Dennis Fermoyle is a public school teacher, author and fellow blogger. We've been bloggy friends for some time. He's just written a post on some of the idiocies of NCLB you might want to check out. He says with impossible goals of 100 percent proficiency, people get around to wondering if 80 or 90 percent is good enough and who we can leave behind. The answer: we don't know.
"I am often amazed by the things that are done in modern medicine," he writes. "They have made great progress in so many things. For example, the survival rate for breast cancer has continually increased. But I doubt very much that they are going to have a 100% survival rate by 2014. To set that as a goal, and to tell the medical profession they are failing if they don't reach that would be the height of stupidity. But if you ask, "Well, which women do you want to die?" no one is going to say, Betty Jones and Sally Garfield. We don't know which women will die, and we don't want any of them to, but we know that some probably will."
His blog is titled, "From the Trenches of Public Ed." Clicking the link will bring you directly to the post in question.
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My father is the purple dot above the blue weather station. He's juuust outside Milton's evacuation zone. Well! My brother and I jus...
I think he makes a good point. I don't think 100 percent can be achieved, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try for the 100 percent.
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Dedicated Elementary Teacher Overseas (in the Middle East) elementaryteacher.wordpress.com
I have to agree that 100% will never be achieved as it includes all supgroups, some of whom will never be able to pass the tests. The biggest problem is that the people running the public schools are concerned more with test taking skills than with teaching. If students were taught correctly, the tests would be no problem and there would have never been a need for NCLB.
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