Deborah Cahill | Ewing & Associates

By: Deborah Cahill

No Child Left Behind

The New York Times (2/1, A1, Dillon) reports on its front page that the Obama administration “is proposing a sweeping overhaul” of NCLB “and will call for broad changes in how schools are judged to be succeeding or failing, as well as for the elimination of the law’s 2014 deadline for bringing every American child to academic proficiency.” However, the Times adds that the “administration is not planning to abandon the law’s commitments to closing the achievement gap between minority and white students and to encouraging teacher quality.” The Times notes that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan “foreshadowed the elimination of the 2014 deadline in a September speech, referring to it as a ‘utopian goal,’ and administration officials have since made clear that they want the deadline eliminated.”

Finally some common sense when it comes to this legislation. NCLB (No Child Left Behind) is a wonderful in theory but it lacks the realistic ability to enforce it. You cannot expect schools in “School Improvement” to miraculously catch up to schools in areas where the average household has at least one parent with a college degree just because the state is requiring higher test scores! It just is not possible.

Realistic goals need to be set so that we are seeing steady improvement and at the same time are not setting goals which increase each year making it impossible for these schools to ever get out of School Improvement. This encourages and allows the best students from the School Improvement schools to leave to go to other schools which are not in school improvement, hence making it more difficult for the SI school to improve test scores because their best students are no longer in attendance to help pull up their scores! It has been a “catch 22″ which has caused a great deal of distress and unfair pressure on the SI schools. Maybe this new understanding on the part of the government will finally help public education and take some pressure off the schools who are drowning under this deadline.

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By: Deborah Cahill

As a secondary school teacher in California for a number of years and as a classroom teacher for over 25 years I can at “test” to the fact that one of the major complaints teachers have is that we spend far too much time teaching to the test and then taking even more time out from our regular courses of study to complete the tests! It has gotten to the point where we loose weeks each year on tests which teachers feel are unnecessary and really devalue our time. As a result, the amount of material we love to teach and which excites the students, and which we have been able to cover, seems to diminish each year. Here is a brief article that addresses that concern.

California’s Top Teachers Say Law Hampers Classroom Creativity, According To Study.

California’s Press Enterprise (1/26, Straehley) reported, “The best teachers don’t like the effects of the No Child Left Behind act, saying it hampers creativity in the classroom and makes it harder to teach students to love learning,” according to a UC Riverside study published in Policy Matters today. Researchers “surveyed 740 national board certified teachers in California” and “found that 84 percent reported overall unfavorable attitudes about the” law. Many teachers said that “too much class time is devoted to teaching what’s on the state tests, and there’s little time left for creative and fun lessons.” Titled, “Does the No Child Left Behind Act Help or Hinder K-12 Education,” the reports also says that “teachers did see value in the focus and high expectations set by the act, but” did not see NCLB as helping students reach those standards.