Is the No Child Left Behind act helping or hurting?

By Karen S. Lynch

In Senator Barack Obama’s latest book, “The Audacity of Hope” he wrote, “Throughout our history, education has been at the heart of a bargain this nation makes with its citizens: If you work hard and take responsibility, you’ll have a chance for a better life. And in a world where knowledge determines value in the job market, where a child in Los Angeles has to compete not just with a child in Boston but also with millions of children in Bangalore and Beijing, too many of America’s schools are not holding up their end of the bargain.”

The major area of contention is how best to achieve the goal of insuring children in public schools, will receive the best education possible. When asked about the No Child Left Behind Act, Joel Estes, Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction for Galesburg District 205 stated NCLB was, “A veiled attempt to privatize education.” Estes said the District is meeting their goals but said they are, “Feeling unbelievable pressures to meet the test scores for AYP” (Adequate Yearly Progress). The state-mandated test expects students to meet or exceed standards in reading and mathematics by 2014.

School District 205 has continued with its normal curriculum to this point but is using a self-tutoring program for students in need of extra assistance, rather than an outside entity. District 205 looked at cost of an outside tutoring administrator, quoted at $45 per hour per student. Cooke School has between 75 and 80 students in the school’s tutoring program, according to Estes, and was able to get off the watch list. Estes says that despite continued decline in district 205 school enrollment, there is an increase in low-income students. More than 40 percent of students in all the district’s elementary schools are low-income and qualify for Title I funding.

Recent figures show School District 205 has approximately 4,539 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. There are 312 full-time classroom teachers, nine schools, and allocates approximately $6,542 per pupil for instructional expenses. In the past two years two schools have closed, Lincoln, and LT Stone. The Galesburg High School graduation rate for the 2004-05 school year was 81.6 percent while the National rate is 87.4 percent.

Harcourt Assessment administers testing for Illinois schools for “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP), mandated by the No Child Left Behind act. The NCLB law requires the annual tests. The Harcourt tests arrived in Illinois last spring missing or with duplicate pages. Special charter flights were arranged to make sure that everyone had a test with all the same questions. Estes said Galesburg District 205 incurred $3,000 in extra expenses, billed back to the State Board for costs and overtime to produce extra copies of complete tests, working eight or nine hours over a weekend and still did not have enough Harcourt tests for all the students the morning of the test date.

The state has been waiting since October for the state testing results. Under Illinois law, results are required to be released by Oct. 31. Illinois schools will now be waiting for several more weeks while the new testing begins the second week of March, without the benefit of previous year results. Harcourt Assessment still cannot match hundreds of tests with the appropriate students.

The delay in receiving test results has not affected tutoring in District 205. Estes said, “We do not need standardized test to know who needs tutoring.” School District 205 is pursuing “High Achievement, doing what we need to do.” Estes said.

The “No Child Left Behind Act,” passed into law in 2001, is up for Congressional reauthorization in 2007. According to the Bush White House fact sheet, dated Oct. 5, 2006, “The No Child Left Behind Act is a historic law – it is working, and it is here to stay.” The President calls for reauthorizing the act: “9-year-olds have made larger gains in the past five years than at any point in the previous 28 years.” The Presidential report calls for improvements in teacher quality and is asking Congress to create a scholarship program, allowing 28,000 low-income children to transfer to a private or religious school of their choice. The President’s report states, “Reauthorizing No Child Left Behind is critical.” The problem with the President’s proposal of transferring students to religious or private schools could be a financial burden on families who choose that option to find a “successful” school in their area and extra costs such as requirements of school uniforms. The report does not state cost estimates for the President’s proposal.

Further exasperating the chance of success in improving education also centers on funding. An Arizona State University Educational Policy Research Unit contains remarks written by William J. Mathis, Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union, from the University of Vermont. Mathis stated, “For Fiscal Year 2007, the President has proposed cutting the education budget by another $2.1 billion, or nearly four percent.” Mathis continued, “The President’s announcement came at the same time that the generally pro-NCLB Education Trust reported that low-income and minority students are short-changed by and within the states. In 2003 dollars, the Trust reports that poor children receive an average of $1,436 less each year than children in wealthy districts, a gap that has increased since 1997.”

What is in contention between Washington bureaucracy and educators is the question of whether the NCLB program is actually improving public education. There are mixed reviews between test score results, reported as rising by Washington and complaints by many educators trying to achieve higher test scores, saying the preparations actually interfere with a teacher’s ability to be creative in meeting students’ widely diverse needs.

Teachers are more likely to know how to teach the students they know best, aiming at individually based needs using creative methods to help students achieve success. Richard DeBaugh, a retired career English teacher from Knoxville High School stated, “Teachers being forced to teach to a specific test stultifies good teachers in their attempts to really teach with all of the nuances that bring real learning to pupils and their individual needs.”

More teachers like DeBaugh are going to be in great demand soon. Obama wrote, “Each year, school districts are hemorrhaging experienced teachers as the Baby Boomers reach retirement, and two million teachers must be recruited in the next decade just to meet the needs of rising enrollment.”

Many claim that teachers are underpaid compared to what they can earn in private sector jobs, especially for those who hold a Master’s degree. Obama agrees that programs like “Teach for America” attracts talented teachers in the two-year stint program and they find the work rewarding, although often change careers or move to suburban schools because of low pay, or a lack of support from the educational bureaucracy.

In Obama’s comments on education from his book he wrote, “Money does matter in education—otherwise why would parents pay so much to live in well-funded suburban school districts?—and many urban and rural schools still suffer from overcrowded classrooms, outdated books, inadequate equipment, and teachers who are forced to pay out of pocket for basic supplies. But there’s no denying that the way many public schools are managed poses at least as big a problem as how well they’re funded.”

The No Child Left Behind testing program has up to 37 subcategories, which includes special education students. Attendance records are also taken into account in determining whether a school complies with the act. Gerald Bracey is a research Psychologist and writer from the Washington, D.C. area. Bracey attended the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation Conference titled: “Fixing Failing Schools: Are the Tools in the NCLB Toolkit Working? Bracey wrote, “If for two years any one subcategory in a school fails to make arbitrary, predetermined gains in test scores called ‘Adequate Yearly Progress’ (AYP), the law declares that the whole school has failed and requires it to offer all students the option to transfer to a ‘successful’ school.”

While the NCLB act does allow students to transfer to the government’s idea of “successful” schools, some rural areas may have a difficult time finding nearby schools that pass the government-mandated standards and may require lengthy commutes per day if parents decide to use that portion of the act and transfer their children to another school of choice. This school year, about 1,800 low-income students have used scholarships from the Washington, D.C. Opportunity Scholarships Program to enroll at a school of their choice.

Educators have diversifying views on NCLB’s effectiveness and cite complying with a “standardized” system of testing is arbitrary and does not address special needs children, minorities, and non-English native speakers.

There are calls for reforms in the No Child Left Behind program. The National School Board Associations (NSBA), the National Education Association (NEA), a group of Chief State School Officers in March 2004, stated, “AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) requirements could not reasonably be met under current interpretations and recommended that states be given the flexibility to determine and use their own definitions and programs for determining adequate progress.” Thirty educational organizations, convey AYP as being “unrealistic and unworkable, and that NCLB was dramatically under-funded.”

Bonnie Harris, M.S.Ed., Director of Core Parenting, parent educator, founder of The Family Center in Peterborough, NH, and author of When Your Kids Push Your Buttons (Warner, 2003) www.bonnieharris.com says that “No Child Left Behind makes it even harder for schools to administer to the needs of individual children. In fact, NCLB forces schools into practices that violate and derail what has finally come to be understood about how young people grow and develop.”

“Schools must see that they are meant to serve children, not political and social gains. When children are given the environment and the methods that suit them best, they are sponges to knowledge.”

Democrats have promised hearings on education early in the 2007 session of the 110^th Congress. Campaign trail promises by the Democrats who will hold the majority in the House and Senate in the new congress, pledge educational reforms. One proposal will be to slash interest rates on need-based college loans in half, from 6.8 percent to 3.4 percent. Another involves Pell grants that will likely get a boost from $4,050 to $5,100 but would cost roughly $4 billion.

Our schools continue to strive for higher standards. Are our schools failing? One thing is for certain, success in anything requires the right tools to achieve success. The majority of teachers in public schools are trying to achieve classroom success, or they would not be in the teaching profession considering all the adversities they contend with, if they did not care about seeing their students excel.

Posted 12/30/06