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No State has Taken Over a Failing School |
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Written by Robert A. Southworth Jr.
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Tuesday, 16 October 2007 |
The New York Times reports today that under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the 2001 education law that is up for reconsideration this year, no school that has been labeled as "failing" has been taken over by the state, as the current law stipulates.
The Bush administration is pushing for narrow sanctions agaisnt schools who are labeled failing. The problem is compounded by the fact that poor schools seem to be targeted with no solutions except to close. For example, California has 6000 poor schools out of a total of 9000. Closing schools might be a good idea if there was some alternative. In New York City, the alternative is to close large failing high schools, and restructure them into groups of smaller high schools who share the original high school's facility.
No state has taken over a failing school because the alternatives to
closing a failing school are few and far between. If you choose to
label a school a failure as determined by testing you are ignoring lots
of other data. If you choose to restructure that failing school, you
then need to come up with four or more new schools, four or more new
teachers, and four or more new ways of doing business. I cannot stress
enough, however, that the government under NCLB is implementing a
failing Policy when it labels schools as "failures."
NCLB labels schools as failures by means of standardized testing. The underlying causes for a school's failure are not addressed. Any solution that ignores the wealth of unexamined data will perish in its own time. The crisis is not at the school level, rather, it is at the national level. We need to redisgn the system to be responsive to the Versatile Intelligence and Assessment, VIA (Southworth, 2006) of every child.
Educators all over the country share their frustrations with the NCLB law and its narrow use of standardized test data. In my mind, the continued use of limited data, in this case one test score from students on one standardized test, is ignoring the vast amount of data on student thinking, ability to make adequate yearly progress, and the variety of versatility of student intelligence on a wide range of academic tasks that are ignored when making these high stakes decisions.
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