Part III: All Asbury Park Children Left Behind

Considering Asbury Park schools have failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for the fifth year under the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandate and as a result run the risk of major restructuring, it seems an appropriate time to take a critical look at NCLB and its impact on at-risk youth.

Luckily my partner Amy just wrote a graduate school paper on that exact topic.   The whole paper is available here (with references included, I removed them below for ease of reading), but I will break it down into digestible parts in this post.

After extensive research, Amy’s take home point is that NCLB is designed and implemented in a way that has a significant negative impact on the population it is designed to help, at-risk students. Not only does NCLB lack guidance on how to help failing children and schools, it shines a very bright light on the populations that are failing.  With no additional resources or guidance on how to raise the achievement of these populations, the easiest way for schools to improve test scores is to remove these students from their rolls.   The result is the dropout crisis that plagues Asbury Park and other US inner city schools.

Perhaps most disturbing, the federal policy ignores the real problems that cause the achievement gap – unemployment, unsafe communities, insecure housing, poor health care and nutrition, lack of public  transportation – while scapegoating the schools.  Reformers claim, if we could just fix the schools, everything would be alright.  It seems clear that the reverse is true.

Part II: Merit Pay and Christie’s Eduction Reform Plan

Merit pay, charter schools and tenure reform are key components of Governor Christie’s  education reform plan. As a teacher of ten years, still without tenure because I have switched schools three times, I know tenure needs to be reformed.  Let us leave that for another day.  For now, let’s focus on merit pay and charter schools.

Part I: Race to the Top

Part I: Race to the Top – General Flaws

There are tons of problems with this policy. A good primer is Alfie Kohn’s interview on CounterSpin. His points seem obvious, but the mainstream media fails to address them.  He explains why.

John Dewey & Food: Linking School to the Lives of Our Youth

1. DEWEY & EXPERIENCE

In “Experience and Education” John Dewey opens discussing the “organic connection between education and personal experience.”  He goes on to explain “that does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative… everything depends on the quality of the experience.”

The Recall

My plan was to provide some of my thoughts regarding the current recall effort. After hearing from the organizers of the recall as well as the Alliance to Benefit our Children, I think it makes more sense to have both of those groups provide factual outlines of their cases supporting and opposing the recall.  I will post these outlines on this website in the hopes of beginning a community discussion.

Crap-Detecting & Creativity: An opportunity for Asbury Park

“A built-in, shock-proof, crap detector.”

That was Ernest Hemingway’s response  when asked if there were one quality needed, above all others, to be a good writer.  Neil Postman took that line and proposed it as the best thing schools can do for a child.