BuckeyeBlog

“Fewer local districts were in trouble because they had failed to make sure no child was being left behind, but some qualified as making adequate yearly progress even though they have yet to show it for all types of students.”

“Because they had failed to make sure no child was being left behind”? Isn’t that a bit of unfortunate phrasing? Intended or not, it’s either snarky or, worse, credulous. I realize the temptation to beat politicians over the head with their own words is a powerful one, but a better way to go about it would be to not use their silly propaganda titles to begin with. The press could avoid this by not using “No Child Left Behind” and instead refer to it as “Public Law 107-110.”

About those school report cards. Your district is rated in one of five categories. Excellent, effective, continuous improvement, academic watch, academic emergency. Once in awhile you’ll see these compared to grades, A, B, C, etc.

This is pure nonsense, a substitute for thought. Presumably it’s a shorthand, allowing parents and anyone else who is interested (usually people selling things to parents) to rank a school to the nearest good or bad, but it’s still nonsense. Maybe if the categories were excellent, good, average, poor, failing, then it might be worth something, but even then it’s not much use. Unless you’re able to say what the elements of these things include, it gives you no idea what is really happening, and worse, it gives you a false impression of what is truly relevant to your child or indeed any individual child.

What our federal, state and bureaucratic officers are doing mucking around in here bears no relation to any student’s performance. It does, however, relate closely to whether that politician or bureaucrat takes credit for the good things others do, while ensuring that the responsibility for the bad things lands elsewhere.

Each day George Bush, Ted Kennedy and the lot of them must wake up and think, “I was excellent yesterday, and I’m going to do be so again today.”

Dublin Schools will soon be rated “continuous improvement“.

Of course that means nothing whatever, so you have to know that one of the alternative ratings is “excellent,” which Dublin is accustomed to receiving.

At the same time, the state has 30 benchmarks that it scores, and Dublin hit all 30 of them. So what gives?

Two things. The state has a different scale than the feds, and the feds require that the schools measure various subgroups to see how they are performing. This is all well and good, since schools will be quick to tout their excellent performance while forgetting to mention untold numbers of individual students who simply aren’t receiving an education. Shame on the state for not doing a better job emphasizing that. No Child Left Behind, indeed.

But the federal law has a bit of silliness in it concocted by Ted Kennedy and George Bush: by 2014, 100 percent of students in each group must meet benchmarks, which is another way of saying there can be no failing students.

This is silly. People are going to fail all the time. My wife can set the benchmark that I’ll look like Tom Cruise, but it isn’t going to happen.

On the other hand, the schools shouldn’t be allowed to ignore those failing students, and assuredly if you leave it up to them to tell you about those failing students, you’re not going to hear about them.

There might be a role here for the federal government to require truth in advertising, and require schools to disclose certain information, such as failure rates. But that’s about the extent of it. There’s no role for federal funding, and there’s no role for federal mandates beyond disclosure, including requirements to close schools or take other remedial action.

The usually excellent Jennifer Smith Richards must have been dozing a bit yesterday, or possibly her editor was, or both. Here’s a nice little story about Ohio’s changing it’s silly “grading” system for public schools and the consequences. Apart from an equally silly statement that the old system was designed “to punish struggling schools” (maybe it was designed to help students? Save the OEA press releases for later) the story does a nice job of describing one of the basic problems of the No Child Left Behind concept that 100 percent of children will be above average. It even quotes Fordham Institute’s Terry Ryan, always a plus.

Just one thing, though. Who did this scrapping? Was it one of state Rep. Larry Wolpert’s bills to reform education? (Presumably not, since the state legislature must “still approve the new plan.”) Was it an action by Gov. Strickland? The Ohio Department of Education? The federal Department of Education? Did someone issue an executive order? Write a letter? Approve a waiver request? We sort of know why, and some aspect of it happened yesterday, but who, what, and where?