Let’s Be Careful about the Reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act
Our serious and ongoing concerns about the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) cause us to ask our legislators in Congress not to rush through a quick fix but instead to take the time to reauthorize NCLB with care. We believe it essential that members of Congress discern NCLB’s problems so that they can implement what we believe are direly needed major structural reforms.
One of our primary concerns is that the law operates by holding schools and school districts responsible for outcomes measured by standardized tests without equalizing inputs-all the resources that help children learn. When the very small amount of funding in the federal law is laid as a very thin veneer upon a very thick block of state and local funding that has not been successfully equalized for many, many years, the big city school districts with enormous needs and responsibilities find they are sanctioned for being less successful than rich suburban districts. We are therefore concerned that what was proposed as a civil rights law has, in reality, made it harder for these big-city districts to serve the mass of our nation’s poorest children. NCLB has punished city school districts with sanctions that have re-directed Title I funding away from educational programming to pay for transportation and supplemental services. NCLB’s requirements have been tragically under-funded, increasing demands on city districts with diminishing tax bases.
We are concerned that NCLB blames teachers instead of supporting them. Problems in NCLB were brought to our attention when pastors began to report growing despair among the public school teachers in their pews, teachers who feel trapped by demands they cannot meet even while doing the best they can. We are troubled by reports of teacher burnout and decisions among experienced teachers to leave the profession.
We are concerned that NCLB fails fully to honor children’s growth and accomplishments by relying on scores on a single annual standardized test and on fixed Adequate Yearly Progress benchmarks. The law increases pressure on schools to compel low-scoring adolescents into GED programs and to focus only on children whose scores are close to the passing rates. NCLB narrows the curriculum by reducing time for the arts and social studies, and it disproportionately punishes special needs children and English language learners. NCLB’s labeling of schools and districts is driving racial segregation in metropolitan areas where the press identifies affluent, white suburban districts, according to standardized test scores, as the only good place to raise a family.
We are concerned that a production target of “all children proficient by 2014″ is unrealistic and counterproductive. As people of faith, we do not view our children as products to be tested and managed but instead as unique human beings, created in the image of God, to be nurtured and educated. While we emphatically support improving public schools, we fear that as many schools come to be rated “failing,” NCLB will erode public support for public education, our largest civic institution, and one that is foundational to our democracy.
We are concerned about NCLB’s sanctions. While poorly operated schools must be improved, the law should focus on leadership development among principals, staff development for teachers, and support for stronger professional assistance from state departments of education. Instead NCLB redirects federal Title I money from school programming to provide unregulated, privatized, supplemental tutoring for which there is little quality control, and which may not be well coordinated with school programs.
While the law sets reconstitution of staff, charterization, and state takeover as the final sanctions in the fifth year, there is no evidence that the disruption caused by staff reconstitution improves schools in the short run. Neither has any state department of education ever successfully operated a big city school district, while this has been tried on a number of occasions. Nor have charter schools proven themselves more effective on the whole than their companion public schools. Surely we should not encourage people to look to institutions outside the public schools as the key to overall child wellbeing, as there is no other alternative institution of a size and complexity to educate the nearly 50 million children currently enrolled.
These concerns have led the NCC and many of our member communions to join the now 138 national agencies to sign a “Joint Organizational Statement on the No Child Left Behind Act.” We believe that the many interests represented among the signing groups speak to serious problems in NCLB.
As NCLB is reauthorized we hope Congress will: set ambitious and yet reachable goals; reduce reliance on standardized tests; end labeling of children, blaming of teachers and stigmas for schools; develop programs that support teachers and improve leadership in struggling schools; fully fund federal requirements; and use the power of the federal government to press the states themselves, whose funding systems provide the bulk of all school finance, to address school funding inequity.
Jan Resseger is Minister for Public Education and Witness, United Church of Christ Justice and Witness Ministries; she chairs the NCC’s Committee on Public Education and Literacy
Curtis Ramsey-Lucas is National Coordinator of Public and Social Advocacy, National Ministries, American Baptist Churches USA; he is a member of the committee.
The NCLB act has also put a big damper on a lot of the creativity and innovation that was taking place in charter schools. A woman who has founded two high-achieving elementary schools told me that she would never attempt to open a charter school since the NCLB “handcuffs” descended upon the world of public education.
I have taught elementary school in the same district for over a generation. Several years ago a Ph. D. from the state department of education addressed our staff about NCLB. After listening, I asked a question. I said, “I believe I understand our role as teachers, but how much of the responsibility for school success lies with the students and their parents?”
Her reply was, “None. It’s all your responsibility.”
Think about that for a moment. What if doctors and hospitals were judged like this? All responsibility for patients’ health resided with the doctors and hospitals. None with the patient. They were free to smoke, eat fatty foods, etc. Yet the doctors and hospitals would be fined or lose their jobs. That’s just one example. You can probably think of many others.
Another little known or discussed provision of this law is that if and when schools meet the AYP in all areas, the “bar” is raised for the next year. And so on until that school fails again.
This law is beyond repair. It must be scrapped along with so much else Bush has done. And since Ted Kennedy is a sponsor, there’s plenty of blame to go around.
Our schools are NOT failing, that is simply a frame that has been used since at least 1981 to make it easier to underfund education.
It’s the business model applied to everything, except government accountability. Think Bush could pass the tests used to leave this child or that behind? I see the business model not only in the way it allows insurance for-profit individuals to determine who gets what health care, if any, but it the actual treatment of disease. Business is about profit and profit is a salutation to Mammon. The Bible states unequivocably that the LOVE of money constitutes the ROOT of all evil. So when policy follows profit, EVIL is what’s being perpetrated, but of course this administration and its careful PR enablers dress up the TRUTH in all form of sensitive sounding slogan. Orwell… are you listening man? We’re LIVING 1884 and then some!
Oops… l984.
re-authorize? hell no! repeal!!!!
Although the authors allude to it, they fail to address the root of the problem with NCLB. Bush and his neocon supporters DESPISE free public education and are using NCLB to dismantle it and replace it with a privatized, for-profit system. The authors write:
“. . .we fear that as many schools come to be rated “failing,” NCLB will erode public support for public education. . .”
Exactly so. It is an ingenious strategy so must have been hatched by Rove or Cheney. They give the plan a warm, fuzzy name that suggests that they care about children. Then they proceed to underfund it and use it to begin labeling schools and teachers as failures. Ordinary people hear this and get scared and start looking for private schools for their children. Soon, if the plan works, only poor people will be using the public school system and then it will be easy to eliminate since no one in this country cares about poor people and their children.
I agree with skeezyks above. We must dismantle NCLB and all the other schemes designed to privatize the commons. Our schools are not failing. Our government and fellow citizens are failing our teachers and our children. Shame on all of us.
NCLB is complete garbage. This “re-authorization” is nothing but another failing of the “opposition” party to take a stand against BushCo’s failed policies. It was an attempt by the current administration to completely destroy public education by choking off federal funding of schools. Nothing more. A “re-authorization” is simply going to prolong the failure.
The comments written here so far are not those one would expect to read in a progressive forum, and they show me, that many of the Commmon Dreams bloggers’ are not well informed on important issues. You should do something more useful with your time. Such as learning what the Republican Party is really all about, it might help you to become more aware and productive in our society. Or, join a good Christian church and learn to love one another and to respect our president and what he really stands for.
If the (NCLB) is not reauthorized, it will ruin a business and put hundreds of Americans out of work. The business furnishes school districts with “required” educational materials for teachers and school administrators.
If school districts do not buy the somewhat expensive materials, they lose any federal funding they now recieve. The company is owned by GWB’s mother, brother and an uncle. I understand they earn multi-millions from the business. Therefore you can easily see the importance of (NCLB).
Uhhhh___ there is one small problem. Teachers say the material is absolutely worthless junk and is never used. Don’t you just love it?
Everybody here seems to know the truth. You all must have worked in education.
By the way this article did not go as far as did a recent story (I believe in the August edition) of Harper’s. There is another caveat of this program, that some schools that do not perform essentially get turned over to privatizers! These sharks are waiting in the wings to assume these nice morsels of real estate, as if privatizing anything, especially under the Bush junta has resulted in any demonstrably positive effects for other than Haliburton and Blackwater and the other warriors-for-profit enterprises. I don’t have the story in front of me, but it’s recommendable reading in that it earmarks exactly how this transfer of public wealth (schools, infrastructure) is planned to go forward… setting artificial criteria like how underprivileged kids in underfunded schools would NOT meet the test results is part of this latest co-optation of public resources!
If the above data sounds like sci-fi, consider a war on fixed cause, an executive branch breaking laws and then demanding that it need not follow any thanks to the direction of his snake oil holy man, Gonzales; that a US city of major cultural value was left to go to s–t literally; that at least 9 billions dollars just disappeared in Iraq, that the “opposition” party hardly bothers to put up any opposition, etc. These times truly empower the adage, “that truth is stranger than fiction.”
If you would like to acquaint yourself with some of the real issues facing education in America, please follow this link: http://tinyurl.com/3azzj2.
It’s often easy and convenient to spout rhetoric without grounding one’s self in facts. The authors of this report have much to say. Sadly, few in America who make decisions about the education of our children will read it.
That includes my elementary principal and most of my fellow teachers. Still, I have offered it to them.
Young people, read this and understand that becoming a teacher could be the stupidest thing you ever do. I used to believe that working in education allowed me to give back to society, to contribute to young people, and to help minority students rise up. Boy, was I wrong! The education system is designed to exacerbate racism, classism, and other forms of social disparity while appearing to fight these things. NCLB at a glance reveals its intentions to make our worst-off even worse off. DON’T GO INTO EDUCATION–AT ANY LEVEL!!
I’ve always thought the best use of the NCLB tests would be to administer them to the elected officials (and candidates)who think they’re such a good idea. Then post their scores on the “internets.”
Lots of people who criticize NCLB make the assumption that everything was great in public education before it was enacted. This is not the case. The achievement gap between middle class white students and poor students and students of color was persistent. There was no accountability and therefore no incentive for school districts to change. Why bother to respond to the needs of students or parents when it’s so convenient to blame low achievement on poverty? Any parent who has dealt with the public school bureaucracy knows that the problem is intractable without someone building a fire underneath all those dysfunctional bureaucrats.
Public education has always had to be dragged, kicking and screaming into the future with regard to racial segregation, sex discrimination, religious discrimination, refusal to educate the learning disabled or physically disabled. It has always required court cases, mass actions by students, parents, and teachers, and legislation to get any positive changes in an institution that has always been run in the interests of and for the convenience of the grownups involved rather than for the children or the community.
Some schools are responding to the pressure by improving the education for students who have previously been left to languish in low-expectation schools. Unfortunately, some school districts are incompetent and do not have the expertise to do other than cut out music and art and social studies. NCLB doesn’t make them do that. If a school district doesn’t have highly skilled leadership or teaching staff that can utilize methodologies that are effective, many times they continue to do the same old ineffective thing, but they just spend more hours doing it. Great. Then they complain about NCLB.
Ask any parent. There are many really terrible teachers and principals and school boards that exist and never get fired and never are forced to do a better job. They’ve got tenure, they make more money based on seniority, not effectiveness, and there are many practices that result in experienced teachers congregating in suburban schools while urban schools get short shrift.
NCLB is not perfect and needs to be improved, but the standardized tests (not the same thing as high stakes tests) are essential. Now we have evidence, something that parents have always known, that our kids are not being taught what they need to know. The disaggregated data also shines a light on the lousy job that schools are doing for learning disabled students and students of color. People who think that democracy requires a good education should applaud at least this.
Susan H,
You’re joking, right? I quote you:
“it’s so convenient to blame low achievement on poverty”
Look around and you’ll see that poverty is the biggest ill that public policy continually exacerbates. The poor get poorer every year. What we do in the USA is expect teachers–normal educated good people–to miraculously rescue the poor from their lives of poverty. When they fail, as they will always do because the greater social pressures of poverty always come into play, we blame them for, of all things, poverty. Do we blame doctors for broken legs? Do we credit psychologists for causing depression? Do lawyers hold the key to ending bankruptcy? Definitely not. But we still hold teachers to unfathomable standards despite treating them like servants and goons.
You note that there are a lot of bad teachers? Duh. Most of the sensitive, caring teachers get bashed out of the profession. It’s hard to look society’s extreme problems in the face every single day and know that you might be the only one addressing them. A kid gets beaten up for being gay, another doesn’t have any food at home, another’s pregnant and doesn’t know what to do. After a year or two, the stresses become overwhelming for any person with a shred of decency. They leave the profession, leaving the rotten, uncaring teachers to proliferate.
Criticize teachers at your expense, susanh. Your analysis is skin-deep at best. Next time, think a little bit before recording your knee-jerk reactions.
NCLB has been a boon for private tutors. Teachers teach to the test and nervous middle-class parents call me up. I repeatedly offer my services free for low-income students to no avail. Yeah, it’s absolutely more complicated to reach the poorer students and the extra hours of instruction certain segments of the population receive nullify your standardized testing.