No child left behind

Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2004 9:18 am

Today school started for my son. This also brought back many memories of when I was teaching. So this week our topic of the week is School Policies, to be more precise the 'No child left behind' policy.

Tell us how you voted and give your Pro's and Con's about this policy.

Added info: for those of you who don't know what the 'No Child Left Behind' act is visit http://www.ed.gov/nclb/landing.jhtml?src=pb

Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2004 11:23 am

You sure can pick em! The whole concept is riddled with holes. The question I think that should be asked is why are we not spending equal dollars on the gifted and talented as we are on the slower to profoundly stupid population?

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Aug 27, 2002 Posts: 17088

I came across this recently http://www.newswithviews.com/Stuter/stuter9.htm and know nothing else about the writer. However, I agree with this document. Bottom line, once again, the liberals continue to want to control the way I raise my family. Well, we home schooled and/or Christian schooled our children so it's water over the dam at this point. But, it's still an irritation.

Posted: Mon Sep 13, 2004 4:20 pm

I just saw a small article on this in a local paper. I had a good laugh. They declared it a success "In spite of its unpopularity" based on one classroom of one grade at one school.

registered · Posted: Mon Sep 13, 2004 5:39 pm

I grew up in Christian schools. I just want vouchers. (how is that for a can of worms? Laughing

)

Posted: Mon Sep 13, 2004 9:46 pm

I'm with Raven on this. We sent our six children to a Christian School where my wife was a teacher. Later she decided to leave her teaching position and home school our children. We don't need the anyone telling us how to raise our kids or what to teach them.

Posted: Tue Sep 14, 2004 8:21 am

How hard was it to home school your kids? Do you feel they had a better education? What guidelines did you have to follow? Did they miss out on any social interactions?

Posted: Tue Sep 14, 2004 3:33 pm

1. NO
2. YES!
3. OURS!
4. NO

I'll explain further later . I' have limited time right now. ....... Wink

Involved Joined: Apr 05, 2006 Posts: 263

well,
my junior (UK) school teacher mrs brigs was very fond of calling me thick, hence my class mates thought dito.
i did`nt hardly learned a thing because
1, my hand writing was terrible
2. we moved on before i got the gist of what had been taught, and its was like that all through those years.
3. never got any help to catch up , she wanted to help the inteligent kids !! get the most of it.
every course i went on in army i was taken the pi** out of by other men or women for being thick for not keeping up, or asking for things to be repeated, or asking that stupid question no on else thought of.

but by this time i might add i always came top in writen and the practical tests. ...strange that.

winston churchil was said to be of low inteligence by his teachers .along with other famous people in UK and american history the past 100 years, einstein included.

just because you dont pick it up striaght away does`nt mean your stupid or anything like that, it just shows IMHO kids like adults have different learning speeds. or that it might take a while then everything just clicks in your head, type of thing like the way i am.

i voted Unsure , only because the No options did`nt match my way of thinking on it.

i am quite sure in some cases a little extra tuition to the concentration impared 5 to 11 year old like me. (i blame star wars trilogy killing me

) while the far more god like kids done a little more examples of the (no apology for this) black board. (political bull).
i find that keeping the whole of the class behind for one child is pure stupidity as it had no effect on my life or my inteligence, i learnt alot more out of school than i did in it from the men i worked with, i was on a systems analyst course back in 99, and yes it was abslutley (my speeling is still bad.... ARF) solid work from the get go, and passed with flying colours all of the courses i i ever did. accept that system one as my sister died suddenly.
i am learning php and all the other stuff i need to databases, and learning welsh , german for starters at the present. so to finish off and i apologise for going on, kids are kids each has a talent and if you diversify the education a child will find the one specail thing that they can exel in.

now if anyone would like to exlain to me why my 3 year old comes out with sayings that are beyond her years and gives me belly laughs and saw cheeks. let me know
ROTFL

Posted: Mon Dec 18, 2006 4:34 am

I couldn't comment on the US educational system as I'm not familiar with it but even so, every child should have a right to the education that suits their development growth.

In the UK they employ a technique they call 'streaming' (usually 3 streams) where children with 'average' learning abilities will be placed in the 'middle' stream, slower learners the bottom stream etc - this is applied to children of that same age.

Whilst the concept might seem a good one, it doesn't work in practice. Ineviatably each child will have different abilities among the many different subjects taught in school and whilst streaming does help with that (you might be in the top stream for one subject and the middle stream for the rest etc) the fact of the matter is that the whole educational system is devalued due to the benchmarking they apply to examinations.

As an example, during the last year at school when they sit their exams, they do some bizzare calculation based on percentages so that if every child only got 50% of the questions right, 100% of the children would then get a 100% pass rate based on the fact the 100% of them attained 50% of correct questions.

This in turn means that educational standards are actually driven down as there is no incentive to drive them up.
If every child that sat their final exams next year and only got one question correct, they would all get a 100% pass or 'top mark'.

The fact of the matter is that the standard of education in the UK is falling simply because instead of getting the pupils to kick the ball better, they are moving the goal posts closer to them with every missed kick - just to make the figures look good!!

The only good thing I have found with our particular educational system is that, during the last 3 or so years of mainstream school life, pupils actually get to choose the subjects they WANT to learn which leaves them free to concentrate on subjects that are of interest to them and that they have the potential to do well in - the exceptions are maths and english which are compulsory.

Me, I chose all the sciences. Physical eduaction seemed a waste of time to me, the only phys ed I want was called bedroom gymnastics.
So I selected Biology, Chemistry, Physics which I excelled at and Control Technology (that was a mixture of applied electronics, electrical engineering, phuematics, hydraulics).

Posted: Mon Dec 18, 2006 7:16 am

When I started secondary school they grouped you for Maths and English depending on your perceived ability from primary school. You were then separated into two groups, high and low. I guess this is similar to what Guardian is describing, but these groups were further split into three sub-sections. A, B, C for the higher group and D, E, F for the lower. They alternated the groups, so that the high group would be doing Maths, while the lower group were doing English. I guess this was because of the number of teachers they had, but if you were particulary bad in either Maths, or English you would end up in the lower group for both subjects.

When I started they thought my Maths was about D level and my English was about C level, so I was put in the lower group.

By the time I left secondary school I was group A for both Maths and English, but unfortunately I did miss a lot as I changed groups 3 times and each class was always learning something different. Ever since my English has been OK, but I have always struggled with the Maths.

I went on to do A'levels and then started working full-time. 10 years on and I'm nearing the end of a part-time degree. It's taken me 6 years, 2 yrs HNC and 4 yrs degree, but I'm hoping it's all going to be worth it, but I particulary struggled with the maths on the degree, so much so that I had to get private tuition.

Anyway I can't comment on the education system now as I don't yet have any kids, but they seem to be testing children younger and younger these days. This in my mind places extra pressure on Children at a young age.

Hangin' Around Joined: Dec 07, 2006 Posts: 41

my daughters were average students, so it didn't matter.

if they had been top grade, i wouldn't have wanted them held back, and if they had been poor, i wouldn't have wanted them left behind.

i would have been at the lower end of the top grade myself, but our school was streamed, so there wasn't any real problem with slower learners. i didn't care about the subjects i was slower at, i just dropped them when i did came to choose my o'level exams

Involved Joined: Dec 27, 2005 Posts: 296

My mother teaches at a high school and tells me the behind the scenes story about No Child Left Behind.
If ALL students do not pass the fundamental tests in order to be eligable for college, then the schools lose their governement funding. It doesn't matter if the students are learning disabled, sick or strapped in a wheelchair, or even if its a 'normal' kid who doesn't want to go to college; everybody HAS to pass these tests. The schools have a few years in order to fully comply with the new law. If by the end of the deadline, the schools are not able to get all students to pass, funding gets cut and the federal governemt comes in and shuts down the school to later re-open under the govn't control; which means teachers have to read from governement issued scripts. Not kidding, not exaggerating and this isn't something out of 1984, this is what is happening.
I'm proud to say that the high school my mother teaches at was one of the first school disctricts to file a lawsuit against the federal governement which has been followed by hundreds of other schools and entire states.
Ideally, No Child Left Behind isn't a bad idea fundamentally, but it has been executed horribly wrong. The schools do not have the funds to properly educate the slower students in the first place; teachers are already overstrecthed and overwrought as it is. Not enough books, not enough classrooms, nothing. To put it in perspective the governement spends about 1.5 million dollars a day on military expenses and about $3,000 a day on education. Hmm.
Freedom of education is a right. Whether homeschooled or public schooled, teachers and parents know more about education than lawmakers on Capitol Hill and the latter should ONLY be allowed to empower and fund the former to do so in whatever education method they choose!
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