Daily Kos: The School to Prison Pipeline - 0 views
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Jeff Bernstein on 29 Jan 12Clearly our emphasis on testing and the consequent narrowing of the curriculum contributes to the problem. School have, as George Wood of the Forum for Education and Democracy notes, "a perverse incentive to allow or encourage students to leave" especially if they are likely to be low scorers on the tests by which schools are evaluated. Anyone who doubts this need merely look at the track record of Texas during the Governorship of George W. Bush, when its claimed remarkable improvements in state test scores later became the basis of the perversely named legislation No Child Left Behind. In Texas, sometimes students were held back in 9th grade multiple times because the state tests were given in 10th. After a second holding back students might be encouraged to leave, hiding the dropout rate by listing the child as having gone to an alternative educational program because s/he said s/he might eventually get a GED. Or after being held back once, the child would be told s/he had made so much progress s/he was being skipped directly to 11th, and thus not tested. Rod Paige became U. S. Secretary of Education, after being honored as supposedly the best Superintendent in the nation by a professional organization, largely on claims of more than a 90% graduation rate in Houston schools, at a time when only around 40% of those who entered in 7th grade graduated on time with their cohort. Those forced out or held back and then skipped were heavily from poor families that were African-American or Hispanic.