Many Children Left Behind.- Epic Fail

This is the 12th year. The year the educational law passed by near unanimous vote in the House and signed by Bush in 2002 "No Child Left Behind" was suppose to be met, and hopefully exceeded. The goal was that every student in the nation should be at or above grade-level in Math and Reading.  Grades 4 and 8 were the check points.

Doesn't seem like that difficult of a goal. If a child is in 4th grade, shouldn't she be reading at 4th grade level?

The whole plan sounds acceptable. It even gets your blood going. "No Child Left Behind". It rings with those slogans we hear from Fireman, Marines and Special Forces, "We Don't Leave Our Men Behind", "Everyone Goes Home." And at the time, 2002, just after the 9/11 crisis, we were looking for things to be patriotically positive about. Yeah, we were going to kill Bin Laden, but rage only gets you so far when you are hurt like that, you need something to care about, something with life in it -- who leaves children behind anyway? So Bush signed that paper, it became a national goal and we all felt good.

Results?  Epic Fail.

The test is only for two areas. Math and Reading. There is a single standardized test for each of those, which is given every year. The objective was to come up with educational strategies which would bring students up to grade level within twelve years. Math came up some. A steady if disheartening amount every year. Reading basically flatlined.

Our results indicate that NCLB generated statistically significant increases in the average math performance of 4th graders (effect size = 0.22 by 2007) as well as improvements at the lower and top percentiles. There is also evidence of improvements in 8th grade math achievement, particularly among traditionally low-achieving groups and at the lower percentiles. However, we find no evidence that NCLB increased reading achievement in either 4th or 8th grade. -- NBER Working Paper No. 15531

Letter from Parent to Jeffco School Board -- Don't Tread on Me

The following is an Open Letter to the Jeffco School Board in Colorado originally posted on the Support Jeffco Kids web site. Where appropriate and where I knew of places to link information, I've added HyperLinks. In fact, all the hyperlinks are mine so do not blame them on the author of this letter or believe that she agrees with the juxtaposed information or any conclusions the matchup may bring to mind. -- Glenn Hefley



Letter Begins:

What all the media is missing is that these 3 majority board members have continually forced every decision with their majority vote down the throats of this community and continue to ignore us, so we have no reason to trust that they would do the right thing this time.  We all watch their friends at board meetings, organizing themselves into groups, names not matching the sign-up, repeated voices and most of these “friends” that Mr. Witt clearly recognizes and addresses by name don’t even have kids in our schools.  This is evident even on the LiveStream.

Open Letter to Mr. McMinimee: Jeffco Schoolss Superintendent

Dear Mr. McMinimee:


I am a parent with two daughters who attend Jeffco Schools. Yesterday I received the Super
News update from you in my e-mail with some explanation about the closures at Conifer High
School and Standley Lake. As you explained the situation you concluded with this statement,
“I’m not going to speculate on why teachers were absent.” This statement has left me confused
about your awareness of what is going on in your organization.

I have a little experience with district and teacher issues. Might I suggest a few reasons why
teachers might have called in sick or taken personal days on the same day?

1. The election of the schools board brought a promise of better fiscal transparency and
stewardship of public funds. However this board has given money to charter schools with
proven records of mismanagement of budgets, and no record of increasing student
achievement. Teachers working in schools that have increased achievement in reading and
math might have felt a little disrespected.

2. After the Board forced Mrs. Stevenson out, the search for your position was a sham.
Thousands of dollars were put into a national search-ironically to replace a nationally recognized
superintendent with a track record of improving student achievement. After taking consecutive
pay cuts and salary freezes for the past few years in an effort to keep the organization fiscally
afloat, teachers might have felt a little disrespected.

Jeffco School Board vs Blaine - I Got One More Silver Dollar

The following, as requested, can be viewed as an OPEN LETTER, and may be copied and used on any website as Open Source under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; as a whole, or may be copied in part by any News venue as you wish without citation being required. 

To The Jefferson County Board of Education Members, Students and Teachers,

I keep telling myself that I'm 'just about done' and going to be back to my novel writing any day now. Not today obviously, but soon - which is also my humble way of saying, I'm not a lawyer, or a cop or a Republican or Democrat. I'm a writer. A writer who writes fiction. Thing is though, when people read my fiction, they know it is fiction. I tell them that right up front. I also dislike competition from amateurs, thus the recent activities of you and a few of your Board members has been a distraction. That and the presence of one Larry Krieger at the meeting of the State Education Board Sept 10, 2014, who should be run out of whatever town he is in right now, just on precedent. When those activities blossomed into the Kids of Jeffco demonstrating against them I became fully engaged.  

The full disclosure of Colorado interested me, and allows for a great deal of research from a distance. I've seen these directives called Sunshine Laws. I like that. Sunshine Laws. How could you go wrong with mandated full disclosure? 

Well, by not checking to see what might be lying around.  

Word Of the Day - Proselytize

pros·e·lyt·ize

ˈpräs(ə)ləˌtīz/

verb

past tense: proselytized; past participle: proselytized

1. convert or attempt to convert (someone) from one religion, belief, or opinion to another.

   "the program did have a tremendous evangelical effect, proselytizing many"

   synonyms:

   evangelize, convert, save, redeem, win over, preach (to), recruit, act as a missionary "I'm not here to proselytize"

   • advocate or promote (a belief or course of action).

     "Davis wanted to share his concept and proselytize his ideas"

     synonyms:

     promote, advocate, champion, advance,  further, spread, proclaim,peddle, preach, endorse, urge, recommend, boost "he wanted to proselytize his ideas"

2. Although the federal government criminalized the international slave trade in 1808, after 1820 cultivation of the highly profitable cotton crop exploded in the Deep South, and along with it the slave population. The Second Great Awakening, beginning about 1800, converted millions to evangelical Protestantism. In the North it energized multiple social reform movements, including abolitionism; in the South, Methodists and Baptists proselytized among slave populations.

Today's Real Criminals, and the Massive Damage they Cause

off of Huntington Post ...

A long-running Ladies' Home Journal column that started in 1953, called "Can This Marriage Be Saved?," features real-life couples and the juicy details of their marital issues. 

The columns were split into three parts: a wife's perspective, her husband's take and then final judgment by a counselor from the American Institute of Family Relations. AIFR was a successful, but now defunct, center founded in the 1930s by "Dr." Popenoe. He wasn't actually a doctor or a psychologist but a eugenicist with an honorary degree. Very often, Popenoe's counselors found a way to pin problems on the wives, calling them "childish," "juvenile," "emotionally immature" and "frigid," for example. 

Early "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" columns, which continue today at Divine Caroline without the sexist overtones, show us how far women's equality has come -- but also how far we have to go. Here are five horrifying pieces of advice from the magazine.

... Then five 'columns' describing women being abused in various and serious ways are listed in the Huntington Post article: Awful '50s Marriage Advice Shows What Our Mothers And Grandmothers Were Up Against -- and they are... awful.