It’s All About The Kids!

From OR, decidedly non-hysterical look at this business of turning down Title I money to avoid NCLB’s accountability rules. Thx to reader AB.

3 Replies to “It’s All About The Kids!”

  1. My hopefully non-hystercal take on turning down Title I money is this. FROM MY PERSPECTIVE WHICH IS JUST BASED ON MY EXPERIENCE, supplemented by a lot of reading and reflection, I wish our district had just turned down the money. I’ll just give one example of my logic. Our school has often made collaborative plans for remediation, and if they had been funded I think that they would have had a good chance. But all such efforts were killed by the Top Down policy that grew with the passage of NCLB. (Mr. Carey, you can call it “Correlation” or you can call it “causation,” I’d call it a predictable response consistent with Cambpell’s Law.)

    As we all knew would happen, (and would have happened even if our plans had been implemented) the arrival of the money was determined by the butgetary process, not the schedule that schools and students follow. So they dumped tens of thousands of dollars on us in the middle of the semester, along with plans that had no chance, and we predicatably wasted them.

    No buyin, no effective reform

  2. As a former teacher and education policy consumer, I think this article presents a very one-sided view of the issue of NCLB and federal funding. Was this a news article or an editorial?

    I’d like to hear more from defenders of the schools’ actions -what were the reasons behind the schools’ decision to avoid the NCLB rules? If nothing else, the fact that most of this money stayed in the district makes it less disadvantageous for the schools to make the decisions they did.

  3. This is a great article. It says exactly what happened. School board members didn’t want to take the heat for having to publicize the lack of improvement among students. They’d rather turn down free money.

    In my town, NCLB forced the schools to show test scores comparing black and white kids. People were surprised to see the gap, which had been covered up for so long. Sounds like the folks in this article want to cover it up again.

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