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And year after year we find that the white and Asian kids are doing fine and the black and Latino kids aren't... but out of the last nine weeks, we spent three weeks on various standardized tests!! I can hardly believe anyone thinks it's a good idea to teach them for six weeks and then test, test, and test some more...

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, it's not really a racial thing, it's an economic thing - schools in the worst neighborhoods are going to do worse than schools in the richer neighborhoods.

The Jesse Jacksons and the like try to make it about race, but really it's economics. Maybe that's a taboo thing to say, but we've had our kids in schools in half a dozen states, and when I was growing up, I went through the same number of schools, and it was a given that the best schools were in the best neighborhoods, regardless of race.

With NCLB, that simply told us what we already knew. The federal government was trying to throw its weight around, when all it did was tell us that schools in bad neighborhoods are going to do worse than schools in good neighborhoods.

The biggest problem we face, at least in my area, is that as soon as a teacher has so many years in, they can transfer to other schools (i.e. away from the school the district placed them at when they first came on board). That means that teachers with 4-5 years of experience are going to move to better performing schools, and so the bad schools end up with a constant influx of teachers just out of college, which is the last thing they need - teachers with no experience.

I can't even blame the teachers - if you are paying me the same amount to teach at a school in a bad neighborhood or in a good neighborhood, I'm going to go where there is less stress and where the job is easier, and that means the better neighborhood.

That's not to say that there can't be good schools in bad neighborhoods, but a good school requires competent, experienced teachers (who don't have a "oh geez, just two more years and I can change schools to a better one" mentality), a competent staff, and parents who give a damn. The best teachers and most competent staff can't do much good if you have parents who don't care (or who aren't very educated themselves), and every time we transferred and started looking for schools for our kids, it was easy to spot the schools where parents didn't care (liberals will pull the "the parents are holding down multiple jobs and don't have time to help their kids" crap, but that's a cop-out as far as I'm concerned).

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, it's not really a racial thing, it's an economic thing - schools in the worst neighborhoods are going to do worse than schools in the richer neighborhoods.

These are kids who are all in the same school that I'm talking about. Within our school, the Asian kids are at 60% proficiency, the white kids are at 50%, and the black and Latino kids are at about 22%.

Far as I can see, it's cultural. I teach ESL, and when I say "Take out a piece of paper and a pencil," the Asian kids do it, the white kids do it, and the others, by and large, ignore me.