Quote:
Originally Posted by PM_Mama00
I forgot to post earlier that I have a few teacher friends. We chatted about NCLB and I was under the impression that it meant no matter how bad a kid was doing, he wouldn't fail that grade. I didn't know that there was SO much to it. Both of these friends that I spoke with are by far lazy teachers. They are constantly thinking up new and different projects and activities for the kids. They are involved in their life as far as a teacher can go. They are the type of teachers that a student goes back to and says "You were an awesome teacher". Both of them aren't happy with this system because they DO have to teach the test. They don't have much of a choice because the schools make "the test" their curriculum.
I hate standardized tests. I'm a bad test taker. I probably would have graduated high school and college with a 4.0 had I never had to take a test.
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The bolded part is a great example of what I meant as far as the bill getting blamed for district response to it.
Sure, graduation rate as measure by the number of 9th graders who enter who graduate four years later is one indicator for school performance under NCLB. BUT it's the school districts and spineless administrators who have decided that rather than try to get kids to do all their assignments and actually learn something (or take responsibility for re-taking the course) that teachers should just hand out passing grades. These geniuses apparently have so little faith in actual learning that they don't see that there would probably be a relationship between lowering requirements for the class and kids maybe not learning as much to show off in the tests.
But NCLB probably included graduation rates so that schools didn't have a perverse incentive to push kids no likely to do well on the tests out of school. And yes, I think there are some schools that would have done this. I think a lot of schools indirectly encouraged certain kids to drop out for a long time.