Ron Berler has written about his year in a so-called “failing school” in Norwalk, Connecticut.
The school has a dedicated staff trying its best to raise the achievement levels of students who enter school far behind. Yet it is a “failing school” because no matter how much progress the students make,the children are still not as “proficient” as those in nearby affluent New Canaan.
Berler has a new book out, called “Raising the Curve,” explaining the utter failure of No Child Left Behind.
He wrote this note to me:
“The Title 1 school I wrote about — Brookside Elementary, in Norwalk, Conn. — is 0-for-NCLB. This past school year, the local school board cut $5.9 million from its budget, and applied 80 percent of those cuts to the city’s 12 struggling elementary schools. At Brookside that meant, among other things, eliminating the school’s literacy specialist and shuttering its 15,000-title library every other week. The Brookside principal and the Stamford, Conn., schools superintendent called it “a crime.” I wish this story had a happy ending. It doesn’t.”
It is popular treatments like Berler’s that will help the American public understand that public education is not “broken,” but federal education policy is broken and should be completely scrapped and rewritten to address real problems.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane: Do you have access to the Sandia Laboratories Report done for the first Bush administration? There is a statement in there that says that their research did not find the system wide failure the media was reporting.
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Last time I checked (2012), that statement and links were available on wikipedia.
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Nope, not there.
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Ken,
You might want to start here: http://www.questia.com/library/1G1-13766450/perspectives-on-education-in-america
Duane
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Duane: Very kind of you. However, Questia requires enrollment and commitment to pay a fee for their “free trail” offer. For the time being, I’m going to put that possibility on the back burner.
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Let’s just cut straight to the chase. First govt. has no ethics anymore. Second, until they fix the banking/financial system back to what it was before Clinton signed the 1999-2000 Banking Deregulation Acts nothing is going to work and this is why the world is still in a financial crisis. You can never have financial growth and proper funding until there is once again a stable and accountable financial system.
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Why isn’t reading mandated in schools when it’s evident that there are many literacy concerns involving many children?
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What do you mean? Many schools are reduced to focusing almost exclusively on reading and math because that’s what the mandated tests cover.
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I second that Dienne. I used to have the time to teach Social Studies and Science in a meaningful way, but now all I teach is Language Arts (reading and writing, grammar and test taking skills, and Mathematics.
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I don’t understand your question. Do you think schools aren’t teaching reading? In FL, there’s a law that says reading must be taught for an uninterrupted 90-minute block, where kids cannot be pulled out for things like speech or ESL classes, and activities like assemblies cannot be planned during this block. This law makes scheduling a pain in the rear.
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The elementary-school day is roughly six hours long. Subtract time for lunch, recess, gym, snack time, bathroom breaks, transition time between lessons, art, morning announcements and packing up at day’s end, and you’re left with perhaps three hours and forty-five minutes to teach academic subjects. Double up on language arts and math, and something has to give — the subjects that NCLB does not test. Bye-bye broad-based liberal arts foundation.
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NCLB and RTTT are forced on public education with the end result, of course developing a failed system. And now charter, choice and private are seen as the savior of education. However, being forced under the same failed system of education, they too are failing or cheating. Cheating is especially noted with the subtle as well as not so subtle selectivity of students thus pushing more kids into the streets in order to prove their schools are best.
The trickery is documented on our website, http://www.wholechildreform.com.
The reality is that even before NCLB and RTTT schools were subtly failing kids as they were ranking and sorting within the classroom.
The point is, we must get rid of the destructive NCLB/RTTT but replace it with a new model that allows individualized schools, taking kids from where they are at their best rate to their best future. We did this with our fully public school in 1995 and are ready to help your school do it again. Most of what we did fit into the school design of the time.
Unless we provide a plan for the future, public schools will still close and we will still fail. It is not enough to say NCLB/RTTT is a failure. We must also show what will be successful. Let us help you do that
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Will be reading all on your website this weekend.
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Nothing is going to change for the better until teachers are empowered to make site-based decisions about the standards they follow, the texts they adopt, the curricula they implement, the teaching methods they use. It’s time teachers ousted their so-called leadership in favor of people who understand this.
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This.
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It’s time for the education of our children to be taken back from the social engineers of the left and the right.
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No doubt about that Robert!
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Another NC Teacher says “I’m out of here!”
A very good read
http://www.kinston.com/news/local/guest-column-an-open-letter-to-the-n-c-general-assembly-from-a-teacher-1.153495
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She apparently didn’t read about what is going on in Colorado schools.
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neatherthal100: A very good read indeed
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When will teachers collectively reach the breaking point to all walk out of our schools together and say ENOUGH!!!
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I’m too afraid. I value my job.
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We won’t because to walk off the job is to say, “I give up! They win!” We as a group do not believe this. You can’t change things from the outside, but you do have yourself and your beliefs on the inside. Plus in every profession there may the areas where what the official line is one thing, but in every classroom teacher’s still have control…they have themselves, and their own tenacity, subjectivity and determination to squeeze into the day what ever they feel is missing from the curriculum. For me, I put into our day Art and Music.
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There are many ways to go under the radar. Just do it! Individualized schools is one. My “Village” school was a completely traditional public school. And, with guidance, your own staff can do it. We did. Most of the rules are not rules at all, i.e. grade levels, letter grades, exclusion of the Arts, going into the community, integrated learning, authentic assessment and on and on.
You can give a new design to your school and be up and running when all else crumbles. Just let the test scores fall where they fall and go back to teaching kids.
However, we can’t go back to the same design that was failing even before the testing craze. Kids then were sorted and ranked in the classroom. We must take kids from where they are with failure as a learning experience and the ability to recover from it an everyday process.
Go to http://www.wholechildreform.com, buy our books and gives us a call. We will help YOUR staff make the changes to make learning real and finally for all kids.
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Excellent.
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Public and Private schools need an overhaul.
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