The Observation Deck

Joan Roberts wrote:

Danielle Masters wrote:

I think we should be concerned with districts that don't have to worry about meeting the criteria. .

I think you've captured the issue perfectly. The NCLB argument would have 100 times more weight coming from an Avon special-ed parent than from the superintendent of a failing district.
It's too tempting to see this as a Lakewood vs. Avon issue, which it clearly isn't. It's not about "be true to your burb", it's about real, flesh-and-blood, individual kids.
Good thoughts, Ms. M. And good luck.

Joan

Why would the woman from Avon complain? The point Dr. E. is trying to make is not that the schools are failing. the state gave the schools OK marks, and they showed an improvement. This is not the problem The problem is not even the letter sent out. It is that the school is being judge unfairly. Then you have to ask why, and you have to look no farther than the third year of NCLB. Three years and then the state can assign(privatize) the school. the largest "privateers of schools." The big money is the inner city schools and inner ring schools like ours. Dr. E is not whining we have not been running the series because of some perception of failing. It is because what can happen to our schools for missing as little as we did. Dr. E. is not trying to save his ass, he is trying to save the schools from state control.

A big difference.



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Jim O'Bryan wrote:Why would the woman from Avon complain?



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For exactly the reason Danielle said. Since Avon has too few "subgroup" kids to be counted in NCLB, they have no incentive to work with them. As a result, a special needs child is better off in Lakewood than many other more homogenous communities.
In other words, special needs kids "count" in Lakewood but not in Avon. Damn straight the Avon woman would (or should) complain.
If Dr. Estrop's point is that the Avons and Rivers should be made to toe the same NCLB line as Lakewood, it may be a valid one (although as I said, changing the rules for Avon does nothing for Lakewood), but iinstead, what I'm hearing him say is that standards for the Lakewoods of the country (and it truly is not just about Lakewood) should be relaxed.
So is our superintendent arguing for special ed (and ESL and minority) students to more attention from Avon than they're currently getting? Or is he arguing for Lakewood's right to blow them off like Avon currrently does?
Is he covering his own butt? Who can say? there arern't a lot of out-of-work superintendents. Ohio's sanctions for not making adequate yearly progress involve replacing "key staff' several years before a state takeover. Also, I can't find anything in Ohio's NCLB sanctions that involve privatizing the schools. Can you supply a citaiton on that?

NCBL is a definite low blow to a community/school like lakewood because of its diversity. Not meeting the criteria of the government causes lack of funding, and gives government officials to get rid of all of LHS's teachers and replace them.

I guarantee you all that any teacher no matter where they have taught beforehand, whether bay, river, westlake or any of the cities around here couldn't do half as good a job with teaching such a diverse group as the teachers that we have in place now are doing.

to put such power into government officials is bogus and there needs to be a balance in place.

Plus, our special ed program at lakewood high is one hell of a program- and rare individuals actually have the heart, dedication and goodwill that our special ed teachers and directors have because its such a tough and demanding position.

NCBL should be used as a way to help failing or underachieveing districts, not as a way to punish them and give more power into the hands of the higher-ups.

The NCLB act ignores standard normal distributions of intelligence. That is a word I remember from Statistics and Probability, but not well enough to describe. What I mean is, it used to be that just because you didn't graduate high school didn't mean you had to be a thug or ne'er do well.

Our Civic-Industrial/Professional Complex also ignores Standard Normal Distributions of Intelligence, in that it promotes radical class stratification through Zoning laws and highways via the Automobile. Fortunately today that problem is too big to fix; so we don't have to worry about fixing it. In fact it may even be good for the economy: Ghetto-Slummification and low interest rates drive up new housing prices for each new escape from the rotting expanding core left behind. Extra police, security, special education, and media coverage of those things adds to GNP. And it can all be paid for with unlimited deficit spending partly masked by robbing Social Security Fund Surpluses.

In the rotting expanding cores are legions of people with an abundance of free time. Most of this time is spent emulating older members of the expanding rotting core, or staring at tv screens. At best, in the present system, There then needs to be ever cheaper imports of televisions, car stereo speakers, DVDs, and other crap to keep them distracted and pacified. Anyways, a lot of kids grow up between a culture of instant gratification and a bureaucracy of indifference/incompetence. A kid who moves here from Eastern Europe or even Somalia speaks better English than many Inner City High School seniors after a few years.

And all this runs on oil. This requires resource wars, which adds to GNP. So you see, we all win.

On the other hand, maybe our "best" economists are about 300 years behind. That is to say, maybe the more radically free market and free trade an economist is, the more he belongs in an era when the only way to ship goods and people was with sailing ships and beast drawn carts. Maybe they haven't even caught up to the first commercially viable steam engines.

The NCLB act is a dodge by our government. It is a dodge to pin our social problems on trivial distinctions. It is a dodge to blame our job losses on our lack of "competetiveness". Here is a hint: many nations that report higher achievement scores simply flunk out kids that do poorly before they take standardized tests. India has more people that can't read than there are people in the United States.

Ryan

While I agree that NWO and our government has gone out of it's way to make sure that our kids have three job options, soldier, pole dancer or move to another country. This is typical of this administration. While everyone gets upset about the grading no one is looking at why they are grading and who wins and why.



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Radoslav Karabatkovic wrote:NCBL is a definite low blow to a community/school like lakewood because of its diversity. Not meeting the criteria of the government causes lack of funding, and gives government officials to get rid of all of LHS's teachers and replace them.

I guarantee you all that any teacher no matter where they have taught beforehand, whether bay, river, westlake or any of the cities around here couldn't do half as good a job with teaching such a diverse group as the teachers that we have in place now are doing.

to put such power into government officials is bogus and there needs to be a balance in place.

Plus, our special ed program at lakewood high is one hell of a program- and rare individuals actually have the heart, dedication and goodwill that our special ed teachers and directors have because its such a tough and demanding position.

NCBL should be used as a way to help failing or underachieveing districts, not as a way to punish them and give more power into the hands of the higher-ups.

Mr. K.

Your post is a great argument for why Dr. Estrop should cool it for a while. He's replacing genuine and understandable concern about the schools we pay for dearly with some hysteria about our district being taken over by some distant Dr. Evil.
Please read the NCLB (not NCBL) act and the Ohio plan for yourself. Like I asked Mr.O, please cite where there is a provision for :"getting rid of all of LHS' teachers."
As for putting the power in hands of government officials, should there be no accountability for schools at all? Should we just send Lakewood schools a $65,000,000 check every year and keep our pretty little mouths shut?
Also, having lived in a couple of the communities you've cited, I urge you to not make generalizations about their teachers. There are good, dedicated teachers in all of those districts, and Lakewood has its share of bad ones.
All of that said, I certainly understand NCLB's shortcomings. But I'd still feel a lot better if the well-paid Dr. Estrop was devoting more time to getting those last few standards met than complaining that the rules of the game are unfair.

All of that said, I certainly understand NCLB's shortcomings. But I'd still feel a lot better if the well-paid Dr. Estrop was devoting more time to getting those last few standards met than complaining that the rules of the game are unfair.

I agree completely. I don't disagree with Dr. Estrop about the unfairness. I just disagree with his methods. From what I have gathered he thinks it should be scrapped because its unfair. I think everyone should be held to the highest standards, then we'll see just how great those other districts are. I think that if they were judged in all categories like Lakewood it would prove once and for all that Lakewood is just as good if not better. Lakewood does a great job, this is just another case of Lakewood selling itself short.

I am a parent of (1)a special ed child, (2) a gifted child and (3) a gifted special ed child and I have worked with both Lakewood and another school district - here is my take.

Lakewood's services are OUTSTANDING compared to the other district. The entire culture of the education system in Lakewood for that matter is MUCH better - the teachers as a whole have a greater awareness and sensitivity to the needs of non-traditional students. This is BECAUSE there is larger population of these types of students - a population is large enough to require and support a full spec-ed program. (This is a big part of why I came back to Lakewood.)

Unfortunately, when you have this larger population, you also have a different grading scale. And, in my opinion, you have a much more difficult time making the grade. For example - my oldest son dropped out of high school the minute he hit 18 (I wouldn't allow it, otherwise it would have been sooner). Now is that the school's fault? No. Mine? No. The school and I worked out tushies off to keep him engaged and in school; however, as bright as he is, he had other ideas and we couldn't stop that. No amount of counseling, parent teacher conferences, 504 plans, etc., made a difference in the end result of his education.

Unfortunately, a lot of his disdain came from the other district. I moved here to attempt to save him. It didn't work and now Lakewood bears that against their scores. Does the district deserve that? No. I chose to put myself out here in full public view because as much as we want to blame someone... the answer is not that easy. Never has been. Children with special needs cannot be counted just the same as other children - their whole world is different and the measures of success are different as well. Want to know what it is like to 'lose' your child - what happened, what we tried, did and didn't do? Ask. I'll be happy to tell you what we went through, why, what worked and what didn't. But get real facts from real people before you assume, please.

Lakewood is a tremendous city with a wonderful school system that shouldn't be blamed for the fact that my son dropped out - it should be praised because my other son stayed in and is starting take his life back and because my daughter has made the distinguished honor roll two quarters in a row - growing from a b/c student to one of the top in her class.

In my opinion, THEY are the Lakewood schools' story... regardless, of what the stats say.

Peace,
~Charyn

But I'd still feel a lot better if the well-paid Dr. Estrop was devoting more time to getting those last few standards met than complaining that the rules of the game are unfair.

Although we might be on opposite sides when it comes to the NCBL law, I completely agree with that statement. Dr.Estrop fighting laws that were put in place but aren't "fair" to Lakewood is the same thing as us students fighting and disagreeing with the dress code, I believe.

He's in the same position we the students are with the dress code- we don't believe its fair, its hurting us because we freeze to death in the refrigerator we go to every day, and we don't like it. All we've been told to do is sit down and shut up because it won't change.

Sometimes others should take the advice they dish.


Back to NCBL, although I believe there is some loop holes or flaws in the law, there's always a flaw here and there in every law. The government can't please everyone.
I don't disagree with the main purpose that it's put in for- getting students all over the US equal education, good education, and ready for the job market after school. I hope that's what it's there for at least.

Charyn-- Thank you very much for sharing your experience with the rest of us.

I think it was stated in a way that completely excluded the hyperbolic emotions of this thread and took it to everyday basics.

And, it adds another element which has to be used to evaluate this program.

Stan Austin

Children with special needs cannot be counted just the same as other children - their whole world is different and the measures of success are different as well.

Charyn, thank you for sharing with us your experiences. Our experience with special education services in Lakewood have been great as well. I do think though that Lakewood is the exception and not the rule. I would like to see the services that schools offer graded. Yes we have IDEA and all these other laws that protect special needs children but often parents in districts have to fight to get those. There are a large faction of parents with special needs children that don't know what their rights are or how to get them. I know NCLB does nothing to stop this from happening it merely requires the children to be tested. And as many of us know testing a special needs child really doesn't tell you much. Thanks again for telling us you story. It sounds like you did what you could do for your son. Sometimes as a parent that is all you can do.

Hi Danielle,

Actually, I agree with you; however, I don't think that our current measures are providing the best evaluation of performance. Lakewood is the case in point - they have provided more for my children than any school did - but because of the difference in measures they actually performed worse that the other district....

I had to fight tooth and nail in the other district just to get them to create the 504s and then teachers essentially disregarded it. And I was one of the more motivated parents - reading every book I could find to determine what our rights were and what the school's responsibility was. I saw daily what happened to parents that simply trusted the school and took them at their word... It was tragic and it tore families apart.

So yes, you are right about Lakewood being the exception. My bigger picture was meant to let the good people on deck here know that Lakewood city schools are an exception. They are doing a great service to children and they deserve our support and praise for all that they do right.

Peace,
~Charyn
A proud Lakewood parent!

the teachers as a whole have a greater awareness and sensitivity to the needs of non-traditional students.

Charyn, as a student at Lakewood High School I can't applaud you more for pointing that out.

I've meet the special-ed teachers and like I said in my first post, special ed teachers are truly unique individuals that can't be found everywhere. And that goes for any district, any school. They should be praised and aknowledged by the government for their hard work, not punished.

You see special ed students walking the halls between every class just like normal students, you see them working in the cafeterias, the school even puts children into employement and they spend half of their day working just like any other "traditional student". That's what I believe is so great about our program, the fact that special ed students aren't "special ed", they're students.

Thank you for bringing your first hand experiences to this post. If anyone should know the pros and cons to Lakewood's special-ed program it's the loving parents of that group of students.

Dr. Estrop is not making up the NCLB privatization meme. His arguments are clearly established in the political discourse, propaganda efforts, special interest instigations of our times.

Dr. Estrop is a public educator, who believes in the mission of public schools within the American democratic tradition. He's in a battle for public opinion. Like it or not, it comes with the territory of his position. I commend him for drawing attention to the structural agenda and public education model through which he labors. I would expect nothing less from a public school superintendent. He has put the community on notice about strategic threats to its assets.

To paint him as a self-interested whiner is to lead us astray from the substantial challenges and political stakes at hand.

There’s ample material to support the fact that Dr. Estrop’s point about NCLB and privatization can be argued by reasonable people.

Wikipedia captures salients that resonate with several of Dr. Estrop’s points:

• NCLB is designed to set the stage for the eventual privatization of the U.S. public school system: reports about struggling schools sour public opinion and may cause more and more voters to question the viability of public education.
• NCLB violates conservative principles by federalizing education and setting a precedent for further erosion of state and local control. Libertarians and some conservatives believe that the federal government has no constitutional authority in education.
• NCLB is a covert flushing mechanism developed by Rod Paige to eliminate the Department of Education by requiring unreachable high standards to fail a disproportionate amount of schools and reduce the amount of federal funding handed out so that eventually the individual states would pay entirely for their school system and defederalize all education (which some might see as a good thing).
• Students with learning disabilities do not receive extra help when taking the standardized tests, and can jeopardize the assigned rating the entire school is given.
• Students who are learning English as a second language are expected to take the standardized tests and show proficiency equal to their English-speaking peers, when it is proven that English-Language-Learners take between 5 and 10 years to "catch up" to grade-level proficiency.

For more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act

Barbara Miner, writing for In These Times, offers this:

“Not surprisingly, there is escalating concern that NCLB will be used to label all of public education a failure, thus paving the way for privatization via for-profit private management companies and vouchers for private and religious schools.

Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont, a former Republican who became an independent in large part because of the party’s hypocrisy on education, has called NCLB “a back door to anything that will let the private sector take over public education, something the Republicans have wanted for years.â€Â￾

What makes the Bush agenda so dangerous is that it weds conservatives’ fever for privatization to fundamentalists’ devotion to religious education. Both groups see a chance to capture large chunks of the roughly $350 billion spent annually on K-12 public education.

Bush has left it to Secretary of Education Rod Paige to take the vanguard in denigrating public schools while extolling religious education. “All things being equal, I would prefer to have a child in a school that has a strong appreciation for Christian values where a child is taught to have a strong faith,â€Â￾ said Paige, according to the news service of the Southern Baptist Convention in April 2003. “In a religious environment, the value system is set. That’s not the case in a public school where there are so many kids with different values and different faiths.â€Â￾

A quarter-century ago, Ronald Reagan launched the conservative counterrevolution with his winning mix of conservative economic policy and right-wing social agendaâ€â€￾and masking it all with warm and fuzzy rhetoric. Since then, hard-core Republican policies have gained strength and now dominate all three branches of government.â€Â￾

For more:

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/a ... l_children

Corpwatch sheds this light:

“Under NCLB, if a school fails to improve math and reading test scores within three years, a portion of its federal funding will be diverted to "parental choice" tutoring programs further weakening the schools ability to improve. These outsourced programs are run by private companies such as Educate Inc. owner of Sylvan Learning Centers whose revenues have grown from $180 to $250 million in the past three years and whose profits shot up 250% last year.

Ironically, while school districts will be required to certify that the percentage of their teaching staff who have teaching credentials is increasing, private tutoring companies, the replacement recipients of tutoring funds, will be under no such requirement to prove that their staff even have such credentials.

The big impact of NCLB still lies in the future. Like the so-called welfare reform act, it will be some years down the road that the real price will be paid. After five years, the act requires that low-performing schools be converted to charter schools, turned over to a private management company or be taken over by the state.â€Â￾

For more:
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11543

Let’s look at Lakewood over the next decade. With plenty of churches on the way out, there are multiple sites for charter schools intent on capturing public school dollars.

I am not saying that public school teachers should get a free pass. In fact, I believe that they should make every effort to reside in the city and contribute to the norms with their human capital. Otherwise charter schools with Lakewood residents will likely create compelling value propositions for parents, students and taxpayers.

Bottom line is all public traditions are under attack. There are grounds for attack.

Those who labor in public institutions must be attentive to the struggle; they must energetic enough to discern a path beyond their own self-interest, creating value and serving the public good in ways that the free market does not.


Kenneth Warren

Kenneth Warren wrote:Those who labor in public institutions must be attentive to the struggle; they must energetic enough to discern a path beyond their own self-interest, creating value and serving the public good in ways that the free market does not.

Kenneth Warren

In other words, the program is making schools do exactly what it set out to do in the first place, improve public education and make it perform better in the marketplace. I can see where many have a problem with that.

Joe