ABC Nightline tonight -- No child left behind

[Bozita]

 
Nightline Daily E-Mail
October 8, 2003


TONIGHT'S SUBJECT: President Bush initiated a bold plan to reform public education. But then came the war on terrorism and the economic slump. Now, public education is suffering, from kindergarten through college. States are slashing budgets, teachers are being laid off, class sizes are swelling and the promise of public education is cracking.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

It's happening to some degree or another in school districts from Massachusetts to California. State budgets are shrinking and as a result, so are local public school budgets. Arts and music programs cancelled. Class size doubled. Teachers laid off. Special needs programs cancelled. Facilities crumbling. Did you hear about the school principal in Georgia who broke her own school's windows to force the district to replace the windows she had repeatedly reported were badly in need of repair? People are getting desperate.

President Bush campaigned that he would be the 'education president.' And his 'No Child Left Behind' legislation was bold, even earning the support an unlikely ally in Democrat Senator Ted Kennedy. But Kennedy and several other former supporters have since soured on the plan, which demands much from the schools and which critics say provides little to no funding to help them meet those goals.

Tonight ABC's Judy Muller offers a report card on the nation's public school system. First she visits Arlington, Massachusetts, a working class bedroom community outside of Boston. The state budget cuts have hit this area hard, forcing the community to hold bake sales and fairs to raise money to pay teachers. Parents even are being asked to pay tuition to keep their children attending all-day kindergarten in this public school system.

But the problems are not limited to K-12. Public universities are suffering too. Tuitions at several top public universities have increased as much as 30 percent this year alone. Faculties are being cut, forcing lecture classes to swell to the neighborhood of 500 students, making real learning that much tougher. Some students can't even finish their degrees in four years because the required classes are oversubscribed or unavailable. Judy Muller reports from the University of Texas at Austin, the largest public university in the country.

Public education is one of the great promises of this country. But are we keeping that promise?

We hope you'll join us.

Sara Just and the Nightline Staff
Nightline Offices
Washington, D.C.

[jpgray]

1. I fail to see how this plan was bold beyond doing the opposite of its name

[jpgray]

2. Also--public school is an institution long under attack by neo-cons

Leave No Child Behind, in my opinion, was an effort to cripple and destroy the effectiveness of public schooling. Public school, social security, and unions--inroads are being made on these issues that are prompting knee-jerk negative reactions from voters, and thus alienating them from the Democratic Party. The media coverage is largely responsible, and while Nightline may mean well, the average person may take away: public schools are terrible and can't be fixed.

[linazelle]

3. The nation's 40% dropout rate is no fluke

The dumber the people, the better to hatch their diabolical schemes. Makes sense to me...

[jpgray]

4. Europe's public schooled kids whip the tar out of us

Public school isn't the problem, but our government's management of it is. I was lucky and had a great school in Minnesota--took every AP class offered and got into college with forty-nine credits. There were great teachers and so-so facilities. We spend about four times more on Iraq's latest bill than we do all year on education. Don't get me started about the Pentagon's budget.

[Pale Blue Dot]

5. May I list all the reasons why NCLB is bad legislation?

1. As accurately noted, it is an unfunded mandate.

2. It's emphasis on testing is completely altering the way teachers teach.

3. It's not just the test, but WHAT they're testing. Reading and matha are of course very important subjects, but they don't teach students HOW TO THINK. And there is no testing on history, which gives students a context for the times we are living in. An now these critical skills are not being taught at all because of #2.

NCLB is one of the worst pieces of legislation to come out of this administration, and it will have just as much of a negative long term impact as the tax cut and the Iraq war.

[JackDragna]

12. Even more than that..

The NCLB act has two major asinine components. The first is the way it handles grouping students in schools. NCLB recognizes nine specific subgroups, including a number of minority groups, children that don't know English well and so on. If there are more than ten eligible members of a subgroup in your school, then your school is considered to have that subgroup. No subgroup in your school can perform at the unsatisfactory level: if they do, your school catches hell.

The real problem comes in when arraging individual students in the groups. A single student can be a member of more than one group. So, for example, if there were a black, learning disabled limited-English speaking student in a school that performed poorly, that student would drag down the performance of three different subgroups.

The second idiotic component comes from treating all students the same as far as testing goes. It makes no difference how many students with learning disabilities you have in your schools, what the average socio-economic level of your school is and so forth: everyone takes the same test. Only those with moderate-to-severe mental defects are exempt. What does that mean? Many people in special education will have to perform as well as the general student body.

Oh, a third thing I just now mentioned: by 2011, all schools will have to have 100% of their students getting "satisfactory" results on their test scores.

[Wonk]

6. kick

:kick:

[Cush]

7. kick

[Cush]

8. Kids just laughed at Bush

A kid, probably in high school just said that if they can spend billions of dollars on wars to protect us from Weapons of Mass Destruction that no one can find, I think they can hire a few teachers

(laughter in the background)

[Cush]

9. now talking about Colleges/Unis

talking to people at the University Of Texas (largest public Uni in the nation)

Talking about budget cuts and tuition hikes

giving a list of Schools that have major tuition hikes this year

[jiacinto]

10. I know this all too well

I've had to support myself completely throughout college and graduate school. I have tons of loans that will take me 30 years to pay back and am in difficult trouble right now. This is all too well.

[devilgrrl]

11. Has anyone heard about this? Mississippi's H-1B Teachers

Subject: Mississippi's H-1B Teachers


---------------<<<>>>---------------
JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER
by Rob Sanchez
www.ZaZona.com
---------------<<<>>>---------------

Various prognosticators claim that there is a critical shortage of
teachers in the US. An estimate in this article said that the US will
have a shortage of over 700,000 in the next three years.

Educationists attribute the shortage to the low regard, dismal pay
scales and high turnover in the once admired profession. State and
local governments that are strapped for cash have chosen to solve this
problem by importing cheap labor to teach our kids. Many techies who
are hoping to use teaching as an alternative career will get a rude
surprise when they find out that they are once again competing against
H-1Bs.

Mississippi joins a growing number of states that are using H-1B
teachers to cut costs - and surprisingly the teacher's unions are
allowing this to occur.

Arizona teachers in Scottsdale are being fired while at the same time
an entourage of school administrators went to India to recruit H-1B
teachers. ( http://makeashorterlink.com/?G6E222595 ) When I discovered
what was going on in Arizona I sent several emails to every officer in
the local teachers union. I never received a single reply so I called
and left several phone messages to the president of the union. They
totally ignored me. I assume that's because they are either too stupid
to understand the message, or they have been bought off by the cheap
labor lobby. Teachers may be unionized but they won't be able to rely
on them for help.

A copy of my letter to the Arizona teacher's union is included
following the article below.

------------------------------------

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?msid=
127564

America calling: Techies out, Teachers in
CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA

TIMES NEWS NETWORK< TUESDAY, AUGUST 12, 2003 10:16:19 PM >

WASHINGTON: Last week Garima Malhotra was teaching at the PKR Jain
Secondary Public School in Ambala, Haryana. This week, she will begin
instructing at Greenwood High School, Greenwood, Mississippi.

She arrived in the United States on Friday, unpacked over the weekend
in a new apartment the school had rented for her, and went to work on
Monday. No, she did not begin teaching; there was lot of paperwork to
be completed so she sat in the classes of other teachers to absorb the
atmosphere.

"So different, but it looks very nice.I am very nervous," she said in a
telephone interview from the school. "I think it will take little time
to adjust."

Malhotra, 27, is among the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of teachers
being imported from India to meet a critical shortage of instructors in
the US that according to one estimate will touch 700,000 over the next
three years.

EDITED BY ADMIN: COPYRIGHT

[Bozita]

14. This is outrageous.

Looks like teacher salaries are gonna get Walmarted.

America will soon be needing more dollar stores.

Sad, so sad.

[Donna Zen]

13. There is much...much...more

There is so much wrong with the bill, and it is so convoluted that it is hard to explain unless you're inside of the belly of the beast.

To begin with there are 37 ways to fail and have your school shut down. They have not put the money into the solution/improvement portion of the bill, and I suspect that is not an over sight. Nope.

One guy I know was invited to participate in a group to design alternatives for failing schools. He said that during the first session they handed out papers describing the mission which included a set amount of money and how that money could be used to establish a "new" school according to the guidelines. At that point, he almost got up and left because what he was looking at was "big brother". He stayed because he had driven several hundred miles to the workshop; however, he was horrified. Oh, did I mention he is a repub? Horrified.

Also, the bill mentions something called "the scientific reading method", a program that just happens to be put out by one company located in Texas and a bushco supporter.

More...more...much, much, more. Just think of it as "The end of public schools as you know them with money funneled into the greed hands of republican contributors" act--against America and our children.

[Wonk]

15. mp3 here for those who missed it

5 M