Deborah Meier - Many Children Left Behind: How the No Child Left Behind Act Is Damaging Our Children and Our Schools

Many Children Left Behind

How the No Child Left Behind Act Is Damaging Our Children and Our Schools

Edited by Deborah Meier and George Wood

Beacon Press, Boston

Contents

George Wood

Theodore R. Sizer

Linda Darling-Hammond

George Wood

Stan Karp

Deborah Meier

Alfie Kohn

Monty Neill

Introduction

George Wood

Who could object to a law that promises no child left behind when it comes to our schools? After all, isnt this the great promise of our public school systemthat all children, regardless of race, socioeconomic status, gender, creed, color, or disability will have equal access to an education that allows them to enjoy the freedoms and exercise the responsibilities of citizenship in our democracy?

As proposed, the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation stood as a continuation of this historic promise. It is a promise that began with Thomas Jeffersons proposal for the first free system of public education in Virginia; a promise offered as the balance wheel of society by the first state superintendent of education, Horace Mann; a promise put forward as the most basic of human rights by W. E. B. DuBois.

Great strides were made to fulfill this promise in the second half of the twentieth century in terms of access. The landmark Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education , which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in May of 2004 led this push, insisting that all children, regardless of color, should go to school together in order to ensure equality. For young women the landmark was the Title 9 legislation. And for children with handicaps and learning disabilities, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975 shoved open the schoolhouse doors to full and free access. It is a hard-won tradition of which America should be proud.

But beyond access there was a growing concern with the quality of the school experience for every child. As Ted Sizer points out in his Preamble to this volume, the forerunner of NCLB was the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. For the first time as a nation we acknowledged that access alone was not enough. Rather, some children, given the condition of their childhood, would require more help if access to schooling was to be translated into success at school. ESEA and its multiple titles (Title 1 reading programs, for example) targeted dollars to communities with the greatest need. ESEA, together with Head Start, also established in 1965, staked out the earliest claims that the achievement gap between rich and poor students could be closed in schools with the right support and interventions.

As we learned four decades later it has not been an easy job. Today, children of color and children of the poor still do not fare as well in school as their wealthier, white counterparts. Of course, this should come as no surprise to us when, as Stan Karp points out in his essay in this book, we only attempt to change one part of the equation for these groups. While efforts have been focused on school improvement, almost nothing has changed during these years for the poor or minorities in terms of a host of other gapsfrom health care to housing.

And yet, our faith in public schools as the great equalizer remains, and frustration with our failures led to the most recent attempt to live up to our democratic aspirationsNo Child Left Behind.

It is important to remember that NCLB, the 2002 reauthorization of ESEA, was born in bipartisan spirit to do something positive in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As the nation continued to rediscover its footing the time seemed right to do something together for our children. Motives are hard to decipher. As Alfie Kohns essay points out, NCLB was a Trojan horse for those who would challenge the very notion of a public school system. A tool not to strengthen our schools but a ticking time bomb set to destroy them as the punitive sanctions of the law kicked in.

But other proponents of NCLB undoubtedly felt they were doing the right thing for our children and our public schools. The right thing included increasing funding for schools that serve the poor; ensuring that every child would be taught by highly qualified teachers; and holding schools that take federal funds accountable for raising achievement of every student by disaggregating their achievement data. The last of these new mandates was, for many, the most important. No longer would school districts be able to disguise the failure of those the federal funds were meant to target (children of color, the poor, and the handicapped), since the achievement scores of those children would be sorted out and reported separately.

Of course, as with most federal legislation, the nearly 1,000-page bill included plenty of special interest pleading and ideological agendas. For example, schools are now mandated to turn over student contact information to the military for recruiting purposes. The Department of Education must certify Title 1 reading programs as scientifically based; districts must certify that no policy prevents the participation in constitutionally protected prayer in public schools; and no district or school can prohibit the Boy Scouts or any other group listed as a patriotic society under U. S. code access to school facilities. But the most ideologically and politically charged tacticthe inclusion of school vouchers to be used for private school attendancewas pulled by the White House from the legislation in order to maintain a bipartisan spirit to the law.

With this background, why is it that only two years later educators, legislators, and even entire states are in open revolt over NCLB? One does not have to look further than the daily papers to see the news. In Utah and Virginia the legislative bodies have voted nearly unanimously not to comply with NCLB. The roll call of states rejecting some or all of NCLBs provisions includes Hawaii, Arizona, New Mexico, and Vermont. New Hampshires tack was to reduce state funding for standardized testing to just $1. The nations largest teachers union has come out four-square against the legislation, this time joined by administrators in the form of anti-NCLB resolutions passed by the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents, the Illinois Association of School Administrators, and Montana South Central Administrators, among many others. Opinion polls show that while parents want their schools to be accountable, the more they know about NCLB the more they oppose it. For the first time in recent memory a single piece of educational legislation has landed front and center in the campaign for the presidency of the United States.

Most of these concerns have been expressed over technical issues with NCLB, and most certainly these should be addressed. Among those immediate concerns are the following:

Underfunding. By some estimates the current requests for funding NLCB from the administration fall as much as $12 billion short of the requirements of the legislation. William Mathis, a superintendent in Vermont and professor of educational finance found in his review of state assessments of NCLB costs that on average the funding would have to be increased by 28 percent per state in order to be adequate.

Restrictive Definitions of Teacher Qualifications. Many lawmakers in states with large rural populations are finding that the mandates on teacher quality, which focus almost solely on subject matter expertise, make it impossible to hire teachers in some subject areas for schools that need teachers who can teach in multiple areas.

Effects on Subgroups. Demands that disabled and limited English proficient students reach proficiency set those students and their teachers up for failure. Clearly some students simply cannot pass the tests required to demonstrate proficiency and yet no provision is made for alternatives.