RE: [xmca] What new and interesting?

Eric,

I thought you might be interested in this report, which made a "news wave" a
month or so ago. The upshot is that to ensure better NCLB scores, in TX
schools there is a implicit policy to have students "drop out" of the pool
of measurement, regardless of whether good measures are available. Not just
any students, but youth specifically targeted by NCLB (vulnerable).

Here is the abstract...

In the state of Texas, whose standardized, high-stakes test-based
accountability
system became the model for the nation's most comprehensive federal
education
policy, more than 135,000 youth are lost from the state's high schools every
year.
Dropout rates are highest for African American and Latino youth, more than
60%
for the students we followed. Findings from this study, which included
analysis of
the accountability policy in operation in high-poverty high schools in a
major urban
district, analysis of student-level data for more than 271,000 students in
that district over a seven-year period under this policy, and extensive
ethnographic analysis of
life in schools under the policy, show that the state's high-stakes
accountability
system has a direct impact on the severity of the dropout problem. The study
carries great significance for national education policy because its
findings show
that disaggregation of student scores by race does not lead to greater
equity, but in
fact puts our most vulnerable youth, the poor, the English language
learners, and
African American and Latino children, at risk of being pushed out of their
schools
so the school ratings can show "measurable improvement." High-stakes,
test-based
accountability leads not to equitable educational possibilities for youth,
but to
avoidable losses of these students from our schools.

Full report at...
http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v16n3/v16n3.pdf

Ka:ren Wieckert

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf Of ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org
Sent: Monday, March 31, 2008 7:45 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] What new and interesting?

The big push in american public schools is to "close the achievement gap."
This means that there is a discrepancy in achievement when test scores of
one racial group are compared with another racial group. What is it that
we know about the cause of this and how many different answers have been
given in trying to explain it? Are we using the correct tool for measuring
the achievement gap? We have Feuerstein's model, we have Freier's model
and then we have the NCLB model. Seeing as the first two models are
outside the circle of funding it is obvious what model will be provided the
public schools in the U.S. My new and interesting thought is that given
the reality of how public schools are funded and that NCLB will not go away
any time soon, how can the 5th dimension research be expanded so it can
have influence on closing the achievement gap?

respectfully,

eric

P.S. Paula I hope you choose to introduce your new research soon.

_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca

_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
Received on Mon Mar 31 11:02 PDT 2008