Increase in children diagnosed with attention deficit disorders closely tied to schools that focus on test scores. In other words "No Child Left Behind" has resulted in fewer children left un-medicated.

The authors of a new book entitled "The ADHD Explosion" have made a rather startling discovery:  

Using Centers for Disease Control surveys, Hinshaw and Sheffler found that when rates of ADHD diagnoses are broken down by state, it turns out that there are dramatic discrepancies. Based on the most recent survey, from 2011, a child in Kentucky is three times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as a child in Nevada. And a child in Louisiana is five times as likely to take medication for ADHD as a child in Nevada. 

And these states aren’t just outliers. The five states that have the highest rate of diagnoses — Kentucky, Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana and North Carolina — are all over 10 percent of school age children. The five states with the lowest percent diagnosed — Nevada, New Jersey, Colorado, Utah and California — are all under 5 percent. The disparity is even greater for kids prescribed ADHD medication. The same five states are at the top of the list, all of them with over 8 percent of kids getting medication. The states at the bottom of the list for medication — Nevada, Hawaii, California, Alaska and New Jersey — are all under 3.1 percent. 

The authors set out to look for factors that could account for those sharp discrepancies. 

“We thought it might have to do with the supply of providers — how many pediatricians or child psychiatrists in a given region — or the ways states supplement Medicaid,” explains Hinshaw. “It might have to do with advertising. But it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that most kids first get noticed for ADHD in a classroom setting. So we wondered, are there policies about schooling that might be relevant?” 

What the team found was that high rates of ADHD diagnoses correlated closely with state laws that penalize schools when students fail. Nationally, this approach to education was enacted into law in 2001 with No Child Left Behind, which makes funding contingent on the number of students who pass standardized tests. In more recent years, similar testing-based strategies have been championed by education reformers such as Michelle Rhee. But many states passed these accountability laws as early as the 1980s, and within a few years of passage, ADHD diagnoses started going up in those states, the authors found, especially for kids near the poverty line. 

ADHD diagnoses of public school students within 200 percent of the federal poverty level jumped 59 percent after accountability legislation passed, Hinshaw reports, compared with less than 10 percent for middle- and high-income children. They saw no comparable trend in private schools, which are not subject to legislation like this.

I absolutely believe this to be true.  In fact I have seen it in action.

Focus on the test, and stress placed on teachers to make sure each child can finish the test within the time allotted, have resulted in these medical shortcuts which will see children with perfectly normal attention spans sent to pediatricians with teacher recommendations to be evaluated for ADHD or ADD.

And believe me many pediatricians have no problem simply prescribing the medications, even for kids who fall outside of the spectrum. What I don't think many realize, and I have seen many examples of this, is that children who take medications their entire lives have no problem turning to Oxycontin or PCP, or other mood altering drugs as teenagers or young adults.

In fact many of the prescription medications for ADHD have a very high street value, and kids have been known to shop them around in exchange for beer or pot money, or for something quite a bit stronger.

Just another way that George Bush has negatively impacted a generation of young Americans.

Data reveals that Chicago charter schools expel students at an alarming rate. Hey, got to keep those test scores high.

Courtesy of the Chicago Tribune:  

As it continues to modify strict disciplinary policies in an effort to keep students in the classroom, Chicago Public Schools on Tuesday released data showing privately run charter schools expel students at a vastly higher rate than the rest of the district. 

The data reveal that during the last school year, 307 students were kicked out of charter schools, which have a total enrollment of about 50,000. In district-run schools, there were 182 kids expelled out of a student body of more than 353,000. 

That means charters expelled 61 of every 10,000 students while the district-run schools expelled just 5 of every 10,000 students. 

It's the first time the district has released student suspension data for every school and also the first time it has released data on expulsions for charters. For charter critics, the numbers will buttress long-standing complaints that the privately run operations push out troubled students, allowing their schools to record stronger academic performances.

Sure must be easy to keep those test scores high when you can kick all of the disruptive or academically challenged kids to the curb whenever they threaten to bring them down.

In public schools expelling children is the last resort, and there are all kinds of modifications made to a struggling students education plan, or behavioral plan to help them to be successful.

I know I have helped to develop these, and implement these.

To put it bluntly, if I had been a student in a charter school it is highly likely that I would have been expelled in the tenth grade. If not before.

Instead I graduated with honors, and was considered a leader in my school.

You cannot turn behaviors around, and help make successful those who are a challenge, if your bottom line is a dollar sign.

Small "typo" costs one teacher their job and others their bonuses.

Courtesy of Politico:  

A single missing suffix among thousands of lines of programming code led a public school teacher in Washington, D.C., to be erroneously fired for incompetence, three teachers to miss out on $15,000 bonuses and 40 others to receive inaccurate job evaluations. 

The miscalculation has raised alarms about the increasing reliance nationwide on complex “value-added” formulas that use student test scores to attempt to quantify precisely how much value teachers have added to their students’ academic performance. Those value-added metrics often carry high stakes: Teachers’ employment, pay and even their professional licenses can depend on them. 

The Obama administration has used financial and policy levers, including Race to the Top grants and No Child Left Behind waivers, to nudge more states to rate teachers in part based on value-added formulas or other measures of student achievement. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has credited D.C.’s strong recent gains on national standardized tests in part to the district’s tough teacher evaluation policy, which was launched by former Chancellor Michelle Rhee. But teachers have complained that the results fluctuate wildly from year to year — and can be affected by human error, like the missing suffix in the programming code for D.C. schools. 

“You can’t simply take a bunch of data, apply an algorithm and use whatever pops out of a black box to judge teachers, students and our schools,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said this week. The AFT and its affiliates have signed off on contracts that use value-added measures as a significant portion of teacher evaluations — including in D.C. — but Weingarten called the trend “very troubling” nonetheless. 

The problem in D.C. stemmed from “a very small typo” inserted into complex programming code during an upgrade earlier this year, said Barbara Devaney, chief operating officer of Mathematica Policy Research, the private firm that holds the contract to calculate value-added scores for the district. 

God I am SO tired of this teacher evaluation crap!

The conservatives have been trying to break the public school  system for decades and it seems that they have almost achieved their goal.

Public education is the backbone of our democracy and our progress as a nation, and as Americans we should be defending it at every opportunity.

Oh and by the way that Michelle Rhee woman is a fraud, just read what research professor on education Diane Ravitch had to say about her and her methods.

Class size not an issue so long as you have "high quality" teachers? On what planet?

Courtesy of the Chicago Teacher's Union: 

There's a lot at stake in the closing debate for Chicago Public Schools, which sees eliminating redundant facilities as one piece of a long-term strategy to force efficiencies and address a chronic fiscal crisis. 

For parents and students, the prospect of being shifted away from familiar, nearby schools — even those where student performance lags — can be a daunting and even scary prospect in a city where crossing more streets brings with it expense, inconvenience and safety concerns. 

Michelle Harris, president of the Local School Council at May Elementary in the Austin neighborhood, also sees the consolidation efforts as a threat to school quality. 

"In western suburbs like Forest Park, where my kids used to go to school, they sure wouldn't be OK with 30 students in a classroom," Harris said. "When there's more children in a classroom, there's less learning time and less personal time with the teacher." 

May is one of the 129 schools under consideration for closing. This year there are 463 students enrolled at May, under half its ideal capacity as figured by school officials. 

Becky Carroll, a CPS spokeswoman, argued that big classes don't necessarily hamper learning. 

"It's the quality of teaching in that classroom," Carroll said. "You could have a teacher that is high-quality that could take 40 kids in a class and help them succeed."

I am having a VERY hard time believing that a spokesperson for public schools said this.  It literally makes me want to bang my head on the desk in frustration.

Yes it certainly does help to have a good teacher. However these people are educators NOT wizards!

They can teach, perhaps their teaching can even be categorized as"high-quality," but that is only part of the challenge.

They also have to deal with the different learning capabilities of the students in their classroom. The teacher may be "high-quality" but it is unlikely that in a room full of 40 students that they can all be categorized as such.

This teacher will invariably have students that have IEP's and require special attention, students that did not get enough sleep, students that were passed through the system even they are still several grades behind their peers, students that are hungry because there is not enough food at home, and students who have behavioral problems whihc result in disruption within the classroom.

This "high-quality" teacher might be able to adequately educate 75% of her class in this atmosphere, but at least a quarter of them will fail, or learn so little that they might as well have failed.

What's more the strain of trying to teach this size classroom, year in and year out, will eventually burn this "high-quality" teacher out and send her running to the private sector in the hopes of finding some more reasonable classroom size in a private Christian school, where science is considered  unimportant and trouble makers are simply expelled.

Look I've worked in a number of classrooms, I was the support staff for those teachers, and I can tell you that even under optimum conditions some of these teachers barely make it to the end of the year with their sanity intact. There is tremendous pressure to succeed, and often not nearly enough support, leaving teachers terrified of failing their students.

The idea of expanding the class sizes and then holding the educators to some unreachable "high-quality" standard is cruel and  punitive, and will ultimately result in the failure of the school in which it takes place.

But what can you expect when a non-teacher tries to address the problems of education?