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February 27, 2007
NCLB: Coming to a paper near you?There's much ink being spilled in the press about the No Child Left Behind Act and issues that are coming to the fore now that the act is up for Congressional reauthorization. A week ago the News Journal in Wilmington, Del. focused much of its Sunday opinion section on NCLB. This is a paper that seems to do quite a lot of high quality K-12 reporting in general, but this was an especially lengthy and meaty dialogue featuring a range of Delaware voices.
Delaware Schools Boards Association president Ed Czerwinski and executive director Susan Francis lead off explaining that Delaware was ahead of the game because its standards-based acccountability system pre-dated NCLB. But NCLB, they say, has replaced Delaware's focus on continuous improvement with unrealistic time-certain deadlines and sometimes arbitrary sanctions. They note that "growing numbers of families move to Delaware to enroll children in our schools for the exceptional special-education services they provide."
The problem is that NCLB's "'absolute' percentage of special-education students allowed to be exempted from the standard tests" means that "ranking of an entire school and district based not on ability to continuously improve but rather on a target number in every student category—and sometimes on a single category—is not productive." Then, of course, there's the funding gap, the result of which is that "local money that could be used for programs appropriate to a school or district—and for which the citizens passed referenda—is being used to support federal law and regulations."
State Secretary of Education Valerie Woodruff contibutes a piece echoing concerns heard elsewhere about the validity of assessments required of some English language learners or students with disabilities and the accountability problems and uncertainties this creates. Barbara Grogg, president of the state NEA, also emphasizes the need for a "growth model" of accountability and the resources needed to reach the targets.
Pat Heffernan, co-president of the Brandywine Special Needs PTA, agrees that NCLB "is full of underfunded and onerous mandates" and that "the achievement targets are unobtainable and the accountability component has too many problems to even list here." But she warns that focusing solely on the implementation problems could lead people to the false conclusion that we're better off without the act. She defends the transformation NCLB has wrought in creating higher expectations for all students, especially those who used to be overlooked. "Sadly, we need explicit laws like No Child Left Behind to help our society live up to its ideals of equality, just like we needed explicit laws to give women and African-Americans the right to vote," she writes.
The News Journal responds to all this with its own editorial on Delaware and NCLB, saying that "the good news is that the goals of No Child Left Behind are taken seriously here" and that "the complaints are legitimate and solvable with adjustments on the federal, state, and local sides."
How about your local paper?
Posted February 27, 2007 4:12 PM | No Child Left Behind
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