Loophole in NCLB

An article in Education Weekly reports that a group of California parents, students and community groups is suing the U.S. Department of Education for allowing alternative-route teachers who are not yet certified to be designated as “highly qualified” under the No Child Left Behind Act. The federal law states that teachers must be highly qualified to teach. That means must be fully certified in the area in which they are hired to teach. Well some districts are getting away with a loophole! I read in Education Weekly that Education Department regulations allow uncertified candidates who are in alternative-route programs to teach for up to three years while still seeking certification. "These are teachers who have come through one month of boot camp in an alternative program and are thrown into classrooms as full-time teachers.” I don't know about any of you but as a teacher I am outraged by this! I spent many years and a lot of money working to get my provisional credentials. Then once I was hired I worked hard to complete my masters within the time allotted to be permanently certified. I am really concerned that districts are hiring people who have not spent at least 3 semesters studying and student teaching. Does anybody else have a strong opinion on this matter?

NCLB- Is There an Alternative to State Testing?

I read in a letter to the editor in "New York Teacher" that there should be an alternative to the state assessments that our students take every year. The author of the letter explains that perhaps we should model our assessment procedures after Europe where they track their students at an early age to see whether they are university bound or trade school bound.
In a comment from my previous post about NCLB and leaving kids behind a reader writes about her daughters anxiety about testing.
Is there an alternative to all the testing? Does anybody have any ideas? I would love to hear them?

NCLB- Are We Leaving Our Kids Behind?

I recently read in the New York Times about a little girl genius whose parents tried to their public school to skip her to the grade at which she performs. The public school. Her story is as follows-
"Any sensible culture would know what to do with Annalisee Brasil. The 14-year-old not only has the looks of a South American model but is also one of the brightest kids of her generation. When Annalisee was 3, her mother Angi Brasil noticed that she was stringing together word cards composed not simply into short phrases but into complete, grammatically correct sentences. After the girl turned 6, her mother took her for an IQ test. Annalisee found the exercises so easy that she played jokes on the testers--in one case she not only put blocks in the correct order but did it backward too. Angi doesn't want her daughter's IQ published, but it is comfortably above 145, placing the girl in the top 0.1% of the population. Annalisee is also a gifted singer: last year, although just 13, she won a regional high school competition conducted by the National Association of Teachers of Singing...
The system failed Annalisee, but could any system be designed to accommodate her rare gifts? Actually, it would have been fairly simple (and virtually cost-free) to let her skip grades, but the lack of awareness about the benefits of grade skipping is emblematic of a larger problem: our education system has little idea how to cultivate its most promising students. Since well before the Bush Administration began using the impossibly sunny term "no child left behind," those who write education policy in the U.S. have worried most about kids at the bottom, stragglers of impoverished means or IQs. But surprisingly, gifted students drop out at the same rates as nongifted kids--about 5% of both populations leave school early. Later in life, according to the scholarly Handbook of Gifted Education, up to one-fifth of dropouts test in the gifted range. Earlier this year, Patrick Gonzales of the U.S. Department of Education presented a paper showing that the highest-achieving students in six other countries, including Japan, Hungary and Singapore, scored significantly higher in math than their bright U.S. counterparts, who scored about the same as the Estonians. Which all suggests we may be squandering a national resource: our best young minds."
Does anyone have a reaction to this story? Has anyone heard of a similar story?
It is my opinion that we teach to the middle of the class and leave the remedial and the enrichment students behind. All of the state testing that is our solution to complying with NCLB has created such a panic in educators and administrators that we tend to pay the most attention to the average students because those are the ones that we can get to improve their scores.

Back to School is Coming!

Summer is almost over and I'm feeling the same as my kids- a little anxiety, a little dread and a little enthusiasm for a great upcoming school year. My school is getting new wall mounted SMART Boards and new Dell desktop computers. As the math and technology consultant for my school, the teachers will be looking to me for ideas. I would like some ideas for kindergarten software and kindergarten friendly websites and maybe some lesson ideas for the SMART Boards. HELP!!!!