Most folks know what the NHSBA stands for – The NH School Board Association. Frankly, it is the epitome of the Education Establishment. They know best. They will do what they want, and while they’d like “involved parents,” They don’t brook too much dissent.
Think of it as one of the Political Parties here in NH. They are the Elite that believe they should be running stuff. There’s a reason why NHSBA belonged to the NSBA – the National School Board Association. You remember them – they worked with the FBI and other entities in the Biden Administration to label a lot of Parents as “Domestic Terrorists.”
The School District Governance Association of NH is different:
Giving voters a voice by empowering elected school district officials to reclaim control over budgets and curriculum.
The NHSBA caters to the insiders – the SDGANH caters to parents and folks that understand one thing: that Government schools are for the good of Parents and voters – they work for us instead of the other way around.
So here’s the starting point:
Ian wrote an article addressing the question as it relates to this: RSA 193-H:2 says flat out that: Schools shall ensure that all pupils are performing at the proficient level or above on the statewide assessment as established in RSA 193-C.
Read the article and consider whether his suggestion should be put into law. Perhaps as a bill next year.
With that as a background, an interesting conversation arose in the email group that I thought should get a wider audience and permission was granted. So…
Sidenote: You can get in on this Members only group – and yes, we (I’m a Lifetime member) cater to Individuals and not School Boards. Our own pockets – not School Board tax monies. Go here and Join us!
…NH State REp Kevin Verville rolled the ball faster (emphasis mine):
What *does* “shall ensure” mean?
There are two things that are difficult to reconcile: Desire, and reality. We desire that all students perform at some common minimum level by age. We do not specify the age anywhere, except that we refer to it as grade level, which is also inaccurate, as we “socially promote” almost all students every year, so grade more often than not, refers to number of years attending school.
So I just stated the quiet part out loud, and revealed the decoder ring. We socially promote students based on age, not based upon academic ability. Why? Because we do not want to commingle students across broad age ranges…such as having 10 year olds in the same class as 16 year olds. OK, fair enough.
Except that when we promote on age, then we need to instruct at many different levels in each grade. We used to “track,” group students by academic ability by grade. We, far and large, no longer do that. Now we “mainstream” students. That is to say we work to ensure that this is a mixture of academic ability in each classroom, in each grade…almost always with one teacher per classroom. If your gut tells you that this is a recipe for disaster in the traditional American public school, then you have good instincts. The reality is that this “mainstreaming” system results, more often than not, in a race to the bottom.
The other elephant in the room is how American public schools deal (actually fail to deal) with discipline. This is a topic for another day.
Unless we are willing to return to tracking, providing classrooms for students of particular academic abilities by grade, then we cannot improve the system. An issue with tracking is that it provides an obvious, and accessible path of least resistance for “lazy” students. That is to say, many students “self track” for the academic easy life.
Assessments were demanded as a vehicle for academic accountability. We got the assessments, but not the accountability. There are no easy answers… Well, there is one “easy” answer. That is expanded school choice. When students and families can select the school, then there is competition, and the product will improve. As long as the American public education system remains a monopoly we will get more of the same…no matter what.
Just a few thoughts to start the day!
And right on queue, the NHSBA, the NH Superintendents Association, the NH Principals Association, the NH teachers unions just had a cow! What, choice – and lose our stranglehold? What, tracking – and show that Individuals matter over our warehouse system? And ALL Unions went – competition?? With US? NOOOOOoooooo!
And I responded, kicking off a line of Kevin’s (with a bit of editing):
We socially promote students based on age, not based upon academic ability
To your point – my two granddaughters. One is autistic with a measured IQ of 42. She lives in her own little world but is nice, sociable (within her limitations) and generally happy. Can barely do the rudimentary academics required of her age (13). Yet, they continue to promote her and I made it clear to the staff (that were not happy with me) when her parents invited me to an IEP meeting, that soon her peers will either start treating her either like a pet or be ignored completely [as being irrelevant] to their maturing lifestyles]. My prediction has come true.
I am now “DCYF entangled” again and may have our 11 year old granddaughter with us for a year [I think]. She operates, going into 6th grade, at a 3rd grade level – mostly not well.
I understand why the “mainstreaming” was tried – yet another “of the Left” experiment to wipe out more the “traditional stigma” set. I could go along with it as the intellectual deficits are not of the child’s own making. I do have problems in staff proclaiming “well, they ARE learning – but to the equivalent of the others? Especially those that could be learning more and faster and end up with Ian’s favorite phrase in concentrating (finally!) on academic achievement?
Who is being helped by this? When I visit the Grandson’s elementary school, I see, sorrowfully, kids in wheelchairs highly disabled: some deaf, some mute, and of extremely limited capacity. One is in the Grandson’s class. Even with a para-professional by her side, there are those staff members, on the QT, admit that there is little to no learning happening.
Before I get excoriated soundly, I sometimes think that the older manner, where we did divide kids into academic levels (for my time: basic, standard, honors, and advanced classes) was better for most but also had these kinds of kids that are now socially promoted without learning the academics, gathered together for more intensive and specialized helps for them. No, I didn’t care hearing about the worst treatment (“warehousing”) that that happened to some and the regular students joking about “the short bus” and “Room 101”. But is this working?
This social promotion of those ill-fitted to the normal system is like the homeless problem. While some choose it as a lifestyle, MANY shouldn’t be out there due to mental illnesses – the result of the mandated removal of asylums (and yes, that many rightfully had really disgusting conditions and maltreatment) for them. Now, to remove the “stigma” of being in one, we now have open air ones in major cities in the country – with little help at all and put many citizens at risk because of the crime behavior they exhibit.
In both cases, the babies were thrown out with the bath water; the pendulum went too far and now should swing back. There does seem to be movement for the adult homeless where even the Left is realizing that mistakes were made in the call for better treatment – but many of those turned out worse than the original problem.
So, too, with social promotion, IMHO.
While mainstreaming attempted to remove stigma, it created a worse problem – that the kids were only known by their grouped age and not about their capabilities (either intellectually or motivationally, which either (or both) was applicable. People and kids are different. They think differently, behave differently, emote differently – they are just different. Mainstreaming just wipes that all out. It also started the process of wiping out of the idea of meritocracy in govt schooling (remember participation trophies and the self-esteem movement? Neither of those worked – just yet more education fads that blow in and then blown out).
Those that can’t keep up have their own niche in which they can excel at their own rate. Those of much higher capability get to do the same (and without being constrained by those of lesser capability) – faster and more information. Why is this a bad thing?
In both cases, I would like to think we’ve learned lessons to curb the excess in each area, both at the lower end and at the higher one. But does the Educational Establishment willing to do this? No, for if you read this, they are more apt to protect their Failure because of Power and Institutional Inertia. Oh, and money (emphasis mine, reformated):
For starters, schools have failed abysmally in their fundamental task — teaching basic academic skills — despite spending staggering sums. In 2019, annual expenditures for K–12 public schools totaled almost $800 billion, but, according to the Nation’s Report Card, barely one-third of public school students were “proficient” in math and reading pre-COVID, a dismal track record that worsened significantly post-COVID.
Nationally, just 26 percent of eighth graders are proficient in math, with 31 percent proficient in reading.
Which means 74% and 69% aren’t meeting what we expect them to. Or, as standards have been lowered (in part due to “Social Justice, Critical Race Theory, Preferred Pronoun mandates, and Social Emotion Learning” fluff), reaching those standards has spiraled even more downward.
In Detroit, only 3 percent of fourth graders are mathematically proficient…
…while twenty-three Baltimore public schools reported exactly zero math-proficient students. Government schools, which enroll almost nine out of ten American children, repeatedly fail to deliver on their promises but are rewarded with big budgets and near-monopolistic power.
In government, failure is generally rewarded, which is why there’s so much of it.
This will continue as long as Parents stay ignorant of what is going on and are assuaged by seeing A’s and B’s on their kids’ report cards, never knowing it’s like the old-time wild, wild West facade main street buildings.
Anyways, there’s more to come in this conversation – Grokster Ian is up next!