No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is President George Bush’s legislative effort to slowly kill public education while pretending to improve it. After much hand wringing and posturing, Democrats are falling all over themselves to develop “reforms” that attempt to turn NCLB into something less reprehensible. Of course, such actions beg the question of what these representatives were thinking when they voted for NCLB to begin with. Furthermore, they seem to miss the ultimate point–that we do in fact need a new education policy for this country, one that prioritizes providing public education to all students. An effective policy would have to take into account all of the factors that influence education, such as housing, health, access to nutritious food, etc. Education is dependent upon all of these. It cannot be addressed in isolation.
Such a policy will obviously not be achieved by tinkering with a fundamentally flawed piece of legislation. For instance, many have said that full funding would render NCLB an adequate, if not fine, piece of policy. But then the punitive, myopic approach to schools and education would simply have that much more weight behind it. Further, NCLB has absolute blinders on in terms of the varying levels of support and school-readiness that children have due to the social inequalities that are entrenched in our society.
The reforms that are currently being proposed are definitely narrowly scoped. They do not get at the very heart of the matter, and thus, while we need to investigate them, and potentially support them, they should not be looked to as part of the long-term approach to solving education issues.
The National Education Association has endorsed a set of 17 bills that are currently in various stages in the House and Senate (http://www.nea.org/lac/esea/05nclb.html). Two of these bills, Senate Bill 724, introduced by Senator Dodd (D_CT), and House of Representatives Bill 1506, introduced by Representative DeLauro (D-CT), seem to be a direct response to criticisms of the narrow use of standardized test scores to evaluate student learning and school quality. As opposed to evaluating schools and students by looking at their test scores as discrete points in time, these bills allow educators and administrators to bring some context into play. Under these amendments, students could be measured based on how well they had done over-time, as opposed to just at a given point.
Such as change is important because it implicitly acknowledges that students are not all at the same place, even if they may be in the same grade. Measuring improvement, as opposed to an abstract score, is a more meaningful way of capturing how well our schools, teachers and kids are doing.
But, and here’s the catch, this is still just looking at how well kids are taking the standardized tests that have been approved by their state education agencies and the federal officials overseeing NCLB. Instead of focusing on supporting local assessment efforts, these bills focus on local data collection and evaluation, giving financial support for creating and maintaining number crunching systems and using the output of that number crunching to “providing professional development or training for principals and teachers on how to effectively use such data to implement instructional strategies to improve student achievement.” Of course, the ideal is to use the results of assessments to help teachers better understand where individual students need more help, and perhaps where their own teaching could be improved in general. But such data is only as good as the sources used to generate it. And while the assessments used remain an educational commodity as opposed to an educational tool, this data is suspect.
One bill in the House actually does present some serious changes. H.R. 2569, introduced by introduced by Rep. Andrews (D-NJ), offers language changing how Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) is determined for students with disabilities and for English language learners. Currently, those two groups of students are for the most part assessed using the same methods and tests as students in the general population.
Clearly this makes no sense and does not contribute to anyone’s ability to evaluate the progress of such students. H.R. 2569 would substantially address this, by requiring that students with disabilities have their assessments be aligned with those students’ Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), meaning that students would be tested on how well they were achieving the goals that had been individually constructed for them.
English language learners would have their acquisition of English be evaluated in addition to evaluating performance in other areas. These measures would be tracked over time, and presumably, measures of English language skills could be used to understand outcomes of other assessments. While this provision seems to be an improvement over ignoring the challenge of taking standardized tests in a language in which one lacks proficiency, it seems somewhat dangerous in that it makes no reference to students’ primary languages and programs that seek to maintain, if not enhance, a student’s fluency in that language. This is an important issue in San Francisco, where there are a variety of educational programs for parents to choose from that integrate English and a second language into the curriculum.
Whether or not to support reforms while working for a meaningful alternative to NCLB is a hard decision. Attempting to finesse this law seems futile when so much of it is antithetical to what parents, educators and students know would really work in schools. But at the same time, NCLB is the reality our children are living under, and in some cases being punished by. Reforms may be the best we can do right now, and so we may have to accept them, making sure though not to confuse these modifications with real change.
Lisa Schiff is the parent of two children who attend McKinley Elementary School in the San Francisco Unified School District and is the president of the board of directors of Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco (PPS-SF).
