No Child Law Hurting Our Schools
Congressman Thomas Petri listens as Sheboygan teacher Deborah Streblow explains the negative impact of the NCLB law on her district.
Wautoma teacher Pat Schmidt also discusses the impact of the NCLB law. |
Becky Pringle, an NEA Executive Committee member from Pennsylvania, makes a point. |
Saying the federal “No Child Left Behind” law is hurting Wisconsin’s great schools and the kids who attend them, WEAC members recently told Congressman Tom Petri (R-WI) that there must be major changes to the law. Petri is a longtime member of the House Education and Labor Committee, which will take up reauthorization of NCLB later this year.
On April 11, Petri met with WEAC members, an NEA leader and other state school leaders in Fond du Lac to discuss the law. Petri said he is “open to changes” to the law.
In written testimony, former WEAC Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Guertler, an English teacher at Berlin High School for more than 40 years, told Petri about the intensive program her school has for low-performing readers and writers. The program is very successful, as demonstrated by multiple measures of assessment, but is given no credit in the one-test-means-everything world of the NCLB.
“I urge you to consider allowing schools to include these multiple measures of student learning – reading inventories and writing portfolios,” Guertler said. “They recognize the individual needs of the students rather than the current one-day, high stakes snapshot of standardized testing.”
“My plea to you is to try to decrease federal control,” said Debbie Streblow, a teacher of at-risk students in the Sheboygan Area School District. “Think of the real children out there who need us to teach them the right way, no matter what types of problems or disabilities they might have.”
“Money does matter,” Becky Pringle, an NEA Executive Committee member from Pennsylvania who chaired the NEA’s National Advocacy Committee on the NCLB, told Petri. She said NCLB has been underfunded by $71 billion over the past seven years. The congressman’s district has been shorted in NCLB Act program funding by nearly $8.5 million for 2006 alone.
Pringle pointed to the seven specific areas of the NCLB the NEA has identified as needing positive changes.
“We no longer have the luxury of teaching art for art’s sake,” said Pat Schmidt, an elementary music teacher in the Wautoma Area School District. She said she is now required to connect music to math and reading because those are the subjects for which students are tested.
Dr. Russ Allen, of WEAC’s Department of Teaching and Learning, and Dr. Greg Maass, Superintendent of the Fond du Lac School District, discussed the results of a survey that WEAC and the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators (WASDA) recently did of school superintendents in the state.
The survey found that 93% of superintendents believe school success should be based on multiple measures of learning; 91% say schools should be given credit for showing growth even if they don’t meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) targets; and 80% say we won’t make 100% proficiency by 2014, as required by the current law.
Maass also noted that testing in his district takes 15 days away from instruction each school year. “This is a total of 112 hours of missed instruction by each student each year,” he said. “Isn’t this lowering our standards?”
The superintendent of the Prentice School District, Greg Krause, said the punitive nature of the law has not yet gotten the attention of the public. But things will change, he said, as more and more schools fail to meet increasingly stringent levels of achievement needed to qualify for Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).
Wisconsin State Superintendent of Public Instruction Elizabeth Burmaster, president of the national Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), highlighted that group’s recommendations for the NCLB. They include the adoption of new innovative models and a variety of accountability models.
After patiently listening to all the concerns, Petri said, “There has to be more flexibility. In our effort to leave no child behind, we might be hurting public education.”
Petri concluded by saying he was impressed that the education community in Wisconsin had come together to share its concerns with him. He emphasized that this will be the best way to effect changes in the NCLB law when it is brought up for reauthorization in Congress.
Posted April 20, 2007