An Olive Branch

"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