Just to get the ball rolling with a few topics…
The recent Supreme Court decision blocking two integration plans might end up having an effect on Unit 4 schools though the odds may be small as the Consent Decree situation here is not exactly the same situation as the cases before the Court. The school board is reporting some positive gains since the consent decree went into effect but there are still disparities along racial lines. Is the cosent decree enough, do we need to do more? Or is it working just slowly but surely?
On a related note it seems that the consent decree may have shifted “white flight” from being a move of address to moving students from public to private schooling. I don’t know if there’s a good way to reverse this trend of further self-segregation. Thoughts?
July 18, 2007 at 7:23 am
It may take a long time to see exactly what the Court’s decisions will affect on the local level. Interestingly enough, I asked a question on IP that no one seemed to have an answer for.
The Consent Decree and NCLB were both implemented at roughly the same time. Can anybody provide data that show which program is having the greatest impact to the exclusion of the other? It seems to me that with both programs in place there is no way to separate the date meaningfully.
July 18, 2007 at 11:24 am
But, can you separate the data?
July 22, 2007 at 3:07 am
Fixing a bug… comments moved:
It’s hard to believe that NCLB had any effect. Just more tests and no funding to actually help the schools improve. What good does that do?
The Consent Decree on the other hand demands improvement in racial disparity which means actually improving schools. I’d be far more likely to give the Consent Decree credit.
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The statistics would show overall improvements or decline and would be unlikely as far as I know to distinguish what factors were the most helpful or harmful to those trends. So probably not.
But if no actual policy changes were made due to the NCLB testing, just more testing, then there is no data to separate. Unless we’re to believe that testing in and of itself helped improve scores.