NCLB Outrages

And Now For the Truth About the Just4Kids Data

Mike hopes to let other teachers know that when administrators come knocking with invented standards from Just4Kids, there is data available to contradict them.

by Mike in Texas

My last post was about how some administrators used data from the website Just4Kids to browbeat the teachers at my school. When we asked specific questions, such as class size data and expenditures of the schools that were supposedly doing so much better than we were, we were told that kind of data was not available through Just4Kids.

However, it IS available at Great Schools and I spent some time compiling some data about the top ten performing schools similar to ours, according to the Just4Kids website.

This chart shows expenditures of these top ten schools versus Rich Land Donor Elementary School, my school. As you can see in the chart these schools spend an average $1391 more per student than my school. For a class of 19 kids (about what the average is at my school) this works out to be $26,436 per classroom!

can't wait to show THAT one to my clueless principal. I will also show her my copy of Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools? and I will be sure to show her Chapter 4, Not So Strange Bedfellows, The Business Roundtable Power Network so she can read about the anti-public school position of the Just4Kids founder Tom Luce. Pages 68 and 69 if you're following along at home.

About Me I am currently in my fourteenth year of teaching Science and Technology in a small Texas school district.

Here's a comment from anonymous:

Contradictory information, no matter the source, is automatically wrong.

Trying to change the mind of an educational administrator with data is like trying to change the mind of a chimpanzee with a slide rule.

— Mike in Texas
Education in Texas Blog
2007-01-13
http://educationintexas.blogspot.com/2007/01/and-now-for-truth-about-just4kids-data.html

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