The meat of the post is that the act colloquially known as "No Child Left Behind" has some issues which allow states to re-appropriate resources such that rather than using the federal funding as a supplement to state and district funding, it's being used to reduce the cost on the state and district. While the act does have a section to avoid this, there's a loophole which allows districts to ignore the portion of teacher salary based on experience, when high-experience teachers tend to migrate to wealthier schools. This makes it seem as though wealthier and poorer schools have comparable resources, even though the wealthier schools generally have more qualified teachers and may even be spending more.
Likely the most irritating thing I find about this article (and seemingly every other news or blog-like post) is the almost complete lack of any sources beyond links to the same website. Is it really so hard to provide a link to the PDF of the report the Department of Education apparently posted that you based your ENTIRE post on? I ended up having to find equivalent sources to back up THEIR arguments, and couldn't find the report they were talking about (mostly because of just how many reports the ED hosts, and how vaguely the article referenced it).
A complete lack of citation aside, the article seems fairly well supported, assuming the "loophole" they talked about was indeed factual, and it's probably one of the more well put together articles I've read. The data (sourceless or not) was well organized and clearly led into their conclusions. This seems like a very real issue which, upon being resolved, would lead to a big step in reducing educational inequality. It's very interesting to see these kinds of problems uncovered and then have possible solutions proposed immediately, and hopefully more has been done about it since its discovery.
See you next week, and thanks for reading.
The Article:
- Raegan Miller & Cynthia G. Brown. The Persistence of Educational Inequality. Retrieved from http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/news/2011/12/02/10805/the-persistence-of-educational-inequality/
Sources:
- ED Press Office. More Than 40% of Low-Income Schools Don't Get a Fair Share of State and Local Funds, Department of Education Research Finds. Retrieved from http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/more-40-low-income-schools-dont-get-fair-share-state-and-local-funds-department-
- Congress. The Elementary and Second Education Act: Section 1120A, "FISCAL REQUIREMENTS". Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/pg2.html#sec1120A
- Matthew A. Kraft, John P. Papay, Megin Charner-Laird, Susan Moore Johnson, Monica Ng, & Stefanie K. Reinhorn. Committed to Their Students but in Need of Support: How School Context Influences Teacher Turnover in High-Poverty, Urban Schools. Retrieved from http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mkraft/files/kraft_papay_charner-laird_johnson_ng_reinhorn_-_teachers_in_high-poverty_urban_schools.pdf
This article did offer some insight into how the “No Child Left Behind” act may have some shortcomings, in the realm of funding and resource distribution, these problems cannot however be realistically fixed by federal mandates on how funds should be distributed because school districts and teachers will always find a way to earn as much as they can even if it means slipping through the cracks and finding loopholes.
ReplyDeleteThe problem this article really addresses is human nature. Teachers like any person will strive to better their lives, to attain something more desirable, and to avoid things which are negative. Federal intervention to limit teacher’s abilities to travel between schools is unlikely to guarantee higher performance in schools. In all likelihood the nation would just see a higher turn around rate on teachers due to early retirement, which would hurt performance in schools severely due to the loss of seasoned teachers.
As it stands, in your analysis and in the article, school districts tend to ignore merit and pay teachers poorly despite experience, this promotes good teachers to migrate to better schools which have superior funding. The author of the article seems to feel that regulations forcing schools to reward good teachers would prevent this flow, I believe that this would only stagnate the issue further as it would keep some teachers in place but drag down those schools which are achieving well.
An alternative would be that all schools above a certain level of excellence would be largely on their own aside from aid they are already receiving, that is left to their own devises to maintain their performance, and preferably to better themselves. Whereas all low achieving schools would receive direct federal intervention by way of highly qualified teachers and staff assigned to the schools who would be under contract to remain in place for X number of years but be rewarded with supplemental federal pay and support.