From JD of Ballistic Deanimation:
Do you understand?
I’ve got a girl here, born in the US, schooled here to 13 years in this system, ready to receive a diploma from this system. I give her a test on college level material, and she does so poorly THE COMPUTER ASSUMES SHE MUST NOT SPEAK ENGLISH!
Does that not concern anyone else?
I spoke about this with my wife, a college counselor at a high school in the Bay Area. In her assessment the problem is threefold:
1) No Child Left Behind requires that you test only to the 8th-grade level of competency;
2) NCLB requires that you test EVERYONE, including the English Language Learner (ELL) kids, on the same test;
3) The ELL staff still think it’s unfair that ELL kids have to learn English much faster than their native counterparts, so they refuse, for the most part, to teach to the test. (It would not be hard to get ELL kids to learn English within a few years; millions of English-speaking California kids get to minimal competency in French, German, Spanish, etc., with two years of required foreign language in high school.)
The net result, sadly, is kids who complete their graduation requirements, pass the NCLB testing (at the 8th-grade level), and yet still can’t speak or read English. Ironically, it’s the kids whose parents waive them out of ELL classes who pass the tests — further proof that it’s the ELL staff that are screwing these children.
Additionally, where kids like the one Josh mentions above will get royally screwed is the California High School Exit Exam — they won’t pass it. That means that even though they’ve “completed” all their high-school requirements, they won’t get their diploma. Eventually that will come home to affect the ELL staff’s careers, but unfortunately it affects these kids right now.
I believe you missed his point.
This girl was not an ELL student (when I was in school they were called ESL, English as a Second Language).
She was just so bad at answering questions the computer assumed she didn’t speak or read English.
Which says as much, if not more, about our disgustingly pi$$ poor educational system. I’m going to assume (oh oh) that she was receptive to learning, if not, it’s a mixed bag of where the problems may
lie.
I don’t think you can blame any part of this on NCLB – schools were turning out ignorant dummies who couldn’t read or speak properly long before the law was passed.
I think the egotistical teachers that allow no alternate views have met their match in students who won’t bother doing the work to learn even that one view, because there is no immediate consequence for failure. Nobody has to repeat a grade anymore – they just go along and get along.
Jerry Pournelle says that students have to pretend to believe an awful lot of foolish things to get by in school these days. I say if you spend too much time pretending, there’s no time left to do anything else.
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Mollbot, you’re right — I was focusing on a slightly different aspect of what JD was discussing. My bad.