NCLB Not About Filling in the Bubbles - But Connecting the Dots
by Senator Christopher Dodd
It’s been interesting to review the comments on this blog since I share the concerns expressed on some of the major posts. The bottom line for me is that our economic and national preparedness rests on our commitment to educating and preparing our children to succeed in a global economy. This starts in our public schools. I’m proud to say our 6 year-old attends public schools - and our 3 year-old isn’t far behind.
Teachers need to be part of the process when we make reforms, and there is no better place for us to begin collaborating than with the reauthorization and reform of No Child Left Behind. It’s long past time we get this law right. No one argues with the basic tenets of the law. No one argues that providing a high quality education for all students is our highest priority. And no one suggests that the importance of closing the achievement gap across demographic and socioeconomic lines is critical to our future. But the No Child Left Behind law has come up short. It’s rigid. It has been drastically underfunded. And it makes a mockery of the teacher certification process.
It’s long past time we acknowledged that test scores alone are not the only measure of student achievement. We should also consider a student’s rate of improvement, dropout rates, and advanced placement courses. We should give credit and provide resources for schools that do well on these kinds of yardsticks.
Teachers know better than anyone that learning isn’t about filling in the bubbles - it’s about connecting the dots. Instead of penalizing schools that are identified as needing improvement, we should put a system in place that supports and invests in them. We should provide schools additional time to implement reforms before they move up the accountability timeline. We should allow schools to target school choice and supplemental services to the students who actually demonstrate a need for them. And we should increase flexibility for meeting the highly qualified teacher requirements.
As negotiations to reauthorize No Child Left Behind go forward, teachers will be at the top of my agenda. The ongoing NCLB debates ought not to be about the quality of teachers in the workforce. As far as I’m concerned, no one works harder and gives more than our public school teachers. Rather, we should focus on identifying where teachers need the most help and, for a change, work to provide them that help.
6 responses so far ↓
unitedwelay1 // June 1, 2008 at 6:19 am
I teach extremely disadvantaged children in North Philadelphia. NCLB has not helped them at all. It’s not about funding. You can’t fund an initiative when the schools themselves are lacking the basics. There are no computers, few books, diminished supplies, etc… Classrooms are so severely overcrowded that teachers cannot possibly manage a classroom that way. If you have 45 students, some without desks to sit at, how can you be held accountable when a few slip out to cut class while you’re writing something on the board. Forget about giving ANY of the children individual attention. The classes are only 50 minutes long. That’s a minute per student with no time for instruction. Instead of a blanket mandate to incorporate into all schools, we need to fix the problems of individual cities first.
And it’s great that you’re proud that your kid goes to public school. I’m not trying to be sarcastic, but where, exactly, is that school? Does your child have to ride public transportation to get there? Are there after school programs? Does your school have a library? Computers? Books? Fewer than 35 students in a classroom? Teacher’s aides??? Does your kid have to go through a metal detector each morning and be hand-searched by a staff member? How many shootings (citywide) were in your child’s district last year? Incidences of weapons brought into the high school? Suspensions for violence? Expulsions? We can’t pretend that all our schools are on the same level.
susan // June 2, 2008 at 4:58 am
Senator, what process do you have to keep teachers up to date on what’s happening with NCLB?
K // June 2, 2008 at 5:52 pm
I don’t have severely overcrowded classes and the school I teach in has technology, even art and shop classes. What it doesn’t have is support for teachers. Teachers are the adults who have the most influence on kids other than their family. Why then are teachers thrown to the dogs first? Accountability is used as a hammer to force compliance to ill-conceived ideas about what needs to happen in a classroom. Teachers get better reviews if their classrooms have cupcakes rather than content. Discipline is handled differently depending on the day of the week or the administrator in the building. Data collection for decision making has become an accountability stick where we write our own evaluations and administrators have no idea what is going on in the classroom or school.
Instead of rolling downhill to the teachers, change should be coming up from teachers who are with the students every day. Train teacher leaders and listen to them.
School funding is next!
Kevin // June 5, 2008 at 9:38 am
I have been teaching technology education the past three years; a mid-life career change after working fifteen years in private industry. I agree with “K” above in many ways. In my experience, experienced teachers tend to get cherry assignments, while new teachers tend to get assignments such as monitoring study halls filled with students that are on the verge of dropping out. The teachers union can be very hypocritical in this context - they talk a good game in regards to teacher training and leave it at that. Also, I don’t know what Senator Dodd means when he says, NCLB… “has made a mockery of the certification process.” Could it be the NEA’s party line on highly qualified status? For the record, I absolutely love working with kids and I earned this awesome responsibility the “old fashioned” way.
Urban teacher of English // July 10, 2008 at 2:07 pm
I’ve been in a CT urban district for nearly 10 years following a successful legal career and while we all acknowledge testing and accountability are critical for the industry for the students and the professionals working in schools, NCLB is not effective. It doesn’t deliver the results- it creates an adversarial relationship between administrators and teachers and students/families. Successful suburban districts remain successful. Urban districts may secure funding to rebuild infrastructure; but without support from leadership top down, wherever a school is struggling with scores there is usually poverty and behavioral issues. Teachers who aren’t supported on behavioral issues have their hands tied even if they have a lovely new building. Administrators are looking for scores to improve with a wary eye to funding and the latest state initiative. An urban child’s world is a very different place and a school isn’t equipped to address the economic and social problems that bombard these kids each day, particularly when the cycle has been entrenched for multiple generations. Everyone should be looking at Achievement First in New Haven to glean what can be learned and applied in the rest of that city and the other CT cities in the same testing economic reference group: Hartford, Waterbury, Bridgeport, New London and the like. Testing and accountability are a fact of life but testing alone is not the answer. Further, every teacher is trained to recognize and teach to the different learning styles of individuals. But, then we are told that the only valid measure the state and federal government really value is the testing score. Most students are not “test-takers.” Neither are most adults. The skills students need are a facility with reading, math, various sciences and communication that will equip them to be thoughtful, responsive and responsible in the world as adults, given their chosen career path.
nld // August 11, 2008 at 12:05 pm
In my view, poor managers lead to poor results. This is the heart of the public school problem. The highest impact action for school improvement is to improve all aspects of school management.
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