A Primer on No Child Left Behind
Friday, July 20, 2007 at 7:33 am
- 4 Comments
How has No Child Left Behind affected public education in Minnesota? It’s a mixed bag, area educators say.
But first, here’s a refresher course on how NCLB came to be adopted:
In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which was heralded at the time as America’s promise to our children. While the act has undergone mostly minor changes during various reauthorizations, it has remained the basic blueprint for public education in this country.
Then came the No Child Left Behind reauthorization in 2002. Although NCLB was intended to introduce high educational standards and accountability into the public schools, many of its provisions have been controversial with educators, parents and lawmakers.
The National Education Association, for instance, has been a vocal critic of NCLB; it issued a critique that focused on three priority areas that it hopes Congress will change when it considers reauthorizing NCLB this year or next. The NEA recommends that NCLB should include more than test scores as measures of learning and performance; class sizes should be reduced to help students learn; and the number of highly qualified teachers should be increased.
Other criticisms are raised in an online petition put out by the Educator Roundtable, which has received more than 30,000 signatures from around the country. Among the petition’s 16-point list of concerns: No Child Left Behind misdiagnoses the causes of poor academic performance and improperly blames students and teachers for circumstances over which they have no control; neglects the teaching of higher-order thinking skills and assumes that competition is the primary motivator of human behavior and that market forces can cure education-related problems.
Matt Mohs, assistant director of funding programs for St. Paul Public Schools, says the district would have pursued the same goals with or without NCLB. While Mohs acknowledges criticisms of NCLB, he is also quick to point out that, “It’s actually been one of those things that has its pluses and its minuses. For St. Paul, it’s really helped further the agenda of improving achievement for all students and raising awareness around areas that maybe Minnesota hasn’t been so strong in historically, as well as areas that St. Paul was beginning to move forward on prior to NCLB.”
Sharon Freeman, St. Paul’s assistant director of Adequate Yearly Progress Early Intervention, agrees with his assessment. Freeman, former principal at Prosperity Heights Elementary, a nationally recognized school for achievement, says that NCLB would not have affected her school’s performance and that it “wouldn’t have made a difference to me or the staff.”
Sarah Snapp, Mohs’ counterpart in the Minneapolis Public School system, says that NCLB has helped to spotlight Minneapolis’ progress toward the goals of closing the achievement gap and raising achievement for all students. “What NCLB says is that it’s not just about access, it’s about achievement and what are the standards? We have to make sure that all kids meet standards,” she said.
Even so, Snapp has concerns with NCLB. “It has taken money out of the classroom because we are required to spend part of our Title I money on supplemental education services,” she said. Those service providers include community groups, churches, nonprofit agencies and corporations. “We have to spend money paying for services from them and there’s no accountability for those providers,” she said. “We take money that would have gone to schools and classrooms and put them into these supplemental services.”
Internal evaluations show poor results form some of those providers, she said, adding she would like to see them held accountable for their performance. “If you’re going to put my results on the front page of the newspaper, then put these for-profit corporations’ results on the front page too, if they’re receiving public dollars. Let’s be fair.”
more inside While the Minnesota Department of Education declined comment, the Minnesota Monitor was able to obtain a list of recommendations issued by a “working group” convened by the department for improving NCLB. Snapp and Mohs were among the group of area educators and administrators.
The report, titled “Recommendations for the Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act,” takes a “mend it, don’t end it” approach to NCLB.
The group recommends that NCLB and ESEA should:
4 Comments
Comment posted July 29, 2007 @ 9:43 pm
Primer? No, critique. You said, in the article, “here’s a refresher course on how NCLB came to be adopted”, and then skipped right over how NCLB came to be adopted and went right to the quotes by the people who don’t like it.
Couldn’t you point out that there was a widespread perception that some schools – maybe many schools – were promoting students without teaching them? That this was happening in communities that needed the education the most (in order to overcome past deficits) and had the least amount of power with which to address this problem themselves?
That the NCLB Act’s purpose was NOT to address class sizes, or teacher training, or classroom materials or books, or to fix old school buildings, or to provide nourishing lunches.
NCLB had ONE purpose: to begin the process of making education available to all, fairly, across the spectrum of poor to wealthy communities, by taking the simple step, not ever taken before, of finding testing methods that would allow us to compare a student from one district to a student in another district, and draw conclusions about the districts from the mass test results. This step was critical, as there was no objective criteria available with which to make such judgments until NCLB. School districts could fail completely in their mission of education and continue to promote the untaught students to the next grade, eventually graduating students who couldn’t read, do math – students who might as well have stayed home – students from (usually) poor communities who would then be unable to compete in a job market full of graduates who COULD do those things.
Sounds like a goal to get behind, doesn’t it? Kennedy did, and most Democrats did, and Bush did, too.
Problem is, it’s the “how” that’s causing problems. Finding an objective set of tests that will tell us about relative progress without stepping on toes has been . . . difficult. Entrenched guilds have not appreciated the public scrutiny of measurable scores, complaining that the tests don’t measure education progress accurately, or that they take up too much valuable teaching time, or are too costly . . . Long lists, by people who suddenly have these gored oven running around their yards.
And, yeah, for most districts, this is probably a net negative, because the Act was designed to end the fake-education racket ongoing in a small percentage of schools. But, back when the Act was first contemplated, we knew such a process was aimed at that small percentage of schools, and that, for most, it was simply a burden, carried by them as a fair way to provide data and results against which the bad schools could be compared.
So, let’s fix the process as we can, but let’s not complain about all the ills of education and cry “NCLB!”, ‘cuz it’s inaccurate, and it will simply work to bring back the temporary warehousing of communities of poor kids in their school buildings while their richer counterparts are being educated.
Comment posted July 29, 2007 @ 4:43 pm
Primer? No, critique. You said, in the article, “here's a refresher course on how NCLB came to be adopted”, and then skipped right over how NCLB came to be adopted and went right to the quotes by the people who don't like it.
Couldn't you point out that there was a widespread perception that some schools – maybe many schools – were promoting students without teaching them? That this was happening in communities that needed the education the most (in order to overcome past deficits) and had the least amount of power with which to address this problem themselves?
That the NCLB Act's purpose was NOT to address class sizes, or teacher training, or classroom materials or books, or to fix old school buildings, or to provide nourishing lunches.
NCLB had ONE purpose: to begin the process of making education available to all, fairly, across the spectrum of poor to wealthy communities, by taking the simple step, not ever taken before, of finding testing methods that would allow us to compare a student from one district to a student in another district, and draw conclusions about the districts from the mass test results. This step was critical, as there was no objective criteria available with which to make such judgments until NCLB. School districts could fail completely in their mission of education and continue to promote the untaught students to the next grade, eventually graduating students who couldn't read, do math – students who might as well have stayed home – students from (usually) poor communities who would then be unable to compete in a job market full of graduates who COULD do those things.
Sounds like a goal to get behind, doesn't it? Kennedy did, and most Democrats did, and Bush did, too.
Problem is, it's the “how” that's causing problems. Finding an objective set of tests that will tell us about relative progress without stepping on toes has been . . . difficult. Entrenched guilds have not appreciated the public scrutiny of measurable scores, complaining that the tests don't measure education progress accurately, or that they take up too much valuable teaching time, or are too costly . . . Long lists, by people who suddenly have these gored oven running around their yards.
And, yeah, for most districts, this is probably a net negative, because the Act was designed to end the fake-education racket ongoing in a small percentage of schools. But, back when the Act was first contemplated, we knew such a process was aimed at that small percentage of schools, and that, for most, it was simply a burden, carried by them as a fair way to provide data and results against which the bad schools could be compared.
So, let's fix the process as we can, but let's not complain about all the ills of education and cry “NCLB!”, 'cuz it's inaccurate, and it will simply work to bring back the temporary warehousing of communities of poor kids in their school buildings while their richer counterparts are being educated.
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