(no subject)

[theweaselking]

No Child Left Behind: In a for-profit school where performance on standardised tests results directly in increased funding, investigations show that poor-performing students are suspended so they "don't count" on the tests, answers are altered by the teachers before they're submitted to the state for marking, copies of the tests are provided in advance, and grades are flatly falsified outright.

And yet, somehow people are still surprised that this kind of behaviour appears when you make standardised test performance, not education, the driving goal of your school.

Comments

[andrewducker]

The question being, of course, is there _any_ way of telling whether teachers are doing a good job which doesn't distort the system?

[gothpanda.livejournal.com]

My big problem with NCLB is that if the school is doing poorly, don't they need MORE funding, for more teachers, better equipment, books, etc.? It just seems illogical to punish the children further for doing poorly on the exam. Wouldn't that just make the test scores drop even more? I think this is all part of the Right-Wing Agenda to reinforce class distinctions, creating two economic groups that are so disparate economically that never the twain shall meet again. The haves and have-nots, except that the have-nots are the have-nothings.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

You're not starting from the correct right-wing position: *since* the money granted already *must* be sufficient to cause the correct results (because you're getting the same federal money per student as schools who DO pass), then the failure *must* be as a result of wasting or stealing money, and so you need less.

Besides, if you reward performance, you get performance in search of the reward. If you reward failure, then people will deliberately fail to get the reward. This is why the existence of soup kitchens make people want to be homeless.