It seems officials are intending to actually enforce a provision of the No Child Left Behind act stating that schools that are not meeting the benchmarks set forth by the NCLB act, must inform parents that their child has the option to recieve free tutoring or to transfer to another school altogether.
While this sounds like a wonderful idea, letting parents know their rights in regards to their children's education, but sadly, fails to live up to the good intentions such things have (a common trait of NCLB). The biggest problem is that schools recieve funding based upon enrollment. Thus, if students transfer out, enrollment goes down and thus, funding gets cut as well. Schools that would fall under this provision (ie, the failing ones) will already be the ones that do not see enough funding.
Thus, underfunded schools are being threatened with either having funding cut further for trying to keep students by not informing parents of their right, or having their funding cut for not maintaining students. Of course, there's always a third option: Schools can always refuse to participate in the NCLB program and have all of their funding cut.
Thursday, April 06, 2006
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4 comments:
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I'm a firm believer in education as well. However, I don't think much of America's system currently. For a time, was an education major, but eventually gave that up because I thought they were too pretentious.
Yet that entire time, I'd still never met anyone that thought NCLB was a good idea. Having a parent that is also in the educational field, I get to hear even more about how unintelligent NCLB is.
At the same time there was a terrifying article in the Washington Post this past week about how private schools have crossed the $25,000/year tuition threshold. I feel like there's a tremendous irony (or hypocrisy?) in this somewhere, but I can't put my finger on it.
I don't know if it's irony, but perhaps a slightly disturbing trend that private schools are able to demand that much money.
Given that most private schools (not all) are religiously affiliated, I find it unacceptable that there's been moves recently to try to use tax dollars to pay for children to go to these schools, whether that money be in the form of "vouchers" or students going there from public schools that fail NCLB.
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