An Olive Branch

On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 14:09:07 GMT, "Jay Honeck"
wrote:

"No child left behind" isn't perfect, but it's the first program in my
lifetime that holds out any hope for fixing the utterly broken inner city
schools -- which is what the program is really targeted at.

Unfortunately, here in Vermont the smallish size of many of our
schools causes them to be the "collateral damage", so to speak, of
this program aimed at inner city schools.

With small schools and small classes, students with learning
disabilities have a disproportionately large affect on the test
results. And guess what, they aren't going to improve much regardless
how effective the teacher is, so the test results won't go up from
test to test. Vermont is studded with small schools and pretty much
all of them have learning disabled students. No dodging this one, the
Feds say all students must be tested regardless their actual ability
to learn.

These schools are getting warnings that they are not in compliance
with the standardized testing and there's little they can do to
improve things, other than convince the parents of the learning
disabled kids to move away from their district.

So far the Feds are not aknowledging the impossibility of the
situation or indicating understanding: do the testing, show
improvement or loose funding.

Corky Scott