In a N&R "Counterpoint" essay this morning, Greensboro author and psychological associate Dr. Ronald Rubenzer hits a real world effect brought on by the No Child Left Behind Act squarely on the head...

"...Watering down a program to raise the overall tide of performance of everyone sounds democratic. But the most undemocratic education is when "everyone" is treated absolutely equally, regardless of needs...  No child left behind does not mean let no child get ahead..." (emphasis mine)

Rubenzer's piece was in response to this wrong-headed N&R editorial in support of Kiser Middle School's plan to integrate high achieving students into the same classoom with low achievers.  This move was purportedly to raise the bar for the low achievers, but I suspect such integration will have the opposite effect of what was intended.

• By the way - the change at Kiser was a "site-based decision".  In light of yesterday's announcement that such decisions are going the way of the buffalo, one has to wonder if the leveling of Kiser's student body will be 'grandfathered' in as policy for the one school, or will it now be reviewed by the administration and adopted as system-wide policy.

10:23:07 AM     comments to the above post so far, join in.   Trackbacks

In a special edition of his "Friday Notes" communique, Superintendent Dr. Terry Grier has announced the first casualty resulting from Guilford County School's dismal performance on the state's ABC report card: site based decision making.

Previously heralded (as recently as last week) as a way to make individual schools more responsive to the needs of their particular student bodies, the administration is now saying, 'never-mind... our bad', and reasserting centralized control of the schools - if they need it or not.

"...we are immediately revisiting the wide-spread flexibility that we have given schools, under the name of site-based decision making, over the past two school years.  

We are returning to wide-spread Literacy First Training and the use of bench-mark assessment testing--two of the key strategies that we utilized from 2001-2003 when over 90 percent of our schools made ABC standards. While we support site based decision making, everyone must realize that if schools are going to make the progress we experienced several years ago, this type of 'Bottom-UP' reform that was touted by so many, has to be balanced with 'Top-Down Leadership and Direction..."

Sounds to me like the baby is mixed in with the bathwater on this.  While site-based management may not be working in every Guilford County school, it is working in many of them.  Undeniably, Guilford County's ABC results are pretty bad when looking at the system as a whole, but there are many many bright spots among our elementary, middle and high schools.  I am sure some of those successes are because of site-based management practices that were "touted by so many".  (And, by the way, who might those "many" people be, and if they are now deemed to be proven so wrong... are they still employed by GCS?)

In this era of 'leveling' our schools (aka dumbing down, as in NCLB), the central office would do well to reverse that trend by keeping their mitts off the schools that are obviously working and excelling.  They should focus their 'Top-Down Leadership and Direction' only on those schools that are failing to properly educate children on their own.

9:34:14 AM     comments to the above post so far, join in.   Trackbacks