversed, there are more students dropping out than graduating.

The research report, released yesterday by the Philadelphia Youth Network, has significant implications for how cities can effectively use their resources to encourage more students to stay in school. According to Neild and Balfanz:

* Most future dropouts can be identified before or early in the first year of high school. For example, eighth- graders who miss five weeks of school or fail math or English have at least a 75 percent chance of dropping out of high school. And in the Philadelphia district, as with most districts with a dropout challenge, many future dropouts attend a subset of high schools that often are overwhelmed by the sheer number of students in need of intensive intervention.

* Most dropouts leave school because they are not attending regularly and are failing courses — a finding that counters the common interpretation of the landmark Silent Epidemic report that suggested that most students drop out because they are bored and not challenged.

* Most dropouts are not involved with social service agencies, but those who are have extremely high dropout rates. For high school students who have been abused and neglected, are in foster care or receive an out-of-home placement in the juvenile justice system, the probability of dropping out is 75 percent or higher. Likewise, having a child before or during high school dramatically increased the chances that female students would drop out. This finding comes from the first analysis of individual school and social service records, and suggests that current social service/juvenile justice supports are not strong enough to enable adolescents in their charge to graduate.[1]

These findings are from a report done by John Hopkins University and provide us with clear signs of impending disaster. Of course recognizing a problem is only half of the solution, the next question is are we willing to intervene in these circumstances to avoid their predicted outcome? Here, we are able to see the future and if we want to we can change the future for these kids. It is not like we don’t already know what the life of a high school drop-out will be like.

The nation’s economy and competitive standing also suffers when there are high dropout rates. Among developed countries, the United States ranks seventeenth in high school graduation rates and fourteenth in college graduation rates (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, 2006). Dropouts represent a tremendous waste of human potential and productivity, and reduce the nation’s ability to compete in an increasingly global economy.

High school graduates, on the other hand, provide both economic and social benefits to society. In addition to earning higher wages, which results in attendant benefits to local, state, and national economic conditions, high school graduates live longer (Muennig, 2005), are less likely to be teen parents (Haveman et al., 2001), and are more likely to raise healthier, better-educated children. In fact, children of parents who graduate from high school are themselves far more likely to graduate from high school than are children of parents without a high school degree (Wolfe & Haveman, 2002). High school graduates are also less likely to commit crimes (Raphael, 2004), rely on government health care (Muennig, 2005), or use other public services such as food stamps or housing assistance (Garfinkel et al., 2005). Additionally, high school graduates engage in civic activity, including voting and volunteering in their communities, at higher levels (Junn, 2005).[2]

Intervention is the key. We must realize that drop-outs drop out of more than school; many of them drop out of society as productive members as well. As with most problems we face as a nation the upfront costs will always be less than the backend cost of reducing our drop-out rates. The truth is these drop-outs do not drop out of sight, they come back and create an enormous strain on society.

[1] http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/home06/oct06/dropout.html
[2] http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:_XM10e-TaYMJ:www.all4ed.org/files/HighCost.pdf+high+school+drop+out+costs&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us

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Supreme Court Versus Brown Part Infinity

The fallout from the recent Supreme Court decisions concerning school desegregation is starting to surface in many communities now embolden to return to the segregated past. I recently read about the situation in Tuscaloosa, AL; where the majority white school board and the white superintendent have drawn up a rezoning plan that looks dangerously close to a return to segregation to many observers.

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — After white parents in this racially mixed city complained about school overcrowding, school authorities set out to draw up a sweeping rezoning plan. The results: all but a handful of the hundreds of students required to move this fall were black — and many were sent to virtually all-black, low-performing schools.

Black parents have been battling the rezoning for weeks, calling it resegregation. And in a new twist for an integration fight, they are wielding an unusual weapon: the federal No Child Left Behind law, which gives students in schools deemed failing the right to move to better ones.[1]

It is already difficult for most inner-city school districts to desegregate due to white flight and the private school dodge of many white parents. I have to acknowledge that as a parent I understand the desire to have your kids in a safe environment where they are getting a quality education. The problem I have is that instead of complaining about or laying blame why more parents don’t become involved to upgrade and change the existing public education system. It is to all of our benefits that we raise the level of education for all of our children.

Sometimes I just don’t get it; this country could have been the greatest experiment of human interaction in the history of the planet. We could have become the beacon for other nations by demonstrating that people of diverse backgrounds could in fact live together in peace and harmony. I guess alas it is not to be, because all we have done is to further illustrate how fear and divisiveness even among people of the same nation still trumps everything else. Either we are going to try and live together or we are not. It is time for those of us black and white who have a desire to make this thing work to overcome ourselves and come together. I am not advocating that we become one big melting pot, although I don’t have a problem with that, I am suggesting that we are able to atleast have a nation of mutual respect, honesty, and fairness.

We have so much abundance in this land and yet to look at the behaviors of many it would appear that we were in some third world nation struggling to survive on subsistent resources. I couldn’t imagine what this nation would be like if we really had to scramble for survival on a day to day basis. The level of racial animosity would be off the scale. As I have written before, because of our history we have to be compelled within the boundaries of our laws to integrate. I am speaking of integration in the sense of learning to accept our differences and our similarities with empathy and understanding for one another. I don’t expect to someday have us all standing holding hands singing, “We shall overcome” but why are we unable to live together as equals is beyond me. Why must one man dominate another man?

The plan in Tuscaloosa involved redrawing the lines of the district to place more minority students in the lower performing schools. The white parents had complained of overcrowding in the white schools, because so many of the black students wanted to go to the schools where they could get a quality education, go figure. Here is my question, why can’t all the parents come together in the district and raise the level of all the schools? Why must everything in this country be an either/or proposition? If you spread around the students and the resources evenly couldn’t you over time raise the level at all the schools?

Months later, the school board commissioned a demographic study to draft the rezoning plan. J. Russell Gibson III, the board’s lawyer, said the plan drawn up used school buildings more efficiently, freeing classroom space equivalent to an entire elementary school and saving potential construction costs of $10 million to $14 million. “That’s a significant savings,” Mr. Gibson said, “and we relieved overcrowding and placed most students in a school near their home. That’s been lost in all the rhetoric.”

Others see the matter differently. Gerald Rosiek, an education professor at the University of Alabama, studied the Tuscaloosa school district’s recent evolution. “This is a case study in resegregation,” said Dr. Rosiek, now at the University of Oregon.

In his research, he said, he found disappointment among some white parents that Northridge, the high school created in the northern enclave, was a majority-black school, and he said he believed the rezoning was in part an attempt to reduce its black enrollment.[2]

What good is saving money if you are not educating all of your children? No, Mr. Gibson, the cost savings have not been lost in the rhetoric, what has been lost in your calculations is that separate but equal has always been a cheaper way to educate. The way to alleviate the overcrowding in the white schools would have been to raise the level of performance in all the schools, but that would require hard work and commitment which the school board obviously didn’t want to pursue.

In a bizarre twist to the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” legislation the parents of the black students are requesting transfers from the lower performing schools based on the criteria of that legislation. In the rhetoric of Mr. Bush, this was one of the goals of the legislation, but let’s wait to see their reaction to it being used as a tool of integration. I have a feeling we are going to see more of these cases as more school districts begin to remove race as a criteria of equal opportunity.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/education/17schools.html?hp
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/education/17schools.html?pagewanted=2&hp

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