The Time Has Come to 'Just Say No' to NCLB

NCLB legislation has been with us for a long enough time to realize that it brought some good to education.  The purpose of the legislation was to improve student performance by identifying subgroups of children to make certain that they weren't being 'left behind'.  That helped those of us in the business of educating children to realize when we were missing some children. 

When we realized that we were missing children, we (educators) were then able to develop new, highly focused instructional strategies that could help close the gap between our most successful groups and less successful groups.  Schools have made great progress toward that goal.

There is a problem though.  With each passing few years, the bar was raised for acceptable performance.  Schools made great progress reaching those goals, but this year the goal for math was that every subgroup now had to have 88.6% of its students pass math.

Imagine that!  A laudable goal, but not very realistic!  As that bar goes up, so do the expectations for passing the tests.  Children with limited cognitive ability, for example, are expected to perform at or above grade level.  

Though this is a worthy goal, it is a fact that although we need to try our best with all children, they are like we adults.  We have different talents, different intellects, and different native ability.  

Why say 'No' to NCLB?  It's simple really.  When schools fail to make adequate yearly progress, they suffer punitive actions.  I heard of a school with an African American subgroup that was targeted with special strategies to help them close the achievement gap in math.  They had great success.  But, the bar went up this year!  In spite of tremendous growth, the school will suffer punitive action.  The message to the staff and its parent community is, "Do everything right, and you can still be singled out as a failure."  

Our public schools are doing a great job.  When children don't do as well as we would like, the Federal government should offer resources to the school to build its capacity to help students even more.  Instead, the government points a finger and says, "You failed to make AYP."  The irony is that even a school that earns the honor of being a NC School of Distinction can also be on the "Watch List."  Imagine, a school that successfully grows children can still be painted with the brush of failure.

NCLB is supposed to help children, not vilify the educators who work so hard to care for their students, nor the families that work hard to support those schools.