jd2718 said...
one of the progress report categories, or is it NCLB? or quality review? whatever. One of the categories that schools are being rated on is how they help their weakest students, and how they help their lagging subgroups.All good ideas, yeah?Except they get credit for
a) doing better?
b) trying to do better?
c) showing someone that they have a plan to do better.
I think just c.
You know what Jd, I think C too! Yesterday we were given a list of all the students in all of our classes. We were told to contact every parent of every failing student and document the nature of our contact on a special form to hand in by Monday. Most of us have been contacting parents. Having us fill out these forms only serves to make the administration look like they are really doing something new to help the failing kids. When will it all end?
I've been thinking about the administration's push for our African American kids to succeed. Is it fair to help these kids and ignore the others? Is the Asian kid who needs help a "throw away" because our school has plenty of Asians that are succeeding? Instead of singling out one race, shouldn't we be finding ways to help them all, or at least help them all equally? If schools truly care about no child being left behind then statistics need to be thrown away and children need to be looked at.
2 comments:
If you're not working in a charter school, THE ANSWER IS ALWAYS C!!! All they do is make you meet federal NCLB or state mandates without the sufficient funding, and/or they stuff your school to a historically new and dangerous level beyone its capacity. One can only hope that one day something will stick. The unfortunate fact is that many DOE policies appear to be implemented as excluding rather than including certain at risk groups. I hate to blame "their culture" alone; if school is not meaningful for a kid for whatever reasons, then maybe it's time to change our perceptions about "school" to include something besides deadly test prep.
Our answer is - hm, I'm not certain. But we started a year ago, noticing what we thought was a weaker subgroup, checking the data to see how big a gap there was (varied by subject), and are now in a long slow process of considering strategies to help close the gap.
Now my principal is savvy about documenting this stuff, so our answers are b) and c). But you know what? I don't think we will make much of a difference. Honest, well-intentioned effort, though.
Jonathan
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