{"id":2269,"date":"2008-02-14T09:06:39","date_gmt":"2008-02-14T09:06:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/02\/14\/67-of-children-left-behind\/"},"modified":"2008-02-14T09:06:39","modified_gmt":"2008-02-14T09:06:39","slug":"67-of-children-left-behind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/02\/14\/67-of-children-left-behind\/","title":{"rendered":"67% of Children Left Behind"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via a EurekAlert release with the catchy headline “As graduation rates go down, school ratings go up”<\/a>, a new study of the Texas school system<\/a>, which provided the inspiration for “No Child Left Behind”. It’s not pretty:<\/p>\n

\n

A new study by researchers at Rice University and the University of Texas-Austin finds that Texas’ public school accountability system, the model for the national No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), directly contributes to lower graduation rates. Each year Texas public high schools lose at least 135,000 youth prior to graduation — a disproportionate number of whom are African-American, Latino and English-as-a-second-language (ESL) students. <\/p>\n

By analyzing data from more than 271,000 students, the study found that 60 percent of African-American students, 75 percent of Latino students and 80 percent of ESL students did not graduate within five years. The researchers found an overall graduation rate of only 33 percent. <\/p>\n

“High-stakes, test-based accountability doesn’t lead to school improvement or equitable educational possibilities,” said Linda McSpadden McNeil, director of the Center for Education at Rice University. “It leads to avoidable losses of students. Inherently the system creates a dilemma for principals: comply or educate. Unfortunately we found that compliance means losing students.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’m sure this gives “Uncle Al” a warm, fuzzy feeling, but to those of us who care about education, it’s clearly a fiasco. There’s a lot to loathe, here, but my favorite little tidbit may be this explanation of the figures, toward the end of the release:<\/p>\n

\n

The discrepancy between the official dropout rates, in the 2 to 3 percent range, and the actual rates can be attributed to the state’s method of counting, which does not include students who drop out of school for reasons such as pregnancy or incarceration or declare intent to take the GED sometime in the future.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is really just the grand unified theory of GOP social policy, isn’t it? If we create a Guild of Torturers and provide an exemption for little Severian when he drops out of regular school, we’d have the full set.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via a EurekAlert release with the catchy headline “As graduation rates go down, school ratings go up”, a new study of the Texas school system, which provided the inspiration for “No Child Left Behind”. It’s not pretty: A new study by researchers at Rice University and the University of Texas-Austin finds that Texas’ public school… Continue reading 67% of Children Left Behind<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2269\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}