Nearly 90 percent of Baltimore elementary and middle schools fell short of academic targets on state assessments this year, signaling a trend that education officials nationwide say will eventually label most American schools as failures.
Only 15 of the 141 city schools met federally mandated progress goals in math and reading on the Maryland School Assessments, according to state and city school data. And the schools that didn't meet the adequate yearly progress goals included some of the highest-performers in the city and the state, illustrating the continuing debate about the embattled No Child Left Behind Act.
"It's a crude measure and an unsophisticated system in that it tarnishes schools with the same brush," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a nonpartisan group that has tracked the nation's progress under the law since its inception. "It's one of these things that everyone knows there's a problem, but no one has figured out how to fix it."
5 comments:
No surprise in that news. The Balto. City school system is abysmal. Yes, at that rate almost every school in the City will be labeled as failing by 2014, the year in which NCLB decrees that a school must have 100% "proficient" rate. That will never happen even by 3014!
"..everyone knows there's a problem, but no one has figured out how to fix it.."
Baloney. Nobody has the GUTS to fix it.
The solution has been known for decades-- go back to what worked. There have been generations of fully literate, well-educated citizens. It only started going downhill when the PC crowd got hold of it and turned our schools into indoctrination camps.
No Child Left Behind, to which President George W. Bush said, "The question is, 'Is our children learning.'"
9:10, No Child Left Behind, the result of years of cooked books in the Houston school system that was only discovered after the law was passed and the superintendent at the time, Rod Paige, was already serving as Secretary of Education. The program never actually worked. The numbers were fixed. And yet, 10 years later, we're stuck with a program we know, without a shadow of a doubt, was based on fraudulent data.
Wicomico didn't meet targets either but spun the news to talk about the improvement in scores. Does anyone care about the tens of millions going for academic and behavioral interventions for kids who are making little or no progress?
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