What was missing — unfortunately — in the No Child Left Behind debate
Steven Singer, a teacher and parent, says he feels like he has entered “a parallel universe.” A veteran Nationally Board Certified Teacher in Pennsylvania with a masters degree in education, Singer watched the House of Representatives and Senate debate and pass differing legislation aimed at rewriting the No Child Left Behind Act, and he can’t wrap his arms around what transpired.
For one thing, he writes on his Gadflyonthewallblog, the debate about how to fix the NCLB “has been less on making things better and more on deciding who gets to make decisions about schools.” For another, he can’t quite get over the fact that it is Democrats who have been pushing to retain some of the controversial testing mandates in No Child Left Behind, which was President George W. Bush’s key education initiative. He wrote about a pro-testing amendment:
Almost every Democrat in the US Senate just voted to keep Test and Punish.But Republicans defeated them.I know. I feel like I just entered a parallel universe, too. But that’s what happened.
Eight years late, Congress is now trying to rewrite NCLB, the current version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 that supporters said would lead to an end to the achievement gap. It didn’t. NCLB was supposed to be rewritten in 2007, but Congress couldn’t find its way to seriously address the issue until now. In 2012, the Obama administration began to issue waivers to states from the most onerous parts of NCLB — such as the impossible requirement that virtually all students score proficient in math and reading by 2014 — but only to states that agreed to implement reforms approved by the Education Department. Among those reforms is a requirement that teachers be evaluated in part by student standardized test scores, a method that assessment experts have warned against using for such high-stakes purposes.
If a new law is signed by President Obama, those controversial waivers will be moot. With the bills passed by the Senate and House now headed to a conference committee, a new law seems within sight, but there is no guarantee. The two bills have substantial differences, and Obama is expected to veto a bill that doesn’t include testing accountability measures he favors. Education Secretary Arne Duncan released a statement on Thursday about the Senate’s passage of its legislation, applauding “the progress” made but also issuing a veiled warning that it “falls short” of accountability measures for the lowest-performing schools.
The biggest issue by far in the NCLB rewrite debate has been about returning power over education decisions from the federal government to the states, which can only be seen as a sharp rebuke to Duncan, who has micromanaged education issues for years to such an extent that even many Democrats came to realize he had overreached. The administration has for six years pushed high-stakes standardized testing as a central education priority and has continued to defend it in the face of a burgeoning national anti-testing movement that includes teachers, parents, principals, superintendents, students and other advocates.
Despite that backlash, some major civil rights groups still support What was missing — unfortunately — in the No Child Left Behind debate - The Washington Post:
