The Alabama Board of Education Had Best Clean Up Its Act

[Javaman]

Why oh why are people still so enamored of standardized testing? Why do people still believe such things are necessary to providing and guiding public education?

Standardized testing pretty much runs counter to what we know about educating children. Why does the media have such hard-on for the results of standardized testing?

Step 1 to improving public education: eliminate standardized testing. Then we can move forward.

Title IV funding. 

Schools receive funds from Title IV based on academic scores. Since the NCLB (No Child Left Behind) act was putt into motion, many schools and LEA's (Local Education Authorities) have struggled to reach the scores necessary to receive that funding from the Federal Government. Supposedly, scores from special needs classes/students/ are lumped in with the rest of the student body scores in order to comply with the NCLB act. This in turn, brings down the overall score for the schools and the LEA's (Local Educational Agency).

This is what I know from being the mother of a special needs student. But certainly forcing someone like me to make my child institutionalized should be a crime. Does my daughter not have the same rights as any other child when it comes to education and learning and being at home with her parents? Yes. Putting my daughter in an institution just so some stupid school board doesn't have to have its schools reflect lower test scores is an abomination and anyone proposing such a ludicrous thing should be publicly removed from their position and should have to issue a public apology to all of the families they offended. 

You send your teachers through continuous learning seminars/classes so they are better equipped to handle teaching special needs students. You make programs available to those students, which they have a right to under IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act). You strive to do better by all  of the students in your district so that none of them have to pay the price for your arrogance and unwillingness to properly make sure all educational opportunities are in place for them. 

Most importantly: you don't hire or elect any officials to sit on your BOE who are going to be a detriment to any improvements or opportunities your district needs to make to become better. And you sure as hell make sure they don't set your district back 60 fucking years when they stupidly propose institutionalizing some of its citizens as a way of getting better test scores. 

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I like that you used the word abomination. Because that's really what it is. The idea that a school should receive less funding because they have more special needs students is just so utterly ass-backwards that it leaves me speechless.

Title IV funding just sounds so utterly weird to me. Funding should be based on student needs. It always boggles my mind that self proclaimed fiscal conservatives argue against increased funding to public education when all the evidence supports increased funding of public education as a way to boost the economy and reduce (future) taxes.

I should point out that I'm a teacher in British Colombia (Canada). We spent 15+ years fighting a neo-liberal government that illegally stripped our contract of clauses that guaranteed minimum levels of support for special needs students. The Supreme Court of Canada ultimately ruled in our favour in a way that really smacked down the government that introduced the illegal legislation.