I have seen NCLB do wrong to our students with my own eyes. This past spring, I visited Shaw Middle School in Philadelphia. It is 90% African American and it is located in a fairly rough, economically-deprived area. This school has a lot of problems with violence, gangs and dropout rates. The biggest problem this school faces is that they were not meeting AYP (Annual Yearly Progress) for a few years so they were having a lot of difficulties getting funding. Since they were lacked funding, the school was not getting what they needed to better prepare the students for the test. This is were the problem is really rooted.
I was in a classroom of 9th grade Math students. They were struggling with the geometry unit which is a significant portion of the PSSA test. The students worked hard during class time and were trying to understand what the teacher was writing in the board. Most of the students took notes but continued to look puzzled. The class ended with the students working independently on some problems in the textbook. Then the bell rang.
I asked the teacher after class why the students were having such a hard time with this unit. She explained to me that the school did not have enough money to buy books for all the students, so a lot of the students only learned geometry in the classroom. Students were not assigned homework on a daily basis because they could not take the books home with them. I then asked her why she did not supplement the students with some handouts of basic rules, examples and practice problems. She replied by saying that each teacher was only allowed to have X amount of copies per semester (she said some ridiculously small number that I cannot recall). She said that she had to ration her copies each week. She blamed this problem on the loss of funding the school received a few years back. She explained that the school has not been able to catch up and off set the economic situation.
This is an absolute shame and it needs to change!
What if you were a parent and your child went through this in high school?
Do you think it is fair that they schools with problems get less funding and those schools that do well get more funding?
Inner city schools are those that are probably hit hardest by NCLB, especially with the huge number of students and lack of funding. I don't think the current policy of withholding funding for poor AYP is effective because it actually holds back resources that could actually help students and teachers. Hopefully, Obama's administration will address these issues in the future.
ReplyDeleteOh, and you also might want to look at how rural schools are being affected. My mom's an elementary music teacher in my town's public school system. Class sizes are increasing, but the district refuses to hire additional teachers or address school space needs.
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