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What's new in D.C.
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NEA speaks out
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NCLB unfunded mandates appeals case
set for November: The U.S. Appeals Court for the Sixth Circuit
is scheduled to hear arguments on November 28 in the NCLB case brought by
NEA and other plaintiffs. According to NEA’s
claims in Pontiac
v. Spellings, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) has failed to
enforce Sec. 9527(a) of NCLB that prevents the federal government from
forcing states and school districts to spend their own funds to implement
NCLB mandates not funded by federal resources. In November 2005, the U.S.
District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan dismissed the case,
declaring that Sec. 9527(a) simply prevents ED from imposing additional
unfunded mandates beyond those included in the law. The appeal was filed
in March 2006. Since its enactment, cumulative NCLB funding has fallen
$40 billion short of the original amount promised.
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ED
Department—————————
Department invites more states to seek
growth model pilot approval: ED recently invited states again
to apply for its growth model pilot program. In an October 11
letter, ED noted that North Carolina
and Tennessee
were approved for the pilot in the last round. In addition, the states
that did not receive approval—Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida,
and Oregon—were advised to submit revised proposals that are
expected to be peer reviewed this month. Other states have been invited
to submit proposals by November 1, but a maximum of 10 plans will be approved
(including the two already approved plans).
ED clears 12 state
standard and assessment plans: As
the fifth anniversary of NCLB approaches, ED has approved the
standards and assessment systems of just 12 states. In essence, schools
in most states are being measured under adequate yearly progress criteria
based on standards and assessments that may not be valid and reliable.
The 12 states with approved plans are Alaska, Arizona, Delaware, Indiana,
Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee,
Utah, and West Virginia.
Teacher quality
report offers state data: The Secretary's Fifth Annual
Report on Teacher Quality presents information by state on the
implementation of the teacher quality provisions of Title II of the
Higher Education Act (HEA) and the mandates of NCLB. The 98-page
report , required by HEA’s Title II
accountability provisions, is on the Education Department Web site. Individual
reports for all 50 states are also online.
One finding from the report: "Across America, the number of
teachers practicing without full certification (i.e., with a waiver)
decreased by one-fourth, going from 3.3 percent of all teachers in
2003–04 to 2.5 percent of all teachers in 2004–05.
High-poverty districts showed a 33 percent decrease in teachers on
waivers; other districts showed a 31 percent decrease. Despite this
progress, in high-poverty districts 3.0 percent of teachers were on waivers,
compared to 2.1 percent in all other districts."
Agency revises teacher quality
guidance: ED has revised its non-regulatory guidance regarding
teacher quality, Improving
Teacher Quality State Grants . Notably,
the October 5 revisions deleted references to NCLB’s
highly qualified teacher (HQT) requirements. According to the Dear
Colleague letter from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings
preceding the non-regulatory guidance, the October 5 revised guidance is
now issued separately from guidance on HQT, which is not yet available.
That guidance, according to the Department, "is under revision and
will be released in the near future."
Department awards
teacher incentive grants: ED recently announced
that the Ohio Department of Education will be the first to receive grant
funds ($5.5 million) under the Teacher Incentive Fund program to reward
teachers and principals who improve student performance. The award in Ohio is the first
of 16 merit pay/pay-for-performance grants to be announced, for a total
of $42,078,259. Details on the other 15 grants have not been provided.
Another $43.1 million will be awarded in spring 2007. In addition, the
White House has been championing
this program of late. NEA is opposed to
this program, which diverts scarce resources away from existing
under-funded programs. NEA President
Weaver said the Teacher Incentive Fund "hurts those that it
purports to help: children."
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Groups concerned
about ED’s proposed multiracial guidance:
Many groups are worried about the implications for recent guidance proposed by ED that
would allow students to identify themselves as multiracial and require
states to report students as multiracial to the federal government. NEA
joined 20 other groups in raising concerns with the potential for the
proposal to cause under-reporting of certain minority populations.
Specifically, the concerns focused on whether implementation of this
proposal would have an adverse impact on: a) accountability systems under
NCLB as well as the definitions of "significant racial disproportionality" states have established to
implement the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act; b) compliance
with and enforcement of civil rights laws; and c) the public interest in
transparency and full disclosure of information related to government
programs In essence, the Department’s proposal first would require
educational institutions to ask whether or not the respondent is
Hispanic/Latino; and if so, to then ask the person to select one or more
races from the following five racial groups: (1) American Indian or
Alaska Native, (2) Asian, (3) Black or African American, (4) Native
Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, (5) White.
ED establishes
priorities for upcoming grants: ED recently outlined its priorities
that can be used for any appropriate discretionary grant program in
fiscal years 2007 and 2008. The priorities are intended to focus federal
dollars "on expanding the number of programs and projects
Department-wide that support activities in areas of greatest educational
need." The eight priority areas are:
- Priority 3:
Critical-Need Languages—Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Japanese,
Russian, and languages in the Indic, Iranian, and Turkic language
families
- Priority 4:
Secondary Schools
- Priority 5:
Professional Development for Secondary School Teachers
- Priority 6: School Districts With Schools in Need of
Improvement, Corrective Action, or Restructuring
- Priority 7:
Student Achievement Data
- Priority 8: State
Data Systems
ED admits Title I
reporting could take nearly 7 million hours! It will take
almost 7 million hours of state and local school officials’ time
and cost $135 million of state and local funds to fill out the paperwork
and reports mandated by the federal government under Title I of NCLB, the
U.S. Department of Education admits in a recent Federal
Register notice. Title I requires
state educational agencies (SEAs), local
educational agencies (LEAs), and schools to
collect and disseminate information to document progress, inform parents
and the public about educational performance, and provide services. The
burden hours—6,688,814 hours to be precise—primarily are
based on estimates of the time needed for SEA, LEA, and school
implementation of statutory district and school improvement planning
requirements and the statutory requirement that LEAs
notify parents of their public school choice and supplemental educational
services options.
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Other
perspectives ——————
National study supports NEA’s
agenda for improving NCLB and closing achievement gaps: A new
report from the Appleseed Foundation, a nonprofit that establishes public
interest law centers to address social issues in communities, cites the
importance and need for parental involvement in raising academic
achievement of America’s
students. The report, It Takes a
Parent: Transforming Education in the Wake of the No Child Left Behind
Act, also clearly states that schools,
and federal, state, and local policymakers need to do more to communicate
with and involve parents. NEA President Reg
Weaver said the report is in sync with NEA’s
positive agenda for the reauthorization of NCLB.
Bracey report
counters Spellings’ assertion of NCLB success: NCLB is
not as successful in achieving its goals as federal officials claim,
according to a recent report by education
researcher Gerald W. Bracey. The 16th Bracey Report on the
Condition of Public Education points out that Education Secretary
Margaret Spellings has touted NCLB’s
success, stating: "9-year-olds made greater gains in five years (on
National Assessment [of Educational Progress]) than in the previous 28
years combined." The Bracey report counters that "what the
secretary is doing is called ‘cherry picking.’ And in this
instance, careless and self-serving cherry picking, too." Bracey
notes that during the 5-year time period to which Spellings refers, for
two of those years Bill Clinton was President and NCLB did not exist.
Therefore, just looking at the timeline, it is unlikely that the gains
were due to NCLB’s success.
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AYP system
‘was pieced together from old shirts’: A new
AFT report, "Failing"
or "Succeeding" Schools, How Can We Tell? by researcher
Paul E. Barton, describes the AYP system as a weak, patchwork approach
that cobbles together old and new state exam systems as well as different
notions of student proficiency. It blurs the distinction between
measuring students and measuring schools. "There was never a time
when this accountability shirt was cut out of the whole cloth,"
Barton says. "It was pieced together from old shirts." Barton
is an education writer and consultant who is former director of the Educational Testing Service
Policy Information
Center.
NCLB does a
poor job of distinguishing good schools from ineffective ones:
A study from
the conservative Hoover Institution says NCLB has not done a good job
in identifying either good schools or those most in need of improvement.
The authors claim, however, that the accountability system in Florida (think Jeb Bush) is superior to that of NCLB.
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Growing chorus of voices
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Two more groups
sign onto Joint Statement: Since our last issue, two
additional groups—Americans for the Arts and Association of
Education Publishers—have signed onto the Joint Organizational
Statement on NCLB, bringing the total to 94 signers. The coalition, now
called the Forum on Educational Accountability (FEA), has activated its
own Web site. We
have added a
link to the FEA site from the press center part of NEA’s Web site.
CCSSO unveils NCLB
priorities: The Council of Chief State School Officers
(CCSSO) recently released its recommendations for reauthorizing
NCLB. Its Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)
Reauthorization Policy Statement urges Congress to promote meaningful
accountability, greater support for innovation, as well as greater
respect for the state role in student achievement. CCSSO’s
recommendations include:
- retaining a focus
on accountability with increased support and greater freedom for
state and local implementation of the foundations of standards-based
reform;
- offering greater
support for state capacity and flexibility for states and districts
to leverage the foundations of standards-based reforms to improve
teaching and learning; and
- investing in
innovation, research, technical assistance, and collaboration to
inform state and local implementation of standards-based reforms.
Chief school
officers offer school improvement tips: The Council of Chief
State School Officers (CCSSO) has published a 41-page policy brief to describe how the
following eight states are organizing service delivery to schools at
different levels of school improvement—Alabama, Arizona, Illinois,
Indiana, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The brief was an
effort to "foster cross-state sharing about organizing school
support effectively to improve the performance of students in low-performing
schools."
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In the states
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NEA-recommended
candidates in Illinois and Virginia speak out on NCLB: Two
Association-backed candidates for House seats in Illinois responded to reporters asking
if NCLB has improved education. Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat running in
the 6th Congressional District, called the goal of NCLB laudable, but
chastised Congress for adopting a faulty, one-size-fits-all approach
rather than recognizing that local educators and parents know best what
schools need. "This law is a prime example of an unfunded federal
mandate," she told The
Daily Herald. "Congress dictated drastic changes at the local
level, but failed to provide the support to achieve those goals. The
law’s strict reliance on standardized testing has resulted in many
outstanding schools in our area being placed on ‘watch
lists,’ which puts their funding in jeopardy."
Democrat Melissa Bean, up for re-election in Illinois’ 8th Congressional
District, said while she supports performance measurement and
accountability, the NCLB approach is flawed. "NCLB measures student
performance against grade level, which does not accurately reflect
individual school progress," she told the
Herald newspaper. "We should, instead, test individual student
progress year over year to more effectively monitor individual school
achievement."
And in Virginia,
Jim Moran, representing the state’s 8th Congressional District
since 1991, offered NCLB as an example of a good idea gone bad in
implementation. He noted that promised funding never materialized
(leaving many districts without the resources to meet the program’s
tough performance measures) and that some sanctions imposed on
"non-performing" schools are counterproductive. These deficiencies
(and others) must be corrected for NCLB to begin to approach its
potential, he
said in an interview with a local paper.
Recent examples of
more schools failing to make AYP:
Arizona:
New statistics show that a record 64 schools in the state have now failed
to make AYP for four or more years, which means that the state will now
intervene in the daily operations of those schools. Overall, the state
reported that 618 schools failed new and tougher 2006 federal academic
standards, a record number.
South
Carolina: Here, too, the number of "failing" schools
continues to go up. The state department’s newest figures show that
38 percent of the state’s 1,200 schools made AYP for the 2005-06
school year, down from the 47 percent the year before.
Utah:
More Utah
schools have stumbled in their effort to meet NCLB standards, according
to 2005-06 data. Statewide in Utah,
18 percent of schools failed to meet a host of NCLB standards compared
with 13 percent in 2004-05. Interestingly, a higher percentage of Utah schools
demonstrated proficiency under the Utah Performance Assessment System for
Students, or U-PASS system, (84 percent) than under AYP.
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Take action
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Hand out NEA’s new
palm cards on ESEA/NCLB at Association events. This small card—it
really does fit in the palm of your hand—lists NEA’s
criteria for Great Public Schools and identifies the main points in NEA’s
Positive Agenda for the ESEA Reauthorization. And most importantly,
on the back of the card is a list of 5 things members can do to support
our positive agenda. Email ESEAInfo@nea.org
to let us know how many more cards you need.
A voice from the classroom on NCLB:
"I have been an elementary educator for 15 years.
I have gone through many changes in the way we teachers are supposed to
teach in our classrooms. I believe I am a qualified teacher and have
always done my very best to make sure my students were getting the best
education possible. I have tried to make sure that I am educating my
students as well as making sure they were having fun at school. Now with
the NCLB mandates, school just seems so monotonous. So many hours have to
be spent teaching out of a state-approved curriculum in math and reading,
and then we must spent extra time with remediation lessons of the same
curriculum. Teacher creativity has been stifled. Where is the time for
science, social studies, art—and having fun along the way?
"Don’t get me wrong; I believe in standards and
accountability, but politicians have taken things to the extreme. Where
is their accountability? They expect so much, yet the money to support
NCLB is short in coming. I hope this will change, but when?
"We all need to let everyone (parents, store owners, husbands,
politicians, and media) know how terribly wrong the NCLB Act is for
education. Especially how wrong it is for our children."
Connie Chavez, San Jacinto, CA
Idyllwild School, Hemet
Unified School District
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