Left Behind By Design: Proficiency Counts and Test-Based Accountability (NBER paper)

Parent Cafe
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<p>Scholars examine the No Child Left Behind Act and find some data suggesting that schools now have incentives to concentrate most teaching resources on middle-ability kids, comparatively ignoring both lower-ability and higher-ability children. </p>

<p><a href=“http://www.aei.org/docLib/20070716_NealSchanzenbachPaper.pdf[/url]”>http://www.aei.org/docLib/20070716_NealSchanzenbachPaper.pdf&lt;/a&gt; </p>

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<p>“Is our children learning?”</p>

<p>Some more than others.</p>

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<p>Dadguy, maybe you are “misunderestimating” GW. ;)</p>

<p>No, I guess not.</p>

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<p>The more I read about NCLB, the happier I am that we have chosen a private high school for my D. Though we live in an affluent area, the requirements are damaging what is a highly regarded school system. The schools were already helping the lower third with many programs and extra-effort but the progress wasn’t fast enough. So they are pouring more money and time into helping those kids who do not score where the Feds think they should…including the thousands of students coming in from countries where the language is not English (Spanish, Chinese, Korean, etc. They may be bright but they’re not likely to score well on a standardized test if they don’t understand it). That means less for the upper third and the middle third gets less still. </p>

<p>We seem to be going back to the days when the TAG kids got nothing. I would have been a TAG in any school system nowadays but when I was a child, they had programs <em>only</em> for the Math/Sci whizzes and very, very few of those. I can’t tell you how hard my mom worked to find a program that would challenge me (I was ‘off the charts’ in reading and writing from 3rd grade). Most teachers/administrators said ‘if she’s so smart, she shouldn’t need help.’ I don’t want to see that happening again. Once you lose a smart kid to boredom, you hardly ever get them back.</p>