child abuse
The rapacious and callous uncaring of the neolib/neocon test-and-punish ed reformers has reached a new level of depraved prominence as school starts back once again with more children suffering under the burden of poverty, no health care, and neglect. The hollow rhetoric by the accountability and testing crowd can no longer mask the devastating realities of struggling families as recession grinds on and the spectre of depression looms. While the wishful thinking liberals and the bare-knuckled conservatives continue to pitch their bankrupt notion of world-class standards and no-excuses accountability plans for American schools, the schools, themselves, are going bankrupt and the children of the foreclosed are dumped on the streets. What will be next, a bowl of soup for a passing score?
From Sam Dillon at the NYTimes:
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — With mortgage foreclosures throwing hundreds of families out of their homes here each month, dismayed school officials say they are feeling the upheaval: record numbers of students turning up for classes this fall are homeless or poor enough to qualify for free meals.
“We’re seeing a lot more children in poverty,” said Lauren Roberts, spokeswoman for the Jefferson County school system, a 98,000-student district that includes Louisville and its suburbs.
At the same time, the district is struggling with its own financial problems. Responding to a cut of $43 million by the state in education spending and to higher energy and other costs, school officials in Jefferson County have raised lunch prices, eliminated 17 buses by reorganizing routes, ordered drivers to turn off vehicles rather than letting them idle and increased property taxes.
The Jefferson County system is typical this school year.
As 50 million children return to classes across the nation, crippling increases in the price of fuel and food, coupled with the economic downturn, have left schools from California to Florida to Maine cutting costs. Some are trimming bus service, others are restricting travel, and a few are shortening the school week. And as many districts are forced to cut back, the number of poor and homeless students is rising.
“The big national picture is that food and fuel costs are going up and school revenues are not,” said Anne L. Bryant, executive director of the National School Boards Association. “We’re in a recession, and it’s having a dramatic impact on schools.”
Louisville’s pain is minor compared with the woes of some cities. Detroit has laid off at least 700 teachers, Los Angeles 500 administrators and Miami-Dade County hundreds of school psychologists, maintenance workers and custodians.
Schools in many states have cut bus stops to save diesel. Districts in California and Ohio have gone further and eliminated bus service either completely or for high schools, leaving thousands of students to find their own way to school.
In Maine, officials worried about the cost of heating their classrooms this winter have restricted travel for field trips to save money. Districts in Louisiana, Minnesota and elsewhere have taken a more radical measure and adopted four-day school weeks. Hundreds of districts, responding to higher food prices, are charging more for cafeteria meals.
In interviews, educators in many states said they were seeing more needy families than at any time in memory. Two charities in suburban Detroit announced in August that they would hand out student backpacks, attracting hundreds of families.
“They went through all 300 backpacks in three hours, boom, and that was that,” said Kathleen M. Kropf, an official in the Macomb Intermediate School District. “We’re seeing a lot of desperate people.”
There were no giveaways for Jacci Murray, 28, a single mother in West Palm Beach, Fla., who said she lost her job six months ago. Ms. Murray bought pencils and crayons for her son, Cameron, who is in the second grade, from a discount bin at Office Depot. Saying she felt “cheap and broke,” she pored fretfully over her school supplies list, afraid to waste gas by making more than one shopping trip.
“It’s been tough this year,” Ms. Murray said. “I’m depressed about school.”
And so are many educators.
West Virginia officials issued a memorandum recently to local districts titled “Tips to Deal With the Skyrocketing Cost of Fuel.” Last week, David Pauley, the transportation supervisor for the Kanawha County school system, based in Charleston, met with drivers of the district’s 196 buses to outline those policies. Mr. Pauley told them to stay 5 miles per hour below the limit, to check the tire pressure every day and to avoid jackrabbit starts.
The Caldwell Parish School District, in northern Louisiana, took a more sweeping approach to saving fuel by eliminating Monday classes. The district joined about 100 systems nationwide, most of them rural, that in recent years have adopted a four-day schedule.
The district’s superintendent, John Sartin, said the move should save $145,000 in a $15 million budget. The decision, made in June, came after crude oil prices had risen for 29 consecutive days, Mr. Sartin said.
“People here worry that they won’t have enough money to last through the month,” he said.
Similar concerns in the Southern Aroostook Community School District in Maine have delayed adoption of the budget.
“We’ve tried to pass it twice, and we’re trying a third,” said Terry Comeau, the superintendent, who has restricted field trips and taken a bus off the road.
“People are saying, ‘I don’t want my taxes to go higher; I need the money to pay my bills,’ ” said Mr. Comeau, adding that one worry is that heating costs will soar this winter.
The problems in many districts can be traced to battered state budgets. According to a July report by the National Conference of State Legislatures, 31 states had budget gaps totaling $40 billion, and many had cut school financing.
California still has a $15.2 billion budget gap, although many districts there have made cuts, including Los Angeles Unified, which sliced $400 million from its $6 billion budget in June partly by laying off 500 administrators and secretaries, though no teachers.
Many districts are serving increasing numbers of needy students. In Mobile, Ala., the number of homeless students tripled to about 2,500 at the end of the last school year from 850 in the 2006-7 term.
“And our numbers are going to be a whole lot higher this year,” said Larissa Dickinson, a school social worker there. “We’ve had phone call after phone call from families evicted over the summer.”
Officials in districts in a half-dozen states reported similar surges. . . .
In defiance of common sense, core research studies, the best thinking from universities, ethical norms, and humanitarian principles, the loons in charge of schools in East Ramapo, New York have run the clock backwards by almost a hundred years to a time in America when it was cutting-edge thinking to propose identification and segregation of defective individuals that stood in the way of American aspirations for purity and perfection.
Today in East Ramapo, instead of using the crude IQ tests that Yerkes, Terman, and Goddard devised to separate the poor and the brown from others with non-defective "germ plasm," we use crude standardized achievement tests on young humans (1st graders) whose normal developmental differences would make such tests a joke, if the results were not being used to fail first graders, to segregate them, to drill them in math and reading, and to remove art, music, social studies, and science from their lives.
Can you guess the snazzy title of this test-and-segregate policy for first graders? The Gift of Time. Let's all nominate Dr. Mitchell Schwartz, retiring superintendent, for the 2008 Orwell Prize.
Can this really be happening in 2008, in America? From the NYTimes:
SPRING VALLEY, N.Y. — With the increasing emphasis on standardized testing over the past decade, large urban school systems have famously declared an end to so-called social promotion among youngsters lacking basic skills. Last year, New York flunked 6 percent of its first graders, and Chicago 7.7 percent.
Now the 8,400-student East Ramapo school district in this verdant stretch west of the Palisades is going further, having revived a controversial retention practice widely denounced in the 1980s to not only hold back nearly 12 percent of its first graders this spring but to segregate them in a separate classroom come fall.
The special classes, which are limited to 15 students and follow a pared-down curriculum of reading, writing and arithmetic, are called the Gift of Time and come with extras like tutoring and field trips to a local farm.
School officials say that adding resources — about $2,000 per child, in a district whose average general-education spending per pupil is about $13,000 — and tailoring the lessons for low-performers works. Nearly 80 percent of the 54 first graders and 47 second graders in Gift of Time classes this past school year now read at grade level (although they are, of course, a year behind their age group); at least 30 percent of the younger group and 11 percent of the older group are above grade level, according to district evaluations performed last month.
Iraida Hada, the principal of Hempstead Elementary here, said that merely holding back students without a special program to address their needs would not have been as effective.
“How are we going to make it work the second time around, if it didn’t work the first time?” asked Mrs. Hada, whose school was one of five in the district that inaugurated the program this year. “What are we going to do for them? What are we going to change? I believe this program has afforded them another opportunity.”
But some parents have greeted the idea with skepticism, and many education experts say it doubly stigmatizes vulnerable children by combining two practices widely discredited by research: retention and tracking low-achievers.
“This is very worrisome,” said Jay Heubert, a professor of law and education at Teachers College at Columbia University, arguing that both holding back students and separating them can lower self-esteem and academic achievement, increasing the likelihood of dropouts.
Michelle Brown, 34, a certified nursing assistant, fought unsuccessfully to keep her son, Nallehc, out of the program this year for fear that he would be picked on — which he was.
“We believe that for you to have to repeat first grade, it means that you are not capable, you are a dunce child,” Ms. Brown said. “It was bad enough to repeat, and then to repeat in a Gift of Time class. I thought it was a polite way of saying he’s a special-needs child.”
The concept, often called transition classes, was tried in kindergarten in thousands of schools — including East Ramapo’s — in the 1970s and ’80s. Lorrie Shepard, dean of the School of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said such programs were generally abandoned after students failed to show significant academic gains and often developed a worse attitude toward school.
“Kids as young as kindergarten were aware that they were being held back and that what they were doing wasn’t normal,” Dr. Shepard said.
But with the federal No Child Left Behind law and a battery of state mandates increasing pressure on schools to raise test scores, efforts to end the longtime practice of promoting children based on age rather than achievement have taken on new urgency. Districts in Milford, Del., and Lakeland, Fla., are among a handful nationwide that have been experimenting with transition classes in recent years, though both dropped them in the face of parental resistance and, in Florida, concerns among teachers.
“I had a hard time putting just the low-achieving kids together,” said Betty Fitzgerald, principal of Lakeland’s Churchwell Elementary, which ran a separate class for repeating third graders for two years in response to tougher state standards. “It’s like saying, ‘You all are low kids, and you all didn’t pass.’ ”
(The Delaware schools scrapped the retention piece: low-performing kindergarteners are promoted, but grouped in a first-grade class that emphasizes basic skills)
Supporters of the separate classes say they give struggling students a chance to learn at their own pace rather than setting them up for future failure by shoe-horning them into a uniform timetable. Since the 1970s, several schools scattered around New Hampshire have placed kindergarteners in what they call readiness classes for up to a year before starting first grade; the classes are usually smaller and promote social development as much as academics.
“I feel it raises the academic bar in the entire school,” said Dillard E. Collins, principal of an elementary school in Hampstead, N.H., who enrolled his own son in a readiness class in nearby Nashua in the 1980s. “If all the children are ready to go, it’s like moving the starting line up.”
Here in Rockland County, the East Ramapo district serves a mostly poor and minority student population: nearly three-quarters qualify for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program; about 56 percent of the overall public school enrollment is black, 25 percent Hispanic and 7 percent Asian.
District officials said they revived Gift of Time classes to address a widening gap in the vocabulary and other skills of the youngest children. Similarly, the district began requiring full-day kindergarten last year for the bottom one-fifth of students.
Dr. Mitchell J. Schwartz, a psychologist who retired this spring as the district’s superintendent, said East Ramapo had similarly tried separate classes in the 1980s to address an achievement gap between boys and girls (boys were behind). He said those classes, also called Gift of Time, were successful but were eliminated after several years for financial reasons. . . .
Yesterday Congressman Miller got through the House a bill that would shut down the human rights hellholes that operate under the name of youth boot camps. Where is the bill that would put an end to the kind of publicly supported abuse and humiliation that is happening in Rockland County's first grade classes for poor children? Inspired, no less, by that policy fiasco we shall never forget as No Child Left Behind?
Some price to pay, huh, for a school privatization plan gone haywire?
From Monty Neill at FairTEst:
Craig Haller has been battling the state over requirements that his daughter Hannah take the MCAS. Hannah is unable to communicate and thus cannot respond either to the test or the alternative assessment. She should be exempted, but the state is stonewalling. Craig has been working with policymakers, advocacy groups and the media.
And the following is from Craig Haller's website, Leave My Child Behind:
My daughter is severely disabled. She is non-verbal, non-mobile and has an incredible personality. She cannot communicate a simple yes or no. She cannot signal where she hurts when in pain. She cannot inform you if she is hungry or tired. She is 15 years old. The state we live in demands that she be tested for her abilities in Math, English and more. Her math skills would be put to shame by Clever Hans the horse. Her English skills are greatly surpassed by Alex the parrot. And she does not come close to the communication of Washoe the signing chimp. This is not a reflection on her intelligence, knowledge or awareness, it is the statement that we do not know nor can we test what she does possess. Note that without the fantastic technologies he uses to communicate, Stephen Hawking would not be able to pass the exams either.
My daughter greatly surpasses Hans, Alex and Washoe in a myriad of wonderful and amazing ways, but alas, our state has no interest, and the No Child Left Behind legal quagmire could not care less.
__________________
The Boston ABC affiliate station, Channel 5, ran our story this evening. Note that the Commonwealth completely misled the reporter on the testing requirements. No guts to face what they do, I guess. I do want to thank Bianca de la Garza, the anchorwoman who did the story, and the camerman. Both were great with Hannah and did a wonderful job getting our story out.
