this thread spawned off a previous post in flame when I got SDAI to actually talk about things that Bush had done wrong. One of the things we disagreed on was he felt that No Child Left Behind wasn't tough enough and that the government needed to push even harder on school accountability.

Here's more discussion about an issue that's very close to me:

As I stated before, my wife is an extremelly talented and dedicated art teacher in a school district in the Phoenix area that is primarily composed of Hispanic, low-income families. The current administration's policies are coming down hard on her school because of the continually low test scores they produce. She is surrounded by other talented educators and administrators that are pulling out their hair to try to keep up with the huge and unfunded emphasis on testing that the Bush administration has imposed upon them. It's a losing battle and if they are labeled as an under-performing school, they will lose the little funding that comes from the Feds and many of them may lose their jobs. The school will face being taken over by bureaucrats of the state. The testing requirements do not take into consideration a number of factors including high student turnover rates within a school. (You can actually compare the results from one year against an entirely different makeup of students from the next).

My child's school, on the other hand, is situated in the middle of an upper to high middle class neighborhood. The neighborhood however is also populated by many wealthy and retired couples that have no children in the school system anymore so they constantly defeat budget increases. Our son's school has no fulltime art teacher as a result, no band, just the basics. The teachers are not well-paid and there's high turnover in their ranks. We have not been very impressed with the quality of most of them. Often class sizes have been high. Their administrators constantly seem incompetent. However, for many years now they've been rated as an A++ school and their test scores are consistently in the high range.

Obviously, the quality of the teachers and staff is not the cause of the test disparities. So what is causing it? REB's response to my earlier post basically said it all - it's the parents and the families that make the difference.

In my son's school district, most families have both a mother and father at home; often with a single provider. English is the predominant language spoken all those children's lives. If it's like our home, family discussions around the dinner table involve politics, science, philosophy, religion. The families go on trips throughout the country and world and children get see the places referenced in their history and geography books. We take our kids to museums, varying styles of music performance, space and science centers. If both parents work, they have enough money to send their toddlers to the best of day care centers where early reading and math concepts are taught.

Back at my wife's school, most children live in single-parent households where the predominant language is Spanish. Often the parent or parents have problems with drugs or alcohol or criminal records. The ones that do try to live by the rules can't make it by on a single salary so they may have multiple jobs, leaving the kids to take care of one another often in front of the tv. Their family outings are rarely out of town but instead to a cock fight or a monster truck rally. They move frequently and have no sense of continuity in school and friends. Because of their lack of command of the English language, they pick up all concepts in school slower. Often their only successes in school are in physical ed or the arts, something that gets pushed aside when testing becomes the goal.

So how do you bring about a fair accountability to such an unbalanced system? The emphasis on testing, rewarding the schools with the best scores and punishing and rebuilding the schools with the worst is absolutely counterproductive unless all the intrinsic factors can be brought into the mixture, something absolutely impossible with such unmeasurable factors. I applaud the desire but maybe it's simply time we left the accountability to the people down in the trenches who can truly see the day to day struggles that are going on. If our federal government is going to get involved maybe they should create legislation that ensures that school funding is based on the need of the neighborhood instead of on the tax base of it's homes.

I know the answer the more conservative of you are going to propose - school vouchers. Give parents the money and let them pick the schools their kids go to. Let free enterprise sort out the winners and losers. Fine concept in business but it ignores basic problems. Give a voucher to a well-off family and they have no problem transporting their children all over town to get them to the finest school. Give it to a poor family and they're going to pick the school closest to their bus route or, if they work all day and the kids have to fend for themselves, they are forced to send the kids to the neighborhood school where they can walk or a bus is provided for them. The vouchers, even if they worked to spread kids out throughout the schools, still don't address the home life those kids have. It would only move students with low chances into schools with successful kids where they would dillute the results and alienate them more. I'm afraid the cynic in me says that the whole idea of vouchers is simply a way to get the government to pay wealthy Americans to send their children to private and parochial schools and has nothing to do with helping the poor students.

It appears to me that No Child Left Behind is a veiled attempt to point the finger of failure at our public school system, one in which most of us on this board thrived in and somehow helped us excel in life. I don't know about the rest of you but I learned so much more than how to take a test in my public school experience. I was exposed to the joy of acquiring knowledge. I developed a love for music and art. I learned how to interact with widely divergent human beings. I learned a sense of schedule and responsibility and the consequences of procrastination and laziness. None of those mentioned things could be measured in a standardized test and yet they prepared me well for life as an adult.