Recently in NCLB Category

Among the reform proposals President Obama plans to implement to the Bush Administration's landmark "No Child Left Behind" will be changes to the way school districts receive federal funds. Under the proposal, announced today, distribution of funding will be based on student achievement and academic progress, rather than enrollment.

The proposal would also eliminate the controversial 2014 deadline for academic proficiency. Any changes to the law would have to be approved by Congress.

From the New York Times:

Significantly, said those who have been briefed, the White House wants to change federal financing formulas so that a portion of the money is awarded based on academic progress, rather than by formulas that apportion money to districts according to their numbers of students, especially poor students. The well-worn formulas for distributing tens of billions of dollars in federal aid have, for decades, been a mainstay of the annual budgeting process in the nation's 14,000 school districts.

Currently the education law requires the nation's 98,000 public schools to make "adequate yearly progress" as measured by student test scores. Schools that miss their targets in reading and math must offer students the opportunity to transfer to other schools and free after-school tutoring. Schools that repeatedly miss targets face harsher sanctions, which can include staff dismissals and closings. All students are required to be proficient by 2014.

Educators have complained loudly in the eight years since the law was signed that it was branding tens of thousands of schools as failing but not forcing them to change.

The education law has been praised for focusing attention on achievement gaps, but it has also generated tremendous opposition, especially from educators, who contend that it sets impossible goals for students and schools and humiliates students and educators when they fall short. The law has, to date, labeled some 30,000 schools as "in need of improvement," a euphemism for failing, but states and districts have done little to change them.

The last serious attempt to rewrite the law was in 2007. That effort collapsed, partly because teachers' unions and other educator groups opposed an effort to incorporate merit pay provisions into a rewritten law. Earlier this month, Mr. Duncan and more than a dozen other administration officials took steps toward organizing a new rewrite, meeting with the Democratic chairmen and ranking Republican members of the education committees in both houses of Congress.

The Obama Administration will also seek to add $3 billion in additional for funding the nation's public schools. Once the law is reauthorized, an additional $1 billion would be added. More money would also be given to charter schools.

From Reuters:

(Obama) would also expand the stimulus initiative known as "Race to the Top" that funded new education innovations, especially at semi-autonomous charter schools, and has added $490 million in his budget for the charter school system. He would also create a $500 million testing program to gauge the success of various innovations.

In the budget, Obama also proposes giving $950 million of competitive grants to states and school districts for recruiting teachers and principals, as well as train them, and $210 million to "Promise Neighborhoods," to strengthen community services for students.

Marcus Winters, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, argues in today's LA Times that since states continue to lower the academic bar for students, amendments should be made to No Child Left Behind. Changes allowing for uniform, stringent testing that would develop higher standards for public schools need to be created, Winters writes.

From the Op-ed:

A recent federal study noted that 15 states lowered at least one of their proficiency standards in math and reading between 2005 and 2007.

And there's more:

The law punishes a school when too few of its students meet math and reading proficiency targets each year. But the law has a gaping loophole: States get to define proficiency. A state can thus meet the law's targets by defining proficiency down; toughening its standards, by contrast, handicaps its ability to meet the federal requirements.

Of course, low standards have their own appeal. The lower the standard, the more students surpass it. State governments love to tell constituents that students are doing great on standardized exams; the public usually just assumes that the criteria used on those exams are meaningful.

We could make better progress toward an effective testing regime if we changed our goal from uniform national standards to high state standards, which two simple amendments to No Child Left Behind could help bring about.

The Manhattan Institute is a conservative think tank based in New York City.

Higher-ups in the education community are speculating about the Obama administration's possible approach to the candidate's pledge to fix No Child Left Behind, the 2001 education law that sought increased accountability by focusing on standardized testing.

The Washington Post has a short story today with some top educators' thoughts. With the economy in the toilet, education is probably not the president-elect's top priority, they concede.

But he's got some promises to fulfill.

Obama has said he wants to add $18 billion in funding for schools and dramatically expand access to preschool. On his campaign Web site, he said "teachers should not be forced to spend the academic year preparing students to fill in bubbles on standardized tests." He promised to "improve NCLB's accountability system so that we are supporting schools that need improvement, rather than punishing them." He also indicated that he could support merit pay programs designed in concert with teachers.

Translating those big ideas into the nuts-and-bolts of policy will be a painstaking process.

The new education secretary will play a big part in all this, of course. One Washington thinktank is holding a contest naming that appointee, the Post reports.

Possibilities, according to the Post story: New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein; Chicago Public Schools Chief Arne Duncan; Stanford University education professor Linda Darling-Hammond; and Jon Schnur, co-founder of New Leaders for New Schools, an education adviser in the Clinton White House.

Education Week reports rising federal academic standards is a growing concern among the nation's educators and state policy makers but not in the presidential campaign.

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain have rarely touched the subject of No Child Left Behind.

According to Ed Week:

In their education proposals, Democratic Sen. Barack Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain have outlined specific plans to address provisions of the almost 7-year-old federal education law. Both would refocus the teacher-quality section to bolster the recruitment of new teachers and to experiment with new forms of teacher pay. Sen. McCain promises to make school choice and tutoring available to students in struggling schools sooner than the current law allows.

But neither candidate has said what he would do to address significant questions about the NCLB law's future, such as whether to keep its goal of universal student proficiency in reading and mathematics by the end of the 2013-14 school year, how to increase the rigor of states' academic standards, and how to improve the interventions in schools failing to meet achievement goals.

A UC Riverside study concludes the majority elementary schools in the state won't meet No Child Left Behind standards by 2014, when all students are required to show proficiency in math and English.

The study reports about half of the state's elementary schools will fail to meet federal academic guidelines by 2011.

According to the Riverside Press-Enterprise:

The English proficiency standard is likely to trip up more schools than math, according to the study. Low-income students and English language learners are the two groups of students least likely to meet the proficiency standards.

And

Schools and districts in California had to have about one-fourth of students proficient in 2007. This year, the standard is 32 percent or higher, depending on the school and type of test. The required proficiency level will go up by about 10 percentage points each year from now until 2014, unless the law is changed.

For all you HBO subscribers: The network tonight is premiering a documentary about a troubled Baltimore high school that is having more than a little trouble meeting the benchmarks laid out in the No Child Left Behind Act.

A recent New York Times review of "Hard Times At Douglass High: A No Child Left Behind Report Card" says that the controversial legislation doesn't actually figure that heavily in the film that "isn't really asking whether No Child Left Behind can help Douglass. It's asking whether anything can."

More from Neil Genzlinger's preview: "[Sixty-six] percent of the Douglass educators are not certified, we're told. The school is running on substitutes and other emergency fill-ins.

And that is the bottom line for schools like this. Bureaucrats can make all the rules and set all the benchmarks they want, but none of it will change anything if no one can be found to do the hands-on work of teaching. As seen in this film, it's not just a thankless job; it looks disconcertingly as if it might be an impossible one."

Wow. I know what I'm watching tonight.

Oh, those legislators!

Get this: There is a new bill now in the Senate Appropriations Committee that, if enacted, would "request the University of California to conduct a study to research the meaning of the term 'proficiency' in California and other states and recommend a definition of the term to the Legislature, the state Board of Education and the superintendent of public instruction ...," according to the California School Boards Association's latest newsletter.

Further, the state board "would be required to consider adopting the definition of proficiency recommended by the University of California ... and to report the accountability data to the U.S. Department of Education by Jan. 1, 2010."

The No Child Left Behind Act already appeared to be pretty well-loathed, in its existing form anyway, but really, if our politicians are considering drafting entire laws to define what even the word 'proficiency' means in the Golden State, it must be even worse than I thought!

Democratic lawmakers and teachers' unions were quick to denounce much of President Bush's education elements from the State of the Union speech, the New York Times reports.

President Bush’s call for a $300 million program called Pell Grants for Kids is the latest effort by his administration to channel tax dollars to low-income parents to help them send their children to private or religious schools.

His proposal, in his State of the Union address Monday night, was denounced by some top Democratic lawmakers and teachers’ union officials as a national “voucher” program that would only drain resources from urban public schools that in many cases are in need of money.

In his final State of the Union, Bush also discused No Child Left Behind, the landmark law first passed in 2001 that his administration has so far failed to renew.

Is it just me or does the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act seem like a slow crawl toward irrelevence. OK, maybe that's a bit harsh.

But politics have stymied the effort to renew the nation's groundbreaking education law that aims to raise the academic bar and ensure high quality teaching in schools. As is often the case, the behind-the-scenes bickering and lobbying has trumped policy discussions about fairness and accountability for academic programs at schools.

This article in EdWeek takes aim at George Bush and the NEA (the nationwide teachers' union) as the prime culprits.

Here's an exerpt:

When Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., took over as chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee in January, he told audiences that reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act was doable. He occasionally appeared with Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings at his side, promising that such a bill would clear the House this year.

With that goal now unreachable, Rep. Miller sounds pessimistic about the law’s prospects for renewal in 2008, and he is blaming President Bush.

The New York Times has a great story this week about the plight of public schools fighting to meet the ever-more stringent standards of the No Child Left Behind act. They lead with some schools in East Los Angeles.

From Diana Jean Schemo's story:

"For chronically failing schools like these, the No Child Left Behind law, now up for renewal in Congress, prescribes drastic measures: firing teachers and principals, shutting schools and turning them over to a private firm, a charter operator or the state itself, or a major overhaul in governance.

But more than 1,000 of California’s 9,500 schools are branded chronic failures, and the numbers are growing. Barring revisions in the law, state officials predict that all 6,063 public schools serving poor students will be declared in need of restructuring by 2014, when the law requires universal proficiency in math and reading.

“What are we supposed to do?” Ms. Paramo asked. “Shut down every school?”

Read the whole thing here

Gannett News Service has an article that breaks down the leading presidential candidates' positions on the No Child Left Behind law. Read it here.

Many of the South Bay's independent schools pass on 12 federal educational grant programs, even though the No Child Left Behind Act gives them eligibility to do so. Catholic schools, for reasons that have roots in President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society reforms, are a notable exception. Read our story for more.

A study being released today says the math tests being used by states as part of NCLB are harder than the reading tests. And The Associated Press story makes this interesting correlation:

The findings come a little more than a week after the federal government reported students have been making much more progress in math than in reading in recent years.
Michael Petrilli, the think tank’s vice president for policy, said it makes sense that students’ math skills are improving if there are high expectations of them in that subject.
“If the bar is higher, you’ve got to work a lot harder,” he said.

The study also found that California is among the states with the hardest tests in both reading and math.

Here's the link.

There's a story about the effects of NCLB on teachers in today's Orange County Register.

Here's the link.

Five years after the NCLB Act, what are the debates going on in your school about potential changes?

From Naush Boghossian, staff writer

Los Angeles Unified Superintendent David Brewer, board President Monica Garcia, board member Yolie Flores Aguilar and other district officials will brief members of Congress Thursday on the impact of the No Child Left Behind law on English Language Learners. They'll pop by for a chat with Rep. Laura Richardson, who took office Sept. 4, after winning a special election in August to replace Juanita Millender-McDonald representing Carson, Long Beach and Compton.

They will also recommend improvements to the law and outline the federal commitment necessary to fully address the needs of English learners.

Between five and six million English Language Learners are enrolled in public schools in the United States. NCLB was designed to guarantee that schools and districts were held accountable for teaching these students English and measuring their academic progress with tests they could understand.