Teacher tells Congress: ‘We simply cannot ignore the stunning impact of income inequality and high child poverty’ - The Washington Post

Teacher tells Congress: ‘We simply cannot ignore the stunning impact of income inequality and high child poverty’ - The Washington Post:

Teacher tells Congress: ‘We simply cannot ignore the stunning impact of income inequality and high child poverty’

Congress is finally attempting to rewrite No Child Left Behind — a task it was supposed to accomplish in 2007 — even as Education Secretary Arne Duncan has predicted a 50-50 chance that the task will be completed. Hearings by legislators have started, and this past week Democrats in the House held a forum to hear testimony from educators and others about how the education law should be changed, saying that they were concerned that the Republican majority on the committee was pushing a “partisan” approach.

A lot of the discussion has focused on whether or not students should be given standardized tests for the sake of “accountability” on an annual basis and how much weight those test scores should carry. But other issues are important as well, as one teacher Katrina Kickbush, a special education teacher at Wolfe Street Academy in Baltimore, explained in her testimony to the forum, which was headed by Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, who is now the senior Democrat on the House education committee. Kickbush writes about what she sees as the central problems facing many children — a lack of health and other supports that influence their academic achievement — and she calls for the expansion of community schools that provide a range of services to students and their families.

No Child Left Behind is the current version of the Elementary and Secondary School Act, known as ESEA, to which she refers in the following testimony that she gave to the forum:

Ranking member [Rep. Bobby] Scott and members of this committee, thank you for inviting me here today to discuss how the Elementary and Secondary Education Act can better meet the needs of students and families through innovation. My name is Katrina Kickbush, and I am a special education teacher at the Wolfe Street Academy in Baltimore. Over the course of 20-plus years, I have taught prekindergarten through eighth grade in a wide variety of educational institutions, including private schools, special education settings, and currently the Baltimore City public schools, where I serve as our school’s current building representative for the Baltimore Teachers Union.

Every day, teachers work tirelessly—before school, during school, after school, and even after they return home to their own families—not only to develop their instruction so their students can have rich lessons and classroom experiences that will help them excel academically, but also to also ensure students have the supports they need to access those lessons and experiences. With the majority of kids in American public schools living in poverty, this has become the normal job for thousands of teachers across the country.

Every family, no matter what their socio-economic level, knows that bad eyesight, poor mental and physical health, hunger, housing problems and joblessness are barriers to effective education and learning, and thus are barriers to successful student growth, to strong families, to thriving cities and to a 

Teacher tells Congress: ‘We simply cannot ignore the stunning impact of income inequality and high child poverty’ - The Washington Post: