scruffy wrote:It's not the individual teachers I'm after..I can't imagine the challenges you face with deadbeat parents and not being able to push and discipline like you should. I think changes need to be made in the system..Programs like "no child left behind" and others don't fit every district in every state. The government (feds and state) lump everyone together. That doesn't work just like throwing more money at every problem doesn't work either...Now back to the topic of websites!
Scruffy. Just stop. Each time you add to this debate you are proving more and more that you don't know the issues you are talking about. No crap NCBL doesn't fit every state and every district, that's what you get when the top man in the country thinks he knows how to fix public education and calls it "No Child Left Behind." Can you imagine the bad press any senator or representative would have taken if they would have voted to "leave a child behind?" NCLB is a federal program that essentially forces ND Public Schools to adhere the its policies or lose any Federal dollars that the school would normally get. Without those dollars, many of the small public schools wouldn't be here anymore in ND. For example, one of the major components of No Child Left Behind was that a "Highly Qualified Teacher" had to teach each subject in High School. So essentially they were saying that if you had a degree in Physics, you could teach Physics, but not Biology or Chemistry or Anatomy. If you had a degree in U.S. History you could teach U.S. History but not world history or economics or sociology. This program was a very "Metropolitan Centered" program that unfortunately affected all public schools, who chose to participate. So NCLB's requirements would have forced a school like say "Flasher" to hire someone with those specific degrees to teach those specific classes. So let's say I'm a teacher who has been teaching 7-12 science for 20 years but my degree is in Chemistry, now the Feds come along and say, you are not qualified to teach anything but Chemistry?!?!?! So let's say I am a recent graduate of from college with a degree in Chemistry and have teaching credentials, am I going to take a job in Flasher that pays 1/7 of a teacher's salary (which is 49th in the nation) so I can teach the one class of Chemistry at the school?!?!?!
That's just one very clear example of the many flaws of NCLB. The North Dakota Department of Education Standards and Practices Board had to do some pretty quick thinking and implementing of programs to get alot of teachers "Highly Qualified" according to NCLB or North Dakota wouldn't have had any teachers left to teach. In 1997, UND changed its teaching degree program, prior to that time, you would get a major in a subject area, say physics and get your teaching credits, you could teach basically any science class. After 1997, UND said teacher education students only needed to get a composite science degree along with their teaching credentials, then they could teach basically any science class. Then NCLB comes along in about 2000 and 2-3 years of graduates were automatically not qualified to teach in the area they had thier degree in. Which, since this is North Dakota, probably only amounted to about 10 graduates!! (That's a joke people).