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Recent Article from Spring 2009:
No Child Left Behind? Questions Remain.
Will NCLB continue? Will policies change? Or just the name?
No public educational initiative of the last generation has had more impact than No Child Left Behind. Many may question the value of this impact, but few will question the extent of it. Although the law was originally intended to serve several purposes, the one purpose that has stood out has been to increase accountability for educational performance. The way the law was implemented, accountability is now determined in three ways - testing, testing and more testing.
The law has been up for re-authorization for almost two years without actually being put to a vote. The reason No Child Left Behind has not been re-authorized is that people from all parts of the political spectrum have objections. The standards are not high enough. The standards are not realistic. The standards vary too much from state to state. The testing is not thorough. We are teaching to the test but not educating. NCLB costs schools too much money. The program is underfunded, etc., etc. Since NCLB has not been re-authorized or revised, it simply continues in its current form.
Recently, some comments made by the new Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, may shed some light on NCLB’s future. All parties agree that American public education should have high standards and that the gap between the higher achieving schools and the lower achieving ones should be narrowed. Secretary Duncan feels that the standards at the top - e.g., high school graduation requirements - are really not high enough, mostly because they are so inconsistent. Some states have much higher standards than others. However, Mr. Duncan thinks the NCLB policies have been too tight at lower levels. He feels that schools have not had enough flexibility to achieve their goals.
On this latter point, we have to agree with the secretary. The huge emphasis on testing and data collection has caused most public school systems to adopt very rigid protocols. Everyone has to be in the same place at the same time. We often felt that No Child Left Behind could also be named One Size Fits All. For those of us who work with students with learning differences, we know that the human learning process can vary greatly from student to student. Students who are dyslexic can learn to read, they just can’t learn to read by many of the conventional reading methods that still dominate general education in most areas. Pupils who are learning disabled can learn, and many can still achieve high standards, but they need to be instructed in a variety of different ways. They also often need to proceed in a different time frame or in a different sequence than the norm. At Stevenson Learning Skills we have faced this issue for a long time. The Stevenson Program begins with long vowel words because such words provide advantages for students with auditory deficits, blending problems and memory difficulties. Of course, almost all the common benchmark testing that schools adopt assumes that short vowel words come first. And these “interim” tests often begin in early first grade and continue every few months for years. With the Stevenson Program the issue goes away after a few months because the Lonely Vowels (i.e., short vowel words) are introduced later in the first level. However, in a world where detailed standards reach into kindergarten and six-year-olds are frequently tested, teachers and administrators are reluctant to deviate from the norm.
It is not just children with identifiable differences who currently face problems. There is a great deal of variation amongst the individual students in any “average” elementary classroom. You have “hands-on” learners, “textual” learners, “concrete,” “abstract,” “right brain”, and “left brain” learners, not to mention different cultural backgrounds. In other words, you have variety, a variety rarely reflected in the standardized state testing that usually starts in third or fourth grade.
Secretary Duncan’s feeling is that some things need to be managed more tightly and others more loosely. He feels that the standards for a high school diploma should not only be high, but tighter. He sees no value in having fifty different sets of standards. On the other hand, he feels that we should be more flexible about how students achieve these standards. Perhaps, flexibility and a respect for individual differences will be more productive.
In one interview (Charlie Rose, PBS), Mr. Duncan admitted that perhaps the name “No Child Left Behind” should be changed, or “rebranded.” That idea suggests just how much disagreement exists about the current law. However, there is still a very important consensus: high standards are important, a high level of accountability is necessary and schools with records of poor achievement must be improved. No matter what name is attached to a new education bill, whenever it might be passed, we can assume that testing will still be an important tool, with perhaps a little less - or more reasonable - emphasis. In any case, it seems that we might be heading in a new direction, or maybe in a variety of directions, to reach the common goal.
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2002 Stevenson Learning Skills, Inc. All rights reserved.
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