A former student, Aleysha Ortiz, is suing the city of Hartford and the local board of education. Ortiz alleges she graduated without learning how to read or write. She claims it was due to negligence and lack of proper support for her developmental disabilities.
The lawsuit claims Ortiz was denied necessary testing for dyslexia. It also claims she was removed from special education curriculum and only tested for developmental disabilities on her last day of school, revealing significant unmet educational needs.
(without looking into it to verify) isn’t this likely because of “no child left behind”?
No, more complicated.
We stopped teaching phonics (which is something that we had already tried in the 70s, to similar disastrous results). The “whole language” approach just does not work for the vast majority of children.
Digital devices and the instant gratification machine/shot attention spans also make it so less children are reading for pleasure, so that way that some failed children would at least “make it” through interest and passion is less common too.
The NCLB/ESSA aspects are pulling time from social studies and science, which hamper the ability to think critically about what is read. The focus on state testing also means that literature instruction rarely involves reading entire books, but instead excerpts and passages in high school English classes, which more explicitly mirror what is assessed on the ACT, etc.
if it is, they’re doing it wrong. it means to help everyone graduate, not abandon everyone and set the bar so low everyone auto-graduates
No Child Left Behind was designed to defund schools. If it wanted to fix things, poor test results would result in a investigation and overhaul of the district. Instead it just punished the school with less federal funds.
The double bind of working in a “D” or “F” rated school were how many of the factors were completely outside of our power.
You can’t do much when 1/10+ of your student population is absent on a good day, when they hate their teachers getting their bags searched by them as soon as they walk in the door, when students just fucking vanish without anyone caring (deported/shot/dropped out). It really fucking stings to finally make some progress with a kid - like when you finally figure out that the reason they haven’t turned in an assignment the entire the semester is because they are completely and utterly illiterate, and despite being a fucking chemistry teacher you have to do something - and then they disappear without a trace the next week.
There are some names I’ve seen in the news that gut me.
The students you give your standardized test to aren’t even the same ones you began the school with. It’s not measuring anything you or the school did.
And these schools - which are the ones that need the fucking money instead got punished. Got funding cuts. It can’t be that the task was impossible, it’s that you didn’t spend enough money on educational consultants to make sure that all bellwork has an ACT question on it.
yea so they end up just passing failing students to keep the funding going, which is kinda sad, because it will be hard for them to even survive in CC even(in our CC like many if you get too low for too many semesters you will get probation on your record. and there have been several incidence that people were expelled that way, and in these probation classes the instructor confirms that there were people that attempted to come back on the property of the school.