For years the news has reported that the basic concept of no child left behind’s school choice plan was if a school failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress for two years than parents and students would be given a choice to transfer to a school that was making Adequate Yearly Progress. Inmy child’s school district this tactic was horribly skewed and frankly disregarded. I was initially told that my child would attend a school that had made AYP. I was initially assumed that of the two choices my child had to make from two schools that he would end up at one of them. I made the choice of a school thinking this. However after my my choice was made I learned the following:
- My Child would not be attending a school that made AYP, but would be attending an Annex of another school not housed in the building. ex. the annex is housed at coffee high but takes on the name of cream high and becomes an annex known as cream high at coffee.
- In our case the principal was not on campus and we have yet to meet the “so called” Principal of the school, as far as I know. I do know that I emailed the principal and he never responded back. For all intents and purposes the vice principal is the principal of the school which essentially means that the principal at my child’s school has never been a principal before.
- The third fact that is very important is that the no child left behind children in my child’s situation have no interaction with children other than themselves, they are cordoned off from the overall middle school population. Essentially they are ostracized from a normal experience.
- Finally these children entered a school with no infrastructure. NADA
- It all amounted to a new untested and untried school which I seriously doubt would get approval from any accrediting body. The whole structure could be summarized like this a large successful church agrees to rent out a portion of the church to a much smaller jackleg church. If you get this picture you get what’s happening in this school districts definition of no child left behind.
A brief check of the no child left behind powerpoint presentation states that no child left behind students are to have the same resources as other schools however the sad fact is that administrators and superintendents are intent on not following the letter of the law but frankly pushing the policy into failure. As I write about my and my child’s experiences further, readers of this blog will see how this policy is insidious and designed to harm our children. When educators coldly calculate to harm our children, it’s literally time for some sort of Federal intervention to aid our children’s and keep people only interested in getting a salary and compensation from harming our children. I am convinced that the individuals at the annex are not their to teach but in some cases to break the no child left behind policy.
No Child Left Behind has been lie created for some politicians to pat themselves on the back from the beginning, but this story illustrates just how atrocious it is! I am so sorry for the experience that your child is going through. In actuality, NCLB is there to discredit public education and to encourage private, profitable education. Your child wasn’t REALLY meant to go to a public school that met AYP. Your child was supposed to enroll in private school, first with your own money, until you and parents like yourselves organize enough to demand public funding for private schools so that private schools can make money off of you and public tax money. As a teacher, I suffer from the other side of the fences, continual edicts that don’t benefit students without the necessary funding to back it up, all setting us up for failure year after year.
Comment by cityteacher — October 28, 2007 @ 3:48 am