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25 Valuable Phone Numbers For Small Businesses Success
Starting and growing a small business can be a daunting and sometimes lonely process we have compiled a list of 25 helpful phone numbers for agencies and services that work with small businesses. They can give you information, ideas, and...
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Public Schools Are Un-American
Compulsory-attendance laws force parents to send their children to public schools. These laws presume that the politicians we vote into office, our agents, have the right to take away parents’ liberty and inalienable rights. Compulsory education...
The Free Ride In Public Schools
To protect children’s self-esteem or deflect complaints by parents, many public schools today automatically advance failing students to the next grade level. In other schools, some students are left back a maximum of one year, then promoted again...
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How Your Family's Home Page Can Pay for Itself
You don't have to be a "marketing guru" to make some extra bucks with your website. My dad recently retired after many years working in the concrete industry. He suddenly had extra time on his hands, so he started doing some fun things with...
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Parents Demand Dumbed-Down Tests --- An Unintended Bad Consequence Of The No Child Left Behind Act
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is making the problem of cheating, low academic standards, and public schools lying to parents, even worse. Under this Act, the Department of Education now requires students to pass standardized tests. Failing schools will lose federal funding and other perks if their students consistently turn in a bad performance on these tests.
Holding schools and teachers accountable, and expecting students to demonstrate what they’ve learned, sounds like a good idea. But this Act means that badly-taught students, victims of dumbed-down texts and bad teaching methods like new math and whole-language instruction, now have to pass difficult standardized tests they are not ready for.
As a result, millions of students may fail these tests, not because they are dumb, but because the schools never taught them to read properly or solve a math problem without a calculator. Millions of high school students with low reading and math skills now risk not graduating from high school until they pass these tests.
It is important that parents know the unvarnished truth about their children’s real academic abilities, but many parents are now frantic because they see their children’s failing grades on these new tests. As a result, they complain to school boards that they do not want their children taking these tests or not graduating from high school because of low test scores. To protect their children, many parents are now demanding dumbed-down tests to make sure that their kids graduate from high school and go to college.
The No Child Left Behind Act is now forcing many parents to condone schools that dumb-down their tests and standards, instead of blaming these schools for their children’s failure to learn. This is a typical unintended consequence of more government laws that try to fix problems that a government-controlled school system created in the first place.
State lawmakers in New York, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and other states have yielded to parent pressure. They have scrapped or watered-down high-stakes graduation tests that proved too tough even for students in the so-called better schools in the suburbs.
In
Wisconsin, state legislators backed off plans to require high school graduation tests because of strong opposition by parents from affluent suburbs. One parent group calling itself “Advocates for Education” argued that high-stakes testing would not be fair to children and would hurt educational quality in the schools.
Critics of the graduation tests were worried that the tests would put too much pressure on the children. Suburban parents lobbied parent-teacher organizations, and state legislators eventually scrapped the graduation test before a single high-school student had taken it.
Similarly, New York and Massachusetts officials yielded to pressure by parents to set low passing grades for their new graduation tests. In Virginia and Arizona, state boards of education have backed away from graduation tests that were too tough for even the so-called better schools. Only 7 percent of schools in Virginia met new achievement standards, and 9 out of 10 sophomores in Arizona schools failed a new math test.
In New York City, school authorities estimated that over 30 percent of the city’s 11th-graders would not be eligible to graduate if the English language standard that will take effect next year was being applied today. Diane Ravitch of the Brookings Institute in Washington is a longtime analyst of New York’s public-school system She estimated that in some neighborhoods, less than 5 percent of high-school seniors would qualify to graduate under the new standards.
Parents, particularly those with younger children, should take heed. You don’t want to end up with high-school kids who may not graduate because they can’t pass the new tests. In Chapters 8, 9, and the Resource section of "Public Schools, Public Menace," I explore how you can circumvent these serious problems by finding real education alternatives outside the public schools.
Article Copyrighted © 2005 by Joel Turtel.
About the Author
Joel Turtel is the author of “Public Schools, Public Menace: How Public Schools Lie To Parents and Betray Our Children." Website: http://www.mykidsdeservebetter.com, Email: lbooksusa@aol.com, Phone: 718-447-7348.
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