11-13-2012, 09:32 PM
wowzer wrote:
I agree that the no child left behind law has essentially dedicated the school's resources to the lowest performing percentage of students. As long as you pass tests, the public schools in NYC wont dedicate 1 additional penny in your direction. However, if you have any deficits (speech, language, and etc), they will go as far as having an individual tutor/teacher sit besides you in class to help. I don't know how the programs work or not, but as a former NYC resident, I was very peeved, when they shut down our magnet program to pay for these costs. The result of these actions led directly (and this was the sole reason) to my moving out to Long Island to a good school district.
No Child Left Behind had laudable goals but to even hope to reach those goals (if they are even attainable no matter what you do) without reducing resources for kids who are not struggling, NCLB needed to include more funding. They didn't do that, they kept the requirements in place, but didn't produce the funding.
The way the NCLB law was written, school districts face some pretty severe repercussions if the lowest performing students scores do not keep improving, but there is no meaningful consequence if the middle and highest performing students scores are stagnant or decrease. That's a formula that just begs district administrators (whose jobs are literally on the line if they don't meet NCLB mandates) to concentrate resources on those lowest performing kids even though it hurts the other students. The advent of the near-depression recession leading to severely reduced funding for most schools greatly exacerbated the problem.