Education Policy cannot be your sole form of anti-poverty policy
Brian Crosby has been on a tear lately with a couple of fantastic posts on poverty in education. First up is Whose Problem Is Poverty? | In Practice where he builds on ASCD: Whose Problem is Poverty by R. Rothstein about how school reform is being used in lieu of an anti-poverty policy. That we are relying on schools to correct a range of ills without the social service infrastructure to support this effort. Improve their test scores, educate them, and then they will be able to get higher paying jobs. Meanwhile, we are not only ignoring very real social needs, and the social/developmental handicaps that poverty imposes, we aren’t funding schools well. So up next he has Learning Is Messy – Blog » Blog Archive » Build Schools Not Prisons! which discusses how when we invest well (in the social infrastructure) education can improve things. I still think that education policy alone can’t be the whole of your anti-poverty policy. You need health care, employment, and a system of education that lets drop-outs easily drop back in.
What happens with anti-poverty policy centered only on education, and that is all reform is testing based? Well you get behavior like this Death threats for test scores » Moving at the Speed of Creativity brought to us via Wes Fryer, courtesy of the Texas education establishment which seems to know no limits (or shame) in its pursuit of bigger, better test scores.
All this testing has another interesting wrinkle as we see from, SpeEdChange: Not getting to Universal Design (by way of Pat Hensly @ Diigo) where the writer questions whether education leaders really want universal design. Rightly noted is the point that NCLB is brought to us by many liberals (Ted Kennedy, local congressional representative George Miller). They may have intended to end the soft bigotry of low expectations, but instead they’ve created the de facto bigotry of having high expectations but not giving students any support to meet them. That’s not permission to fail, that’s ensuring it.
I remember hearing from a High School special education teacher this time last year lamenting that his principal was insisting that LH/LD students keep taking Algebra classes until they passed the High School Exit Exam which left the students without enough time to take their life skills transition classes. Which would be more useful to them in the long run?
In our state we have had cases where some special education students that were given our standardized test even though their skills are low enough that they do not even understand the concept of a test.
I’ve also worked with severely disabled students (where classes consist of “how to brush your teeth”) where fortunately it is set up so the teacher fills out the “test”, but there’s a grey area above that unaccounted for by standardized testing policy.
There are some with (federally mandated) 504 forms that require they be allowed to use a calculator, but the state laws say that can’t; basically it’s down to a choice of which law to break.
I am teaching an AIMS Math class next year (for our seniors who haven’t passed the test yet) so I’ll get to experience some of this first hand.