Ideas & Issues
"No Child Left Behind" - Is it compassionate, caring or effective?
NCLB is slated to come up for renewal in 2008, but most probably will not be resolved until after the November elections in 2009. Candidates who are not aware of the national effects of this Act need our questions and counsel. Parents, students and educators are stakeholders and so should be at the decision table..
Has NCLB helped more students obtain educational equity? Has NCLB helped teachers by guiding and streamlining instruction methods and goals, thereby resulting in greater effectiveness in the classroom? Has NCLB enpowered parents by giving them a wider range of educational choices for their children or by increasing parental involvent in the educational process? Have American citizens obtainded greater value from their education tax dollars? What have been its effects?
I would like your opinion or experience related to these essential questions as well as your reactions to what you read as my perspective. I will strive to be as objective as possible, given that I am an educator and vested in that interest.
Despite NCLB's giving the federal government expanded control of education through its possible denial of "Title I" funds, the curriculum, instruction, evaluation, management, sanctions and teacher qualifications are still matters of local and state control. Since states set up their own standards, lower performing states like Texas with its "Miracle" model that had state test achievement gap narrowing while simultaneously widening on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, can look better than places like New York state which historically has had "mastery-level, outcome-based" exit exams. The fact is that flat scores on most of the independent N.A.E..P. tests show NCLB has not promoted educational improvement in most states.
The one-size-fits-all accountability systems undercut the capacity of educators to make needed local change (Sunderman & Kim, 2004). The various expenditures for required accountability by states have taken away from funding of other areas of high need such as support for music, art, foreign languages and physical education programs. In fact, book publishers and test makers are making lots of money at expense of schools (Dr. Judy Kugelmass, 12/13/04 presentation). In addition, the funding for NCLB does not come anywhere near the levels that would be needed to reach even the narrow and dubious goal of producing 100% passing rates on state tests for all students by 2014 (Stan Karp, 11/7/03 presentation).
The mandate that NCLB imposes on schools to eliminate inequality in test scores among all student groups within 12 years is a mandate that is placed on no other social institution and inherently oversimplifies the complex societal factors that are involved in student educational success. Furthermore, it reflects the hypocrisy at the heart of the law. The sanctions that NCLB imposes on schools that don't meet its test score targets hurt poor schools and poor communities most. The transfer and choice provisions of NCLB will not give low-income parents any more control over school bureaucracies than food stamps give them over the supermarkets. In fact, the supplemental tutorial provisions of NCLB channel public funds to private companies while choice options funnnel students into religiously based and/or profit maintained educational institutions.
Stan Karp believes as I do that the NCLB is a "Trojan Horse" or cruel hoax (11/7/03 presentation) to privatize public education as part of an ideological effortto reduce the public sector and create commercial relations between customers to substitute for democratic relations between students, teachers and citizens. Moreover, NCLB includes provisions that try to push prayer, military recruiters and homophobia into schools while pushing multicultural awareness, teacher innovationand creative reform out.
At my school, military recruiters have unparalleled direct access to student records and persons. Students must have their parents sign an "Opt-Out" form in order for their personal data to be shielded from military recruiters. My observations (I realize that they are anecdotal) indicate that a disproportionate number of my former students who are from poor or working class families are signing up for the military. This seems to be a more sure way to financial independence for young men and women who don't wantto further burden their struggling, often single-parent families. I sincerely admire their courage and sacrifice.
Stan Karp contends that NCLB moves control over curriculum and instructional issues away from teachers, classrooms, schools and local districts where it should be, and puts it in the hands of state and federal education bureaucracies and politicians. He asserts that it is the single biggest assault on local control of schools in the history of federal education policy. I believe that NCLB is being effective in transferring monies slated for progressive reform of educational instruction to private interests that want to concentrate wealth.
So, where do we go from here? An an educator, I am filing out the curriculum maps (which guide content scope and delivery timing as well as offer administration another metric to assess us), the teacher to teacher, teacher to administrator and teacher to parent reports as well as the online academic intervention reports. Meanwhile, I'm trying to teach in the moment while teaching to a quiz next week and planning for the eighth grade (which really "tests" grades 5-8) science standards test.
That test will be a "yardstick" of my competency, but one among others, thank goodness. My students will probably do well, but its difficult to predict, really. I've never taught seventh or eighth graders before. Thus, in an earnest attempt to "cover" the required standards (and my behind), I am creating the content from textbook resources based on a curriculum map. My professionalism (teaching experience and prevailing science teaching research) compels me to interweave hands-on, minds-on inquiry based instruction into the rote learning methods favored by most textbooks. When students "uncover" the material through guided investigations and demonstrations, the "light bulb" goes on and stays on longer than a week or two. Even though I have 16 years of creating teaching materials, the complexity of meaningful learning requires creativity, careful preparation, and luck. In any case, the administration can sanction me, and they can be sanctioned in turn for my hypothetical poor showing on the standarized test.
It could be any student subgroup in a school that could trigger "need to improve" mandates and sanctions. Often special services and economically challenged students are being scape-goated for a school's potential or actual loss of funding and prestige. Otherwise well respected, international standards-based, city schools are being threatened with replacement of personnel, because a minority group hasn't achieved "adequate improvement". As a professional I could accept this irony and be reticent to comment on it, but when our profession is being pummeled into submission to the benefit of a few which do not include my students, I feel it's incumbent upon me to call attention to the injustice.
In any case, I still teach each day as much in the moment as possible. I labor to allow serendity to enter my classroom, to fill our space with brightened eyes and "ooh and ahs". It seems to me that my students are learning well, and I definitely enjoy the innocence, respect and curiosity of these middle schoolers. Most of my colleagues hope NCLB will pass like other fad educational reform movements. More skeptical I think it will be here to stay unless we reject it, and now get back to the business and art of learning, not earning.
by Tim Wolcott
'References:
Dr. Judy W. Kugelmass, Bartle Assoc. Professor of Education, Binghamton University, NY
Stan Karp, Teacher, JFK High School, Patterson, NJ
Sunderman & Kim (2004), Harvard University: The Civil Rights Project
