Thoughts On Teaching

Zooming around the internet, I found a few sites that discuss the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. Just so you are aware, NCLB is simply a modified Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). To call it NCLB is not technically correct, even though that’s what we’ve stuck with. With a more appealing name, you feel like a jerk if you disagree with the legislation and are more likely to support it for that reason. That’s a fact; there’s been significant scientific research into the matter. I’ll get you the studies later. MIT or something…

Let’s Get It Right

Someone from Let’s Get It Right contacted me to draw to my attention their NCLB musical cartoon. A bit cheesy, especially for someone who hates just about anything that might even begin to fall into the Musical section at Tower Records, the cartoon might get you to think a bit. They make a good point: what the public sees as school accountability is full of inequity; even when schools do well on NCLB measures, we still label the public education system a failure.

ED.gov

A quick Google search later, I browsed through the U.S. Department of Education’s summary of NCLB (nice site design, even though they use tables instead of CSS for layout). They provide teaching resources that are worth a perusal and the site seems genuine in its interest to promote “educational excellence.”

The President called for bipartisan solutions based on accountability, choice, and flexibility in Federal education programs. (Source)

Not surprisingly, the site paints our current President as a man who saw a problem and did something about it. And quick. Accountability, choice, and flexibility were to be the cornerstones of NCLB.

Predetermined Spending

Does anyone out there feel like we have more choice or flexibility in the public education system now? I’ll give that NCLB provides (what appears to be) more accountability. But choice and flexibility?

In 2006, we are more locked into spending funds on specific requirements than we ever have been in education. Certain programs and exact student populations receive money without any flexibility to change the spending in order to better serve the campus or district as a whole. By the time we get to any funding that can be spent on actual campus needs (would that be discretionary funding because it can be spent at the school’s discretion?), there is very little of the initial budget left.

Have money left over as a result of overcrowding classrooms? Well, you cannot use that money to buy more textbooks, so in a pot it sits, virtually wasted. Don’t need more textbooks but could stand to pay teachers overtime to tutor kids after school? Too bad. Textbook funds can only be spent on textbooks. And, by the way, if money isn’t spent in a year, it goes back into the district general fund, completely lost to the school site. Next year’s funding is decreased by a proportionate amount of what school sites do not use; less spending this year means fewer dollars next year.

Comments As A Sign Of Cooperation

The spirit of dialogue, as shown through the ability to comment on their NCLBlog, comes across in the Let’s Get It Right site. The ED.gov site maintains a traditional top-down approach to legislation, engendering no conversation or discussion of how to improve the system. This sends out the impression that the U.S. Department of Education assumes they have all the answers and simply need underlings to carry out their grand plan.

I’m sure I sound nit-picky here, but that’s a real problem when we’re dealing with an area that should be open to community input. Turning the ED.gov site into a place where comments are welcomed will not solve anything, but it might open up the discussion a bit, particularly if those in places of influence take any comments under serious consideration.

A Study In Contrast

It’s interesting to look at both of these sites in one sitting. Obviously, considering the source is in order. I do not think the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) to be flawless. I actually know very little about the organization. Their name actually scares me a bit, as all things tending to group-think do. Nor do I think NCLB is inherently evil or wrong. I like how Let’s Get It Right acknowledges the things NCLB does that begin to make education in America better.

I can’t help wondering which site is more accurate, though. While the ED.gov site lays out “Increased Accountability,” “Greater Flexibility,” and “Putting Reading First” as key elements of NCLB, Let’s Get It Right suggests that the law has been a fairly massive failure and is in need of dire reform. Knee deep in the post-NCLB education system, I lean toward agreement with Let’s Get It Right, particularly when they state that the federal government never fully funded the NCLB mandates, while still holding schools accountable for carrying out those mandates. ED.gov holds the stance that NCLB provided lots and lots of money for the new regulations and even provided money for furthering professional development (under Title II of the act).

I can tell you from personal experience that my school district doesn’t know how to access those funds and there are several other school districts in the Bay Area who never heard of those funds until someone mentioned it to them. This is just to say that funding may be there, but it’s not widely advertised how to access it. Brilliant, really, because it can be said that money was set aside for things like professional development and when schools don’t take advantage of that funding, the government comes off smelling like a rose. In reality, though the money may be set aside, since schools don’t know about it, it might as well not be there and remain another unfunded promise of NCLB.

The ED.gov site is ironically filled with promises made in 2001 that are today unfulfilled. It’s kind of a blast from the past looking around at promises that are under funded, regulations that have since been eased up on, and ideas that simply had no way of being implemented to begin with. More importantly, however, it is a glance at what could have been had we really valued education in this country.

We Obviously Don’t Care

We, all of us citizens, let NCLB go as a dream differed because we didn’t care enough to hold this president’s administration accountable to the promises it made. Again, another irony since NCLB purports to be all about greater teacher and school accountability, a standard that the administration which presented the bill can’t seem to live up to.

Something you might consider doing as a way to encourage discussion of how to improve NCLB, Let’s Get It Right provides a petition for you to sign. The “constructive changes” needed to “get NCLB right” remain a mystery, unspoken in the petition. You have to click “Possible Solutions,” scrawled on the chalkboard at the top of the screen, to get AFT’s list. A more intuitive link to that list is in order. I didn’t notice it my first several times through the site, since that’s not an area one normally looks for navigation elements.

Overall, I like AFT’s approach to NCLB: the law passed, so instead of trying to get rid of it entirely, let’s fix it so that it does what it promises. There are things that NCLB did get right. Just like we do with students, we need to take it where it is and make it better.

# The Good, The Bad, The NCLB: In a stack of papers called Legislation. Comment feed. Both comments and trackback are closed.

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