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Most of the belly-aching about NCLB that you'll hear comes from relatively affluent people (who are disproportionately represented on this site, since it's a fo

Most of the belly-aching about NCLB that you'll hear comes from relatively affluent people (who are disproportionately represented on this site, since it's a forum for people in a relatively high-paying field), because it required school districts to focus disproportionately on getting closer to average outcomes for the worst performing students, rather than letting the best performing students excel even further. For example, if your school district had 2 high schools, one that was extremely high achieving to the point that anything short of a perfect score on standardized test was considered a moral failing, and the other that was struggling to keep the school average at the state/national average, the school district, in order to get more funding from the fed, would need to spend as much as possible on the lower achieving school. Secondary things, like a new pool, or new buildings, or in some cases basic renovations would be denied to the higher achieving school, because they still had a far way to fall before they represented a failure of the school district.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago
> if your school district had 2 high schools, one that was extremely high achieving to the point that anything short of a perfect score on standardized test was considered a moral failing That would never really happen though. The poor high school is very likely to be in a completely different school district with a completely separate local funding source. Rich schools mostly complained about having to prep students for NCLB when they were also prepping them for AP exams and otherwise helping getting their students into an Ivy league.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  To a less extreme extent, that was the case in my Bay Area school district. One school had phenomenal scores (due to a feedback loop of parents willing to pay more for housing to send their kid to a higher achieving school force their kid to achieve highly making the school higher achieving, raising house prices), and the others ranged from so-so, to pretty meager. They were probably all fine on a national average, but the funding definitely got dumped exclusively into the worse off schools, while the high achieving one couldn't scrape enough money together to repair their busted pool. Hell, the entirety of Los Angeles is under 1 school district. You're going to try and claim there isn't variance in student success/socioeconomic status between the highschools in Koreatown and Beverly Hills versus those in Compton? Maybe California has different incentives when it comes to school district organization, but that scenario definitely "really happens" here.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Doesn't California have a more state wide funding model due to Proposition 13? They basically have to send sales tax back to schools to make up for property tax revenue losses, which they can do more equitably. The same thing happens in Washington state due to a supreme court ruling (but with property taxes instead of sales taxes). Still, Palo Alto High School isn't in the same district with East Palo Alto High School, and it is pretty obvious which one has access to more resources. Seattle is like LA, we are all one school district. But there is a huge difference between the poorest public school in Seattle vs. the richest public school in Yakima. And we have equalization of school funding via the state. What winds up happening here, however, is that school districts use funding from normal students to subsidize special education students, but have to be careful because they get funding from the state for each student equally (so if they lose their cheaper to educate advanced students to private schools or adjacent school districts, they have less money to educate their expensive to educate special ed students).

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

> if your school district had 2 high schools, one that was extremely high achieving to the point that anything short of a perfect score on standardized test was considered a moral failing That would never really happen though. The poor high school is very likely to be in a completely different school district with a completely separate local funding source. Rich schools mostly complained about having to prep students for NCLB when they were also prepping them for AP exams and otherwise helping getting their students into an Ivy league.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago
To a less extreme extent, that was the case in my Bay Area school district. One school had phenomenal scores (due to a feedback loop of parents willing to pay more for housing to send their kid to a higher achieving school force their kid to achieve highly making the school higher achieving, raising house prices), and the others ranged from so-so, to pretty meager. They were probably all fine on a national average, but the funding definitely got dumped exclusively into the worse off schools, while the high achieving one couldn't scrape enough money together to repair their busted pool. Hell, the entirety of Los Angeles is under 1 school district. You're going to try and claim there isn't variance in student success/socioeconomic status between the highschools in Koreatown and Beverly Hills versus those in Compton? Maybe California has different incentives when it comes to school district organization, but that scenario definitely "really happens" here.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Doesn't California have a more state wide funding model due to Proposition 13? They basically have to send sales tax back to schools to make up for property tax revenue losses, which they can do more equitably. The same thing happens in Washington state due to a supreme court ruling (but with property taxes instead of sales taxes). Still, Palo Alto High School isn't in the same district with East Palo Alto High School, and it is pretty obvious which one has access to more resources. Seattle is like LA, we are all one school district. But there is a huge difference between the poorest public school in Seattle vs. the richest public school in Yakima. And we have equalization of school funding via the state. What winds up happening here, however, is that school districts use funding from normal students to subsidize special education students, but have to be careful because they get funding from the state for each student equally (so if they lose their cheaper to educate advanced students to private schools or adjacent school districts, they have less money to educate their expensive to educate special ed students).