Falling Behind
Lawmakers want to see No Child Left Behind changed to reflect ‘common sense’
By Bobbi Mlynar (Contact)
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Photo by Carly Pearson
Shawn Pearson plays Uno with the students in his summer school class Wednesday morning at Lowther North Intermediate School.
Officials in education and government see a need for changes in the No Child Left Behind Act, before the state and the nation itself are left behind in the global education neighborhood.
The Act, passed on Dec. 18, 2001, sets criteria that school districts must meet in assessments or qualifications of both students and teachers. School districts are penalized if they fail to reach the federal benchmarks within the proscribed periods of time.
NCLB grades schools as a whole, as well as in “subgroups” that encompass learning disabilities, socio-economic levels, ethnic background and proficiency in English, among others.
Emporia district leaders have long said that subgroups have affected the district’s ability to meet Adequate Yearly Progress goals. Because the Emporia district is a larger district, it has more students within those subgroups, which requires the district to use the subgroups as part of its AYP outcomes.
Smaller rural districts, such as North and Southern Lyon County, often do not have enough subgroup students to incorporate into the districts’ scores.
“I voted against No Child Left Behind when it passed Congress years ago,” said Rep. Jerry Moran. “I feel comfortable with that vote, despite the difficulty of voting against something called ‘No Child Left Behind.’”
Moran said at that time that he had concerns about underlying theories and costs of NCLB, “and a great fear of what it’s going to do to the teaching profession as we make teaching become more bureaucratic and less about the classroom.”
The ramifications of NCLB have done nothing to change his mind.
Moran’s aide, Lea Stueve, spent six months researching and interviewing teachers, Kansas Board of Education members, the Kansas National Education Association, the Kansas Association of School Boards and education professors — in particular Tes Mehring, dean of the Teachers College at Emporia State University.
The results of that research have been incorporated into modifications that Moran would like to see in NCLB when Congress votes this year on whether the act should be renewed. He introduced his proposal, the “Practicality in Education Act,” in Congress last year.
Moran also has sent his proposal out for comment among his peers and has found a Democratic sponsor to help make it a bipartisan effort.
“I do not expect my bill to be passed in its entirety or as a single piece of legislation, but what I’m hoping to do is to be able to get as many components of this bill incorporated as possible,” Moran said. “What we’re doing now is encouraging other members of Congress to take a look at this legislation.”
The bill provides some “Kansas common sense” to the NCLB law.
“What basically we’re about is trying to affect the provisions of NCLB that have little common sense and defy reality,” he said.
Moran wants to change rules to allow tracking of individual students’ progress, rather than measuring progress of groups and subgroups as a whole.
Moran said that it is “nearly impossible” to meet standards related to needs of some subgroups.
English as a Second Language students need to be given time to become competent in English before they are tested, he said, or be tested in their native tongues.
His proposal also would test special needs students at their appropriate levels of learning instead of placing them in an aggregate of classmates.
“I think it just provides some common sense,” Moran said. “We’re asking our schools to do things that in many ways can’t be done.”
He cited teachers’ criteria as another example of change needed in NCLB. The act requires that each teacher be certified as a highly qualified teacher in the subject that he or she teaches.
In smaller districts, especially in rural areas with low populations and smaller budgets, the goal may be impossible. Those districts often hire one teacher to teach multiple subjects, even though the additional subjects are not that teacher’s specialty. NCLB also has effectively eliminated advanced courses in some schools, which results in an adverse affect on students whose interests lie beyond the mathematics and reading focus of NCLB testing.
Moran talked about a student who requested an advanced history course and was denied.
“The advanced history class questions weren’t on the test, so (there was a) ‘Why would we teach it?’ kind of attitude,” he said.
The teachers themselves have become discouraged by the limitations NCLB has placed on their teaching. They find themselves spending considerable time teaching to the reading and math tests to improve scores instead of encouraging individual students to learn more about their interests.
State Sen. Jim Barnett said that informal conversations with educators have revealed the frustrations of teachers working within NCLB constraints.
Barnett also is a former president of the Emporia board of education and is married to a teacher.
“I’ve seen both good and bad with it,” Barnett said.
Students are being more carefully evaluated and teachers are finding ways to meet the students’ needs in learning.
“And I think that is good, along with the goal of wanting every child to succeed to their maximum,” Barnett said.
However, he said, “undue focus” has been placed on testing, to the detriment of students’ educations.
“We have to find out what students’ interests are — find out where their special gifts and talents are, so they can make the most of them, and that would help them succeed in life,” Barnett said.
Barnett said NCLB has “caused us to focus on mediocrity. We’ll never excel as a nation or as a state if our plan is to advance the average. Emporia has a lot of educators and gifted children, but something’s very wrong if, for one, educators are contemplating retirement or the students are not being challenged to the maximum.”
Teachers in Emporia already are contemplating leaving the profession — or already have left — and potential teachers may be changing majors at universities.
“I think burn-out is extremely high,” Barnett said. “The teachers have so many challenges in the classroom with a makeup of students that does not allow them to have the opportunity to work with individual students.
“That hurts us in a competitive fashion. If you look at the U.S. competing with other countries in the fields of math and science, we’re losing out,” Barnett said. “If America wants to remain competitive, we have to turn that around.”
He said that NCLB had created “a number of unrealistic, unattainable goals.” A section on special education mandates certain expensive functions that, while ordered by the federal government, were not funded by the federal government.
Opting out from NCLB probably is not an option, Barnett said, because the state could lose about $170 million in federal education funds.
Moran already had tried to have Kansas partially exempted from the NCLB criteria because schools in the state already were working to meet existing Quality Performance Accreditation (QPA) standards approved in the mid-1990s by the state legislature.
Moran said that the Bush administration to date has been against making any changes in NCLB, despite difficulties it has created for Kansas and a number of other states. He plans to continue working to gain support for his own proposal for changes in NCLB.
“I think the negatives at this point have outweighed the positives,” Moran said. “This is a failed concept.”
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Posted by hottopics (anonymous) on June 7, 2007 at 3:06 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Teachers from every grade have said it has put a hardship on the classes and a lot of pressure on the students. This needs to be revised not schools penalized!!!
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