ConnCAN's Education News Roundup

Opinions and Editorials

Don't leave this law behind
Ronald Brownstein, LA Times, July 11, 2007

Progress is slow under Bush's 2001 education reform, but No Child Left Behind is worth improving.

The complaints are reaching a crescendo as Congress moves closer to reauthorizing No Child Left Behind, the education reform law that President Bush passed with rare bipartisan support in 2001. Conservatives are wailing about federal intrusion. Teachers unions and some leading Democrats moan that the law relies too much on testing as the measure of student progress. And some parents echo each of those indictments.

There's no doubt the law has minted enemies. But Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a nonpartisan group that advocates for low-income children, has it right when she says the law wasn't designed "to make people happy." It was passed because too many students in too many places were not learning enough. It wouldn't be doing its job if it left in place the practices that produced those unacceptable results. Grumbling, in education as in everything else, is the inevitable price of change.



Closing the Gaps
By Fred Smith, New York Sun, July 11, 2007

On June 27, as a final salute to the school year, Mayor Bloomberg told business leaders about the advances that had been made in test scores that were, according to him, "most importantly closing the racial and ethnic achievement gaps in the classroom."

His words were echoed by Chancellor Klein, who, in talking about narrowing the gap, calls education this generation's civil rights movement.
At the state level, the regents chancellor, Robert Bennett, issued one or two sentences on the educational status of 1.2 million students. The press releases that accompany the annual English and math test results often include this quote from him: "Closing the achievement gap is the Regents' highest priority."

Two mandates of the No Child Left Behind Act, which was enacted in 2002, have placed enormous emphasis on improving and measuring the basic skills of all students.

By the 2013-2014 school year it is expected that, with few exceptions, every elementary and middle school student will be proficient in English and math. Additionally, there will be no appreciable differences among the various groups of students, which translates into elimination of the gap.
Taking these objectives to their logical endpoint means that in six years everyone will pass the test's threshold of proficiency, regardless of race, gender, economic background, or other diversities. In this vision, all gaps are bridgeable and on deadline, too.



News and Articles

Parents, Teachers, Docs Seek An Earlier Start
by Allan Appel, New Haven Independent, July 12, 2007

Each year hundreds of New Haveners are born to teen mothers or without prenatal care. They start school behind the ball, not yet ready to learn. More than 100 people gathered at Conte-West Hills School to come up with a plan to turn that around.

The people present at Wednesday night’s meeting of the New Haven School Readiness Council’s planning task force included day care providers, pediatricians, parents, and early childhood teachers.

They knew they face challenges captured in daunting statistics: Of the approximately 2,000 kids born every year in the city, 275 are born to teen mothers; 500 are born to mothers who receive inadequate prenatal care, and about 220 have low birth weight. Also, when they are ready to enter school, only a third or so have the skills needed for kindergarten-level literacy. And it doesn’t get a whole lot better by third grade, where, according to 2006 statistics, only 33.2 percent scored proficient or above on a standardized reading test.