So because our bickering, non-functional congress cannot agree on a way to make the No Child Left Behind law, a federal disaster if there ever was one, work for us and not against us, President Obama today signed an executive order that allows states to opt out of some provisions of this very bad law championed by George W. Bush, and modeled on a similar law passed in Texas while Bush was the state’s governor.
What makes NCLB a bad law you ask? NCLB assigns such horrible punishment to schools who fail to educate their students that states have lowered their educational standards in order to prevent these punishments from happening. The result? An entire generation of poorly-educated children.
States can now apply for a waiver from these provisions, but there is one condition: states who get approval must adopt stricter educational standards, must raise the bar, as it were.
This is very welcome news, but I wonder whether Texas will be in and among the states to get in line to file a waiver. Because Texas is the birthplace of NCLB and NCLB is the brainchild of a former Texas governor and his wife. Filing for a waiver is tantamount to admitting that the law is wrong, and I don’t think our Republican-dominated government is willing to admit making such a catastrophic mistake like that.
Besides, NCLB really is a veiled attempt to achieve a voucher system in Texas, ending public education as we know it.
So I am going to be very surprised, pleasantly surprised though, if Texas files an application for a waiver. The result? Texas will put itself on the path of delivering a second-hand education while the rest of the states retool and deliver a first class education to their school children once more. Ten years from now we should see noticeable differences, especially as Texas becomes a state where the minimum wage is the rule rather than the exception.
In an October 19 report on Texas’ compliance to policies outlined in the federal No Child Left Behind law, a law that is set to be rewritten very soon now, the feds have slammed Texas for its policy in classifying its new teachers as “highly qualified.”
From their report, which you can obtain here, this is the root of the problem:
“Citation: §9101(23)”
“Finding: The State allows new elementary teachers to demonstrate competence to determine highly qualified status by passing applicable ExCET (6-12 and PK-12) and/or TExES EC-12 single subject content tests. The State cannot count or report these teachers as highly qualified. Only the broad-field elementary assessment that measures competence across the core elementary curricula can be used to determine the highly qualified status of new elementary teachers.”
Translating, in order to be classified as “highly qualified,” a new elementary level teacher must pass a test that demonstrates general knowledge. Texas hired teachers that only passed tests on specific knowledge in their core area. For example, a 5th grade teacher who teaches math has passed only the math competency test but has been labeled “highly qualified” by the state.
How many teachers are we talking about here, anyway?
The state estimates we are talking about 30,000 teachers.
Now 30,000 teachers is a drop in the bucket in Texas, which has at last count, 600,000 teachers in public service, or about 5%, but this 5% comprises most of the newly certified teachers in Texas.
This has monetary ramifications as NCLB does not allow federal dollars to be spent in school districts that are not in compliance with NCLB. In other words, in the model of the carrot and the stick, it’s the equivalent of the stick. The carrot, federal inducement to improve education in the states, really doesn’t exist.
This has further repercussions in that in order to continue to receive these funds these teachers need to lose their jobs and right quick.
And I don’t know about you, but as a new teacher, I would not view education in a very positive light if I were let go because of this technicality in the law. I would just find another line of work.
The Department of Education report goes on, by the way, and tells the Texas Education Agency that they have 30 days to come up with a plan to implement the “correct HQT requirements” including notifying all parents of children whose teachers are now viewed as not highly qualified, as well as a plan to get these teachers – especially teachers in federally supported Title I and Title II Part A positions rated as highly qualified.
Now on top of not being able to use federal funds to pay these positions, the districts employing these teachers have to pay postage to send a letter to, oh, roughly 750,000 Texas households telling them that their local tax dollars are not at work.
I can’t think of a better way to enrage Texans than to say that their taxes are being used to fund districts that not only hire unqualified teachers, but lie about it to the feds.
Now I just have to wonder whether this would have been the case had Texas not gone for McCain/Palin in a big way last year.
George “I’ve Got a Veto Stamp” Bush has threatened to veto a bill being voted upon this week. It is the bill to reauthorize and revamp the 2001 “No Child Left Behind Act” – a little gift that the state of Texas, through its ex-governor, has foisted upon a nation.
Why, oh why would Bush want to refuse to reauthorize his own worthless piece of legislation, one would ask? From the Washington Post:
“’I know No Child Left Behind has worked,’ Bush said as he urged Congress to revise the law to increase flexibility for state and local agencies without watering down the annual testing and enforcement provisions that give it teeth. ‘If Congress passes a bill that weakens the accountability system in the No Child Left Behind Act, I will strongly oppose it and veto it.’”
What Bush isn’t telling you is that where the act has worked it hasn’t been due to any help from the feds. NCLB is, as they say, an unfunded mandate. The feds dictate to the states and school districts what they want and how these established benchmarks are to be evaluated through standardized tests. Bush says that by loosening the accountability system it weakens the entire thing. The accountability system mandated by NCLB, but paid for by the states.
Oh, please.
It couldn’t really be, could it, that the new NCLB act provides federal funding, previously promised federal funding, to support the goals of NCLB, but our friends in the Bush Regime simply can’t see wasting that kind of money, to the tune of up to $50 billion, on a bunch of lazy brats. Not when there is a war to fight. Not when there are bills to pay to Halliburton and Bechtel.
Squealing about a lack of accountability is really just smoke and mirrors, you watch. You watch when congress puts back in the accountability issues Bush is whining about, but keeps the federal funding intact.
Then, I think, they’ll be singing a different tune.
But really, really, this isn’t S-CHIP, where there are children’s health issues and lives in the balance. This is NCLB: the single greatest insult on American Education in decades. So, OK, George, do it. Veto NCLB. Veto it again and again. Veto it until all of a sudden we all wake up, it’s 2009, and we all realize that NCLB is NOT the be-all end-all in education.
It is, in fact, the biggest mess ever foisted on children 18 and under.
Congressman Nick Lampson of Texas’ CD 22 had a town hall meeting yesterday (10/29) specifically directed at the upcoming reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). I didn’t get anything in the mail on this but a friend told me about it. It was held at the Fort Bend County ISD Annex in Sugar Land. This is the building that Fort Bend ISD bought from ex FBISD Superintendent Don Hooper’s church for a cool $4 million.
Nick wasn’t there alone, well he had his staffers with him, but I’m talking about his friend and colleague George Miller (D-CA-07). Congressman Miller was sitting in his office in DC, but he was also projected on a 10-foot wide screen courtesy of FBISD’s IT department. They have the best stuff.
Nick came with Congressman Miller, because despite the fact that Lampson is himself a former teacher, he is on a learning curve vis-à-vis NCLB. Rep. Miller was one of those who wrote the original legislation in 2002. He is at the forefront of re-writing NCLB. So what the audience did was ask their NCLB questions at the screen, and got their answers out of a speaker.
Basically the rewriting of NCLB is going to entail these goals, not necessarily in order of presentation, because we were all over the page all evening:
a) Improve teacher quality b) Improve funding c) Change the growth model
Teacher Quality. Implicit in NCLB is that teachers and administrators need to fully support NCLB or it’s not going to work. That’s a no-brainer. The first thing teachers and administrators did when NCLB was rammed down their throats was find ways to game the system.
A new NCLB, Miller says, is to include promoting teacher quality by providing more support, mentorship, of new teachers, higher pay to encourage more qualified people to, or back to, the teaching profession, and my big bug-a-boo, pay for performance. I’ll not go on a rant about why this last thing is such a singularly bad idea, you can read it all here. A new definition of Highly Qualified Teacher is not in the legislation, but a new definition of Effective Teacher is. Now, it is based on standardized test scores. There seem to be plans to alter that model where the teacher is rated by how much their students improve. At least that is what I thought I was hearing.
Improve Funding. This is what got the audience riled up. To-date the feds have funded their mandate to the tune of $2.2 billion. That’s $55 billion short of what was promised to this point. Steve Smelley, FBISD Trustee was in the audience, and all you could get out of him was outrage about how they have only received 1% of what was promised.
Lampson, and Miller for that matter, were adamant that they were also outraged at this and wanted full funding of NCLB. Miller cautioned the audience that he was hearing that Bush did not want to sign a bill that had funding for children in it.
Does that surprise you?
So there is a chance that we are going to see another bill for children vetoed by Bush because he wants the money to go to Iraq and Blackwater.
Growth Model. Currently the same grade is evaluated on standardized tests and improvement is documented when the next year’s crop of 1st graders score better on the test than the previous year’s. Patently ridiculous. As Miller says, that’s like comparing apples to oranges, as every class is different.
No argument there.
The new bill proposes a paradigm shift from assessing successive classes to assessing the improvement of classes as they progress through the grades. That works for me. Especially because, as one teacher in the audience suggested, what we will see is continual improvement in grades 1-5 then a serious retrogression in grades 6-8, then renewed progress in 9-12.
Also, no more high stakes testing.
Schools will no longer be rated based on test scores, but on a variety of criteria: does the school offer AP courses, college prep, what is the graduation/dropout rate. Also there will be a concerted effort to make sure that schools focus on all sub-populations, not just the brightest or the dimmest.
There were also a significant number of attendees from Special Education. Their woes left my head shaking and Nick acted, and I’m sure it was not an act, as if this was the first time he had heard of this. It’s really complicated, but let’s just say that NCLB allows only 3% of a school’s student population to take alternative tests to the standardized tests. That’s all well and good, but if 15% of the school’s students are in the Special Ed program, the schools are not going to make AYP, ever.
Nick very candidly admitted that he first started teaching in 1967 and things like this were unheard of back then.
Toward the end of the meeting, Nick urged audience members to form a task force to thresh out these issues and give him a chance to listen to what they come up with. He very genuinely wanted input from the community.
As I said, Nick seems to be on a learning curve and needs those on the front lines to tell him about what’s going on. I’m not one of those, although I do have my opinions. I’d rather bow to more experienced teachers, experienced effective teachers. Like those seen in this You Tube embedded video filmed at a symposium of state teachers of the year.
