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

Corky Scott wrote:

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.
I don't understand this one. Why is that? Fresh air leads to learning
disabilities, or is it too much maple sugar?

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

--
Alex -- Replace "nospam" with "mail" to reply by email. Checked infrequently.

alexy wrote:

Corky Scott wrote:

With small schools and small classes, students with learning
disabilities have a disproportionately large affect on the test
results.

I don't understand this one. Why is that? Fresh air leads to learning
disabilities, or is it too much maple sugar?

If you have one disabled child in a school that has 500 students, it doesn't affect
the average performance of the school. If you have one disabled child in 500
students, but these students are spread out over 10 schools, the performance of the
one school that kid is in will show up as disproportionately poor.

George Patterson
If a man gets into a fight 3,000 miles away from home, he *had* to have
been looking for it.

"G.R. Patterson III" wrote:



alexy wrote:

Corky Scott wrote:

With small schools and small classes, students with learning
disabilities have a disproportionately large affect on the test
results.

I don't understand this one. Why is that? Fresh air leads to learning
disabilities, or is it too much maple sugar?

If you have one disabled child in a school that has 500 students, it doesn't affect
the average performance of the school. If you have one disabled child in 500
students, but these students are spread out over 10 schools, the performance of the
one school that kid is in will show up as disproportionately poor.

Oh, okay. I didn't realize that the incidence of learning disabilities
was so low. In that case, I agree that a few VT schools would have a
harder time meeting the requirements, while most VT schools would have
an easier time of it than would larger schools.
--
Alex -- Replace "nospam" with "mail" to reply by email. Checked infrequently.

"alexy" wrote in message
...
Oh, okay. I didn't realize that the incidence of learning disabilities
was so low.

It's not. Nor are disabled students genuinely causing problems with
standardized test scores. "No child left behind" isn't helping inner city
children any more than it's helping rural children.

The thought that we can improve education by cutting funding to the
underperforming schools is just plain messed up. Many "underperforming
schools" are underperforming because their resources are already stretched
wafer thin.

Pete

"G.R. Patterson III" wrote

If you have one disabled child in a school that has 500 students, it
doesn't affect
the average performance of the school. If you have one disabled child in
500
students, but these students are spread out over 10 schools, the
performance of the
one school that kid is in will show up as disproportionately poor.

George Patterson

I hope that this 500 was a number pulled out of your hat, and not what you
believe is a close estimate. The number of kids passed along without being
able to read and write is a disaster, and telling of our biggest failure in
the schools of today and the past.

1 in 50 is still too low of a number. Wow.
--
Jim in NC


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Morgans wrote:

I hope that this 500 was a number pulled out of your hat, and not what you
believe is a close estimate.

Absolutely. I was simply providing an example to Alex of what Corky was talking
about.

George Patterson
If a man gets into a fight 3,000 miles away from home, he *had* to have
been looking for it.

On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 11:27:41 -0500, alexy wrote:

With small schools and small classes, students with learning
disabilities have a disproportionately large affect on the test
results.
I don't understand this one. Why is that? Fresh air leads to learning
disabilities, or is it too much maple sugar?

I'm not saying that Vermont has a disproportionetly higher incidence
of learning disabled students than other states. But they do have
lots of very small schools. If the school has just a few learning
disabled kids, they tend to drag down the scores because there are so
few other students in the class. NOTE: I'm not saying that all the
small schools have LD kids in each class. Things get much worse if one
of these small schools is unlucky enough to have several LD kids.
Larger schools get to bury their LD student's scores in a much much
larger student population.

As always at this point in a straying discussion, I regret my adding
to the drift. I will post no more on this subject.

My apologies.

Corky Scott