Garnering Knowledge for Teaching

My thoughts for this new blog post marking my return are inspired by this story run about a month ago.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/child-left-overhaul-sights-obama-administration/Story?id=8663957&page=1

This isn’t the only story that has caught my eye in the last few weeks.  This story discusses research showing how “failing” districts using Supplemental Service funds do not appear to improve after utilizing those supplemental service and this lovely evaluation from the CATO Institute is a cautionary tale about using NAEP scores to determine the success or failure of a particular reform in the last thirty years.  It beautifully demonstrates how reformers from multiple perspectives can utilize the same national scores to support their particular reform.

Over the last 6 years I have watched the NCLB train with a mixture of curiosity and horror.  From my time as a teacher, I know that student assessment is vital to appropriate pedagogical planning.  How do you know what your students need unless you evaluate where they are developmentally and within the curriculum?  How do you know that your instruction is effective unless you find some way of discovering whether your students “got it?”  My curiosity of NCLB lies in this assessment question and in how effective it is to place centralized goals, regulations, and measurements upon a largely decentralized system.  My horror lies in the thought that the centralized regulations are designed so that by 2013, nearly every school in the country will be failing.  No matter how much progress they have made, the final goals are so unreachable, that no victories will be visible, except for a rare few schools.

So why is the current administration considering keeping NCLB?  Schools have made progress during the last few years and much good has come of the reform.  Some students from groups historically ignored by school systems, are receiving new attention from administrators and teachers.  My research has noted a change in school administrators’ thinking towards placing students with disabilities into general education classrooms.  In short, there is a move to provide real curriculum to all students and that cannot be understated or lost in the move to change what the old administration left behind.  Most policy analysts will tell you, it takes years, or decades to fully comprehend the effects of a full-scale policy implementation such as NCLB.  School administrators are just now fully internalizing the regulations of IDEA, a thirty-plus year old policy, it will take time for the good intentions of NCLB to show demonstrable and sustainable gains.

That being said, NCLB can be negotiated without being decimated.  The bathwater can be changed without the baby going out the window.  That first negotiation should concern the unreasonable AYP goals and deadlines.  Every school system has a unique set of challenges, and as long as those challenges are being addressed responsibly, that system should not be punished.  It is impossible to raise scores when districts cannot afford to fully fund a math or reading curriculum (ie: buying some books and none of the supplementary materials).  Assessment is tricky and states are spending millions of dollars to test and score and report.  Where else could that money go?  How can we hold teachers and schools and STUDENTS responsible without ripping away a month from the school year to “measure” how much students have learned?

Also, there needs to be some type of direct funding unit that feeds to school buildings and classrooms.  Politicians say they have spent record amounts on public education and the money seems to make no difference.  If that is true, I see no evidence of it when I walk through the buildings of my local city school district.  I see distress, crumbling infrastructures, recycling of everything, and much doing without.  Meanwhile, many districts with huge budget deficits, seem to boast the highest spending on superintendent salaries.  One would think that a person with a conscience would decline an obscene six figure salary while teachers and assistants are losing jobs. I am not so naive to believe that cutting administrative salaries would solve the education funding issue.  I am, however, confused as to why the money never seems to make it into the classroom, especially for large, poor districts.

Change can be good.  But, change for the sake of changing in a decade that has been nothing but change may not be the best answer.  There are many things wrong with NCLB, but there are some things that have gone right.  The Department of Education needs to ascertain what is working and make sure those pieces are preserved.  Perhaps we could model the changes for what is going wrong, after the things that are going right.  Maybe states have some ideas about how that could happen.  Have we, as a nation, taken time to listen to the people implementing this policy on the ground level?  I imagine that they would have pertinent suggestions as to how the ideas of NCLB could work and be useful to everyone, including students.

I try not to worry.  But with the current economic conditions and the further destruction of public education funding, I wonder how much can American public education take before completely falling down?  What happens if all children (going to public schools) are left behind?