No Child Left Behind and unequal opportunities are the target of NEA President Garcia at City Club today
National Education Association (NEA) President Lily Eskelsen Garcia will ask business leaders to support her union's push for Congress to report educational opportunities for each school and district, not just test scores. (AP/J. David Ake)
CLEVELAND, Ohio – All students need to have the same chances for a good education, says National Education Association President Lily Eskelen Garcia, and that can't happen until we know just how unequal the opportunities are between rich schools and poor ones.
That's why Garcia is in Cleveland this week to promote the "opportunity dashboard" that she hopes Congress will include as it updates the No Child Left Behind program.
Garcia will talk about the NEA's desire for education equity at noon today at theCity Club of Cleveland.
In a conversation with The Plain Dealer Thursday, Garcia outlined her hopes for the "dashboard," the bill and how she hopes her talk today will convince business leaders to back the NEA's plan.
See a full description of the "dashboard" below.
She also had sharp criticisms of charter schools, of the amount of standardized testing in schools, of the national focus on meeting test score targets and of schools cutting arts and afterschool programs to spend money on test preparation instead.
Garcia said No Child Left Behind program created by President George W. Bush in 2002 was a valuable one because it forced states and school districts to break apart its test scores and show how racial and economic subgroups were regularly lagging behind white and affluent students.
But she said "No Child Left Untested" and other school "reform" plans have brought "13 painful years" in other ways.
"What we have seen in these 13 years has been fraud and mismanagement, schools that were rewarded by test scores that didn't deserve it and schools that have been punished that didn't deserve it," she said.
She said the worst failure of No Child Left Behind is that it expected all students to meet test score targets, without paying any attention to how poverty affects how much kids learn. Expecting scores to rise without solving underlying socioeconomic issues was never realistic.
The "opportunity dashboard" that was included in the Senate's version of the new No Child Left Behind bill, but not the House version, is a first step in making the challenges of poor districts clear, Garcia said. She is hoping that business leaders will put pressure on Congressional leaders to keep the dashboard and reduce the penalties for low test scores as they negotiate a compromise bill.
Garcia wants the federal government to report things like student access to Advanced Placement classes, kindergarten, nurses and arts or foreign language No Child Left Behind and unequal opportunities are the target of NEA President Garcia at City Club today | cleveland.com:
