No Child Left Behind. Four words that can make an educator shudder. Even worse could be three letters…AYP. Educators, school administration, and school boards wait with hearts pounding to hear whether or not their school has met AYP, or adequate yearly progress. Recently, a news release from the Bismarck Tribune (http://www.bismarcktribune.com/articles/2009/05/30/news/state/186327.txt) stated that 115 of the 465 public schools in North Dakota did not meet AYP. According to the following North Dakota Department of Public Instruction link (http://www.dpi.state.nd.us/dpi/reports/profile/index.shtm) my school was not among the winners and has not been for the past few years. What now?
As stated in the following article from the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/education/02educ.html?_r=1&ref=education), President Obama’s education secretary wants to institute thousands of school “turnarounds”. That is, closing schools that do not meet AYP, dismissing the administration and teachers, and reopening them with new faculty the following school year. He did this to schools in Chicago while the chief executive of that public school system and now wants to take on schools nationally.
What does this mean for our school? While there are some changes that could be made for the betterment of the district, I don’t think firing the entire staff and bringing in new is going to be the answer. We have a strong teaching staff, some of which have been there for years. The staff constantly strives for betterment of the student body in the hopes that many will decide that the problems that plague the reservation are not for them. Poverty, alcoholism, assault, drugs, homelessness, abuse…just a few of the issues that some of our students face on a regular basis. We have students who will show up for class intermittently, missing good portions of each of the four quarters of the school year. Yet, our school’s performance is judged based on test scores produced by students who face bigger hardships than whether or not they pass a test that is given to them multiple times a year. Do all of our students face these hardships? Thankfully, no. But the students who have relatively stable home lives are indirectly affected in other ways. Behavior issues in the classroom, for instance. It is difficult for a teacher to complete a lesson and focus attention on all of the students if that teacher is dealing with a student who doesn’t want to be in the class at that point in time and is doing everything in their power to disrupt the learning process.
Comparing this school to the last school I was at (which met AYP), they are two different worlds. Other needs have to be met before we even have the remote possibility of making AYP. Completely removing the staff and bringing in new will not meet these needs whatsoever and will in fact cause strife throughout the community. While we do have a few programs that work to strengthen the community and foster positive parent involvement, we do not have the staff or the finances to fully obtain the results we strive for. There is a need for school counselors as well to become more involved in the lives of the students and help them maintain a path for improvement. So many things need to be done before our school system can hope of making AYP. But will those be overlooked in favor of sweeping out the old and bringing in the new?
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My school also was not a "winner" for AYP; we just barely missed the cut-off. The thing I do not like about our testing system is now we are meeting as a leadership team and talking about a handful of students instead of our entire school population. As educators we are spending much of our time on a few struggling students and leaving a large group of our students to work independently without challenging them. I am in favor of meeting a child academic needs and providing for a students needs, but I think we are forgetting about the high achieving students.
ReplyDeleteIt will be interesting what comes about with the new administration in regards to NCLB. I believe that we do need a testing system, just not the one we currently use.