NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND LIMITATIONS

[KIMBER45]

A high school teacher alerts professors to the  limitations of a generation of No Children Left BehindRelated Articles

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Advertisement<a target="_blank"  href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/click%3Bh%3Dv8/3d8f/3/0/%2a/g%3B267378467%3B1-0%3B0%3B93247947%3B2321-160/600%3B52666973/52620806/1%3B%3B%7Eaopt%3D0/ff/4e/ff%3B%7Efdr%3D267486213%3B0-0%3B0%3B15485509%3B2321-160/600%3B52408950/52366653/1%3B%3B%7Eaopt%3D2/1/4e/0%3B%7Esscs%3D%3fhttps://www.tiaa-cref.org/public/secure/ata_awareness_campaign?tc_mcid=em_c8051_ATA_aware_campaign_webinar_0213"><img  src="http://s0.2mdn.net/1373108/1-C8283_160x600_Tools.gif" width="160"  height="600" border="0" alt="Advertisement"  galleryimg="no">[/url]<a  href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/site172.tmus/story_level_pages;pos=top;sz=160x600;tile=1;kw=assessmentandaccountability;ord=3980890720?"><img  typeof="foaf:Image"  src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/site172.tmus/story_level_pages;pos=top;sz=160x600;tile=1;kw=assessmentandaccountability;ord=3980890720?"  alt="" />[/url]'Warnings From the  Trenches'    February 19, 2013 - 3:00am  By Colleen  FlahertyPart swan song, part favor for a friend, Ken Bernstein’s letter to college  professors upon his retirement from teaching high school government is  generating buzz across higher education.
Called “Warnings From the Trenches," the piece alerts professors to  the generation of No-Child-Left-Behinders they’ve begun to inherit in their  classrooms and what standardized test-driven K-12 educations will mean for  college-level teaching and learning.
“No Child Left Behind went into effect for the 2002-3 academic year, which  means that America’s public schools have been operating under the pressures and  constrictions imposed by that law for a decade,” largely sacrificing meaningful  content and development of critical thinking and writing skills for test  preparation, Bernstein wrote. In other words, if it wasn’t tested, it wasn’t  taught.
“Thus, students arriving in our high school lacked experience and knowledge  about how to do the kinds of writing that are expected at higher levels of  education,” he wrote. And even though high school teachers may try their best to  make up for lost time, they, too, are held accountable for standardized test  scores. Beyond mandatory state tests, the broad scope of Advanced Placement  exams can have the same short-sighted effect on instruction, he added (many of  Bernstein’s courses were AP U.S. government and politics).
Consequently, he said in an interview, students now arriving at college -- even elite ones -- are better at "filling in bubbles" than thinking outside a  discrete set of multiple choices, in the ways the higher education  and adult life demand.
Bernstein said he’d planned on retiring from his Maryland high school several  years from now, but decided to leave last month due to a combination of factors,  including the increasingly frustrating nature of teaching in a test-focused  system. The longtime teacher –  who’s been blogging for years about  education, often with the political blog Daily Kos – originally wrote the piece  for the American Association of University Professors’ journal Academe.  He did so at the urging of its editor, Aaron Barlow, a friend and sometime  collaborator on independent projects.
Barlow said his own work as an English professor at New York City College of  Technology and as an instructor for another early-college composition program  have made him “keenly aware of the growing problems for students entering  college out of what has become test-heavy secondary education.”
Getting someone “outside the ivory tower” to speak to the issue has proven an  effective way to promote the conversation both within and outside academe,  Barlow said, referring to the wave of attention Bernstein's letter has  attracted, including a spot in The Washington Post’s popular The Answer Sheet column (from which it’s been  recommended on Facebook 92,000 times). Diane Ravitch, prominent education  historian and professor at New York University, said on her blog that “Warnings from the Trenches” was “unquestionably  the most remarkable and powerful piece that Ken Bernstein has written. Please  read it.” He’s also received more than 180 personal e-mails and can hardly keep  up with the comments being posted in response to its various online links.
David Glidden, professor of philosophy at the University of California at  Riverside, was among those who e-mailed to express solidarity and a concern for  where standardized testing is leading education. After teaching for 37 years, he  said he’s seen a dramatic drop in student writing ability during the last  decade, as have his colleagues.
“None of us blame our high school teachers,” he wrote in his e-mail to  Bernstein. “We quite realize that the terms of instruction established by the  teach-to-the-test system have undermined the ability of students to think and  advance critical views in writing, or in speaking for that matter.”
In an interview, Glidden said that on its face, No Child Left Behind “seems  like a great thing.” In reality, however, he said, it doesn’t “go deep enough” to test skills needed for success in higher education. “How to make facts into  insights and arguments and develop theses and defend them is not tested and not  encouraged in the teaching of high school students.”
Although Bernstein said some have accused him of shirking accountability and  being a “unionized hack,” he said most responses, like Glidden’s, have been  positive and “humbling.” He said he believes his piece has been so resonant with  so many because it represents not only his own experiences but experiences that  colleagues have shared with him spanning many years.
“I have one voice and I can talk or write with a certain amount of cogency,  but this is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “If there were more cases  where more voices were heard, maybe policy makers might wake up.”
Because teachers “have very little say in what is happening in public  education,” Bernstein in the piece asks professors to speak out against harmful  education policies and warns them of the creep of high-stakes assessment into  higher education. He cites proposals to rate teacher education programs by the  test scores of graduates’ students as one example.
In closing, Bernstein apologizes to professors for being among high school  teachers “who understood the problems that were being created [but] were unable  to do more to stop the damage to the education of our young people.” Many tried,  he said, and “[m]any of us are leaving sooner than we had planned because the  policies already in effect and those now being implemented mean that we are  increasingly restricted in how we  teach.”

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/19/high-school-teacher-alerts-professors-limitations-generation-no-children-left-behind#ixzz2LQeKOjwL

[Jim, West PA]

WT ?!?!?!?!?!?!
 I just sat here for 20 minutes writing a response to this post and when i hit spell check it all disapeared !!!

[tom548]

I have had this type of problem, I started to hit the copy button and keep in my computer memory that way if it goes into cyber space I don't have to type it all again. Just copy, then past if it gets lost.
    20 min.  that would be about two short sentences for me!!!!!!

[Old Fart]

Be interesting to see industries response a few years after they kids start populating the job market.

[Jim, West PA]

Thanx Tom. I'll keep that in mind.

Be interesting to see industries response a few years after they kids start
populating the job market.

That's a two edge sword there OF.
 A lot of the ones that do find thier way in are performing marginaly, if that, and have learned form 'school' that even if they don't perform, "deserve" equal pay. And the ones that don't, or should i say won't, are more than content to live out of our pockets.
Then there are those that genuinely try HARD and just can't cut it because they were never taught the skills. My son just commented to me recently that he blames his high school and thier rule of skating everyone thru on the fact that he has difficulty with his clerical abilities, or lack thereof, in the ARMY when he is faced with his boards.

[reliquary]

My comment only applies to Texas schools; I taught JH English-Math-Social Studies, plus JH and HS Science for 15 years after a career in service and my daughter is currently teaching HS Science, so I stay in touch through assisting her.  I went through three iterations of State attempts to incorporate standards and institute competency testing. 
 
The schools have focused so sharply on training students to pass their various "skills & knowledge" tests in various grades that they have lost sight of what many of us call "just the basics".   The curriculum has been dumbed down in order to achieve high graduation rates and "pass" rates.  Inordinate amounts of time are spent on practicing for these "skills & knowledge" tests, but the students aren't proficient in the basic skills such as grammar, spelling, place value, order of math operations, etc. 
 
 I have seen students who, when using a scientific formula that winds up with an answer such as 3/1, have to input that into the calculator to get the final answer.  Simple operations such as 10 X 5...they are unable to do it in their head and must use a calculator. 
 
This problem didn't "just happen", but its fruit is people who have a HS diploma, reach adulthood, and yet are incompetent in the skills necessary for whatever  job market they wind up in.  I did two stints in military training schools, and we had to begin to "dumb down" the training manuals to about 6th-grade levels in the late 70s-early 80s.
 
Another anecdote...I graduated from HS in 1960.  After my service career and miving "back home",  I began teaching in that school system in 1996.  The English teacher who began at that school in 1961 (the year after I left) told me...in 2003...that she was using 1961 9th-grade-level-English lesson plans for her Senior Honors English classes.  That's how much it had been dumbed down.
 
Your experiences may vary. 

[lgm270]

My comment only applies to Texas schools; I taught JH English-Math-Social Studies, plus JH and HS Science for 15 years after a career in service and my daughter is currently teaching HS Science, so I stay in touch through assisting her.  I went through three iterations of State attempts to incorporate standards and institute competency testing. 
 
The schools have focused so sharply on training students to pass their various "skills & knowledge" tests in various grades that they have lost sight of what many of us call "just the basics".   The curriculum has been dumbed down in order to achieve high graduation rates and "pass" rates.  Inordinate amounts of time are spent on practicing for these "skills & knowledge" tests, but the students aren't proficient in the basic skills such as grammar, spelling, place value, order of math operations, etc. 
 
 I have seen students who, when using a scientific formula that winds up with an answer such as 3/1, have to input that into the calculator to get the final answer.  Simple operations such as 10 X 5...they are unable to do it in their head and must use a calculator. 
 
This problem didn't "just happen", but its fruit is people who have a HS diploma, reach adulthood, and yet are incompetent in the skills necessary for whatever  job market they wind up in.  I did two stints in military training schools, and we had to begin to "dumb down" the training manuals to about 6th-grade levels in the late 70s-early 80s.
 
Another anecdote...I graduated from HS in 1960.  After my service career and miving "back home",  I began teaching in that school system in 1996.  The English teacher who began at that school in 1961 (the year after I left) told me...in 2003...that she was using 1961 9th-grade-level-English lesson plans for her Senior Honors English classes.  That's how much it had been dumbed down.
 
Your experiences may vary.

Wow.  I graduated from HS in the 60's and my experiences are very much the same as yours.  In the late 70's I dated a girl who was going back to college and some of her "college" text books blew me away.  Very pathetic,

On the other hand, another family friend's kids went to a good Catholic H.S. and their text books were up to some of the books I had as an undergraduate. 

Quality varies widely, but my teacher friends are very demoralized and trying to retire ASAP.  In the LA public schools there's lots of racially motivated violence and teachers have no power to discipline and no back up from the parents or the administration.   Also the racial problem.  When the "minorities" get in there,  white kids are screwed.

[ultramag44]

Agreed!

No child left behind is a slap in the face to real education.

The so-called federal dept of education takes tax $$ from the states, takes a cut off the top then redistributes (redistribution of wealth)  what's left back to the states w/ a bunch of dictates.

It's time to dissolve the DOE and let the states decide what their kids need and manage all their own $$.

[reliquary]

In this area, many parents are enrolling their kids in Charter Schools and private schools...read "white flight".   
 
The really dedicated teachers have gone into teaching Honors/Advanced Placement classes in order to have their students "filtered" by the system...and that has gotten to be a joke as well.  My last year, they "placed" a Special Ed student with a 4th-grade reading capability into my AP Biology class because that was the only science class available for him at that time.  That lasted only a couple of days.