Soft and hard bigotries
A concerned article in the Hartford Courant frets about the impact of the Leave No Child Behind Act:
State education officials throughout the nation are warning that President Bush's new education reform law will mean giving a majority of the nation's schools a failing grade...
Throughout the country, state officials, most of whom are struggling with deep budget problems, worry that the law will overtax their limited resources by forcing them to channel extra money to schools that may not need it, while causing a public relations nightmare for otherwise improving schools.
"What happens is you create a situation where there are so many schools failing that there is no support for them," said Paul Houston, executive director of the 14,000-member American Association of School Administrators. "The administration likes to talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations and how this law fights that. But what about the hard bigotry of high expectations without adequate resources?"...
The problem being cited by many state and local officials is that the law also requires school systems to raise the achievement levels of students every year in each of five racial and ethnic subgroups, as well as among low-income students, students with limited English skills and disabled students. Any deviation from steady improvement in any of the subgroups for two consecutive years will result in a school's being called low-performing. Accountability experts say that requirement, coupled with the year-to-year deviations that typically occur in standardized test results, means that schools will often be deemed low-performing for what amounts to statistical - rather than educational - reasons.
This generalized panic is evident in this compelling story of a specific struggling school, the Jeremiah E. Burke school in Boston:
Jeremiah E. Burke High School earned a dubious distinction in the spring of 1995: it became the first Massachusetts public high school in recent memory to lose accreditation...
The Burke, as it is known in its Dorchester neighborhood and throughout the rest of Boston, regained its accreditation in 1998, sparing itself the final, most drastic step in the nonaccreditation process: closing. Its comeback has been honored repeatedly...Like an alcoholic, a school that has escaped the label of failing can never let down its guard; nor can the community that supports it. If they do, they risk losing all they have gained.
...[There are] fresh signs that the Burke was in trouble. As a result of state and city budget cuts at the beginning of the school year, Burke High School had to eliminate the jobs of 12 of the 24 teachers and aides it had hired over six years to spur its comeback, including two in math and one in computer science.
The Burke may also be suffering for its recent success, however relative. On the state's new battery of standardized tests — known as MCAS and introduced the year the school got its accreditation back — 42 percent of Burke students passed the English test earlier this year, compared with 10 percent in 1998; 36 percent passed the math test this year, compared with 7 percent in 1998. Those numbers remain well below citywide averages, but at a time when the state is trying to close a budget gap that by some estimates is as much as $4 billion, the Burke may not be deemed so needy anymore.
I am more in favor of tough, higher standards than some of those in the educational community, but I agree that we've created a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. The problem seems to be the timeline. Everyone wants schools to begin improving NOW, but two years is not enough time to turn a school around, and it's also too narrow a time span to expect a constant upward trend in test scores. Do we give more money to schools that are doing well, when it's the lower-performing schools that need the money? Do we give more money to the schools that are performing poorly, given that this may remove incentive to do better? I don't have the answer.
Posted by kswygert at January 2, 2003 10:22 AM