Rich Kid, Poor Kid - Who gets the education? [View All]

From "Daily Kos:

Shakespeares Sister's diary:

Education, poverty, and the quest for a Return on Investment in the poorer districts

Three weeks into the school year and I am busy preparing for my classes. Today, though, I am not preparing an actual lesson for the four out of six classes that I teach; I am instead preparing to spend those four hours a day working on other aspects of my teaching responsibilities (writing Advanced Learning Plans, planning future lessons) because I have to take each and every one of my sophomore classes to testing all week. Why do I have to do this? Because 74% of my students qualify for free and reduced lunches. No one, however, wants to talk about this or even admit it.

Let me take a step back and explain. I work (note that I do not say "teach") for a school district near Denver Colorado, one that has a population of 77% Hispanics. For the past few years, the District has posted almost no gains on the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP), and so to remedy that issue, they have enacted many policies aimed at changing that lack of upward trend. Among those policies are: Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) testing four times a year – with each testing round taking a week, with the goals of providing the District with more "data" to improve their curriculum focus, and also to predict what the students’ CSAP scores will be. Each high school teacher must also follow rigidly structured curriculum documents which focus on Colorado state standards – excuse me – the standards most tested by the CSAP. More on that to follow.

Having provided that background information, I must of course revert to the original issue: my students are so frequently tested because they are of low socio-economic status, but no one admits this. The comparable high school in Boulder, Colorado, one that offers the same programs, only has a free and reduced lunch percentage of 4.5, and their percentage of "Students of Color" rests at a modest 15. In this Boulder school, because their CSAP test scores remain high, these students do not participate in such "rigorous" testing practices in order to produce "data" for the school district.

I repeat all of this information to say two things, and here’s one of them: the constant testing of students to produce "data" reduces them to the worst of things – a "Return on Investment" or ROI, a term quite common in the business world. The "business" definition of ROI is "the most common profitability ratio." Interestingly enough, I spent enough time in that world when I was paying my way through college (paying being a loose term as I now have a significant amount of student debt) to know what it really means. A businessperson or manager – or, in this case, Superintendent – expects to put a certain amount of effort into the business, in order to get a certain return, or to keep a job. In the case of my students, they are subjected to a rigorously-structured curriculum, as well as testing four times a year, all in order to produce numbers – numbers that someone who does not know my students will analyze in order to decide how proficient they are at taking a test – not necessarily at thinking.
(Read the rest. It is crucial)
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/9/15/782074/-Rich-Kid,-Poor-KidWho-gets-the-education

Sad state of affairs!