“This looks like a good move for public education”, she said, quickly adding that it will have what she believes to be a “positive impact on our (federal) impact aid”, too.
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The Senate has overwhelmingly passed and sent to President Barack Obama a massive education bill. For most federal purposes, districts were in hock to federal compliance officers. The new bill will therefore probably just formalize the current NCLB implementation on issues like school turnaround.
No Child Left Behind was a signature education initiative of the George W. Bush administration.
While the measure keeps annual reading and math testing requirements for grades three through eight, high school students would only have to undergo the testing once.
Schools that couldn’t show “adequate yearly progress” toward 100 percent proficiency on mandated tests would face escalating punishments: removing all teachers and administrators and replacing them; conversion into a charter school; turning over management to a private company; or being taken over by the state. Beyond that stood the threat of further corrective actions, including school restructuring. It was because states were not addressing educational inequities that No Child passed in the first place. However it might foster states to set caps on the time college students spend on testing & it might diminish the high stakes related to these exams for underperforming schools. In emailed responses last week, the West Virginia Department of Education didn’t provide much indication of what it would recommend the state Board of Education do with the new freedom the bill would give the state.
Under the new bill, the U.S. Department of Education would be limited to verifying that states’ school accountability plans comply with the law. Patty Murray of Washington.
The bill directs states to intervene in schools where two-thirds of the students don’t graduate, where minority groups lag and in the lowest 5 percent of schools.
Given these modest, but positive results, why the bipartisan push to revamp NCLB? They’ll be tested in science three times during their K-12 education.
The United States’ federal government has come up with a law that corrects the unpopular No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. But in addition to test scores, schools will be judged on measures like graduation rates, student and teacher engagement and student participation in advanced coursework.
Other than these broad parameters, state and local districts are given much discretion.
“But more importantly, we adopted a new approach that will help every child in every school receive a quality education”.
Still, that doesn’t mean the federal government will be left twiddling its fingers. It did not abolish the Department of Education (a long-time Republican goal that went into hiding in the 1990s), but it did severely curtail its leverage with states and districts.
“This bill is a new approach to the federal role in education”. But education should be a national priority, and federal lawmakers ought to insist on transparency about academic outcomes and how federal money is spent. Murray, a former preschool teacher, said the work must now begin in “our schools, in our communities, in our states”, to find ways to make sure that all students achieve. 1983’s “A Nation at Risk”, the report that started the whole school-reform panic, was simply wrong in its assessment at the time that U.S. schools were not doing well and not improving, since by 1983, the country was in the middle of a massive rise in overall, across-the-board student achievement. Thankfully, a lot of the heavy lifting has been done regarding setting up data systems and metrics based on individual student growth.
“We are learning that in order to get things done, we need to listen to each other”, said Murray. The new accountability fights will revolve around how to get information to parents and empower them to fight for quality choices and funding equity. “For the others, shame on you for trafficking our children”. But that would be an enormously complex undertaking, and funds provided to each student would be relatively small.
Under the legislation, which easily passed the House last week, states and districts would come up with their own goals for schools, design their own measures of achievement and progress, and decide how to turn around struggling schools. “They know best how to help their students excel in the classroom – not Washington bureaucrats”.
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Pedro Noguera, pictured here in 2013, is a professor of education at UCLA and director of the Center for the Study of School Transformation.
