Washington Becomes First State to Lose Its Waiver from No Child Left Behind

I have no knowledge in this subject, so I'm not quite sure if it's good, bad, really bad, or what. I just found it to be an interesting article at first glance since it has to do with my home state.

Washington Becomes First State to Lose Its Waiver from No Child Left Behind

• Source: The Washington Post
• Published: April 24, 2014

 

Sounds pretty bad if you ask me. But then you have to wonder why the hell they failed to implement the required standard tests, and for how long. Could be their schools suck anyway and they wanted to conceal it, could be their politicians are incompetent enough to let it slide, could be both.

Looks like politicians incompetence is part of the equation. If their schools don' t actually suck then yeah, it' s definitely bad. Otherwise loosing funds won' t make them worse than they already are.

 

It's all kinda relative at this point, I think. But yeah it's probably just poor legislation.

 

No child left behind... I'll try to keep this neutral, because I'm against this myself...

Is basically a reward program that gives schools with higher scores more money/bonuses than ones with lower scores to fund their schools via yearly standardized tests. So if School District A averages a 90% district-wide against School District B that scores a 60%, school A will get much more massive funding than school B.

The problem is with it is that when teachers, principals and superintendents put pressure on themselves and others to cheat and most likely pressure the students. The first state to implement the policy was Texas. The cheating started quickly and grew rampant very fast, one of the biggest problems I heard is that the same teachers and superintendents are the ones GRADING the tests, also there's from what I hear no supervision when these tests are taken other than the teachers. This allows the schools to basically make the scores look better than they are so they can get the better funding and of course bragging rights. That's what I heard, anyway.

It might have changed due to Washington not doing the tests, but that's the gist of it. I'm not surprised it's failing, though... It didn't sound like a program that would work in the first place. It sounds like a problem from both sides from what it sounds like.

 

Oh wow, the wikipedia page I read failed to mention that. If it is true then yeah, that' d be a huge incentive to cheat.

 

From what Sara said, that doesn't make sense to me as surely that would mean schools that are already doing well will get better funding and better resources to help the students, so the students will be able to do better, conversely schools that are doing badly, won't be able to get the funding to get better resources to be able to improve. It basically says ones that were already doing well will get all the money but the ones who were struggling will just keep struggling even more.

 

It's basically a reward program, not something where it's: "This school is doing badly due to lack of funding, we need more money put into it." It's more like: "If you do better on your own, you'll get more money for your schools as a reward. If you don't, you get less of a reward."

So basically you need to do well in your schools to get more money as a reward. Hence the reason it's so rampant with cheating.

 

From what I' ve read it' s about improving scores, not about getting good ones. The schools that get worse and worse scores 4 years in a row don' t just loose the funds, they also get help in different ways (might involve wholesale replacement of staff, introduction of a new curriculum, or extending the amount of time students spend in class).

I think the idea was to fight against stagnation and disinterest. Sounds good on paper if you ask me, if not for that little "we get to grade ourselves" loophole.