ABQjournal Opinion: Letters to the Editor
NCLB Goes Against Laws of Statistics
I JUST READ the Journal article providing dire warnings that “most schools fail” because they aren’t meeting the standards set by the Republicans’ fiendishly clever No Child Left Behind Act. Have you really not figured it out or is this just sensationalistic journalism?
For one thing, the statute should be called the “Repeal the Laws of Statistics Act.” Every year, no matter how well a school does, it has to do better next year or it “fails.” If 100 percent of Sandia High students meet the goals for 2007, then Sandia will “fail” every year after that, even if they do exactly as well each year because they aren’t “improving.” How do you improve from 100 percent?
The act has 37 measures and if a school misses even one measure, it “fails.” Think about that. A school meets 36 goals, misses one, for an overall percentage of 97.3 percent. That’s an “A” in most grading scales, but under No Child Left Behind the school “fails!” …
Every year, as more and more schools inevitably “fail” to meet the act’s ridiculous criteria, gullible newspapers like the Journal will tell all their readers “your schools are failing!” Seen as a recruitment strategy for convincing voters to distrust the school system generally and the teachers’ union specifically, the act finally makes a little bit of sense. Cynical, vicious, Karl Rovian sense, that is.
Enough of this and maybe the voters will eventually be more receptive to spending their tax dollars to subsidize expensive private schools for the rich. Oh, I’m sorry, the Republican label is “school vouchers”— what was I thinking. …
MIKE DANIELS
Albuquerque
http://www.abqjournal.com/opinion/letters/587798opinion08-21-07.htm
ABQjournal Opinion: Speak Up!
OUR SECRETARY of education has the same old solution to failing schools— deny there is a problem, dumb down the grading, blame the messenger. Another failing grade for the high paid educational bureaucrats.— J.L.P.
http://www.abqjournal.com/opinion/speak/587799opinion08-21-07.htm