Members speak their minds about NCLB at meetings around the country

By Mike Rose

No one would have faulted Boston teacher Gary Fisher had he bagged it and headed home that afternoon in early April. After all, the eighth-grade civics teacher had just logged a heavy day during a busy part of the marking period at Boston’s Timilty Middle School. A chance to kick back was pretty appealing on this opening day of the baseball season, an afternoon that found many Bostonians focused on their beloved  Red Sox and the launch of their 2006 campaign.

But Fisher was focused on a different campaign. Late afternoon found the 20-year classroom veteran at the Boston Teachers Union, where his local was sponsoring a town hall meeting on the No Child Left Behind Act. He and dozens of his colleagues would stay well past the allotted two hours, sharing their hopes, frustrations and concerns about NCLB as it was playing out in their classrooms.

The Boston meeting was one of several that the AFT plans to organize in cooperation with its state and local affiliates. It was a chance to hand over the microphone to frontline educators and let them have their say. That type of feedback from the field is part of the union’s campaign to get NCLB right—a campaign already under way as the AFT meets with federal regulators, encouraging them to make key midcourse corrections in the law, and one that will continue through 2007 as Congress gets to work reauthorizing the law.

This would be no simple exercise in venting frustrations, AFT executive vice president Antonia Cortese assured the crowd in Boston. The union continues to meet with officials at the U.S. Department of Education and with key Capitol Hill lawmakers. Uppermost in the minds of AFT representatives, she explained, is how this federal law is affecting day-to-day teaching and learning. “We’re here to listen to your stories and to get the ammunition to advocate for the changes that educators need in this law.”

And share they did—in town hall meetings from Boston to Minneapolis and in similar gatherings at state federation conventions across the country. “We need to be able to provide them with stories about how NCLB is, and is not, working in your classrooms,” Cortese told the meeting  in Boston. “There is nothing more convincing” than NCLB stories from the field.

Fisher told the crowd how NCLB’s focus on reading and math is crowding out critical subjects like civics and jeopardizing students’ right to a balanced education. He also spoke of frustrations surrounding the law’s “highly qualified teacher” requirement: the confusing maze of rules and contradictions that make him and other veteran middle school teachers feel they’re at the mercy of bureaucratic doubletalk and expensive career upgrades with no support from their school systems.

Most of all, he said, he feels frustrated at what seems like “shifting focus away from the children and their learning.”

Heads nodded in agreement as speaker after speaker recounted concerns that many Boston educators obviously share. There is widespread frustration about the proliferation of unnecessary and duplicative testing in the NCLB era, how it is carving away large chunks of instructional time and changing the climate of the schools themselves. There is consternation that the current benchmarks don’t give schools credit for progress. There is frustration that many of the remedies for these schools—such as the scandal-plagued growth of for-profit supplemental service providers—are more broken than the schools they’re supposed to fix.

Paige MacTavish, a teacher at Paul A. Dever Elementary, told of how testing anxiety has transformed the school into a sterile, regimented environment. Gone are such “luxuries” as outdoor recess. And opportunities for social development and student-to-student interaction also are at risk: The school’s “silent lunch” policy, for example, requires students to sit quietly and eat. It’s “to allow children being tested [down the hall] not to be disturbed,” MacTavish explained.

Brenda Chaney, a teacher at O’Bryant Elementary, said the unchecked proliferation of testing is tying the hands of classroom teachers and sapping any opportunity for innovation and enrichment. “The kids are just getting tested to death,” Chaney said. “The things we want to do we can’t do anymore.”

There is also a growing sense that the school benchmarks under NCLB are unfairly targeting large, diverse urban schools. The pressure is particularly high in subgroups such as English language learners and students with disabilities. Xochitl Perez Castillo, a special education teacher at John F. Kennedy Elementary, says her students can expect at least five tests in the all-important first six weeks of class. Time that should be reserved for learning is being siphoned off to testing.

It’s all about avoiding that ‘failing school’ label
It’s not hard to see how this came to pass, one fourth-grade teacher told the crowd. “The entire reputation of our school hangs on one test,” she said. It’s not about balanced curriculum, enrichment or learning anymore. It’s all about “avoiding that ‘failing school’ label.”

Linda Leisinger, a math teacher at McCormack Middle School, said that testing has turned the classroom into a prescriptive environment where teachers’ hands are tied. “We can’t even do the kind of math we want to do in class—forget about enrichment.”

Cortese told the crowd she had heard this at other meetings in other districts, where so many schools face the “failing school” label if any one subgroup lags. “There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there are about as many ways to get on the AYP list” if you’re a big urban school serving a diverse population, she said to laughs.

Along with town hall meetings for teachers, the AFT also has reached into the community of parents, students and educators to identify areas of common concern. The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers held not only a town hall meeting but also a meeting for parents and the public. Among those speaking from the floor was school board member Judy Farmer, who is also the Minneapolis representative to the Council of the Great City Schools. She thanked the union for giving the community a chance to weigh in on the law. At a time when comments are heated over NCLB, it builds credibility when the AFT stays in the discussion, she said.

The union also keeps up a candid dialogue with all education stakeholders through its NCLB Web site, www.letsgetitright.org, which gives educators a chance to share their views on the law’s problems and promise. The work is advanced through meetings in Washington, as well as by bringing together teachers and federal lawmakers in congressional districts back home.

And the work is certainly advanced by educators like the ones in Boston, Cortese told the crowd, who provide the type of feedback that will guide the union as it shapes proposals for the
future of NCLB.

Congress and the Bush administration should act now to ensure that the No Child Left Behind Act receives adequate funding, places greater emphasis on a balanced school curriculum, and adheres to “open government” policies when state accountability plans come up for review at the federal level. Those were some of the major recommendations made by the Center on Education Policy (CEP), which released its fourth annual report on NCLB in March.

The group’s latest report, “From the Capital to the Classroom,” surveys education officials in 50 states as well as a nationally representative sample of 299 school districts. It finds some positive developments, but it also exposes what CEP president and CEO Jack Jennings describes as “flashpoints” that should be addressed quickly to prevent erosion of support for the law.

At current levels, NCLB “funding is inadequate and getting worse,” Jennings says. “In the long run it is counterproductive” to keep ratcheting up expectations on schools without offering the resources they need to succeed, he warns. “It will undercut support” for the law.

Accountability and open government must also be maintained, the report stresses. The U.S. Department of Education needs to make public its rationale for approving or denying changes to state accountability plans, Jennings says. Without this, it will be impossible to tell which improvements signal genuine gains in student achievement under NCLB, and which gains are merely the results of bureaucratic sleights of hand.

He also calls on the U.S. Secretary of Education “to use her bully pulpit” to defend social studies, the arts, science and other parts of a balanced curriculum. One-third of districts reported they had reduced instructional time in social studies to make more time for language arts and math, the areas that NCLB focuses on in determining which schools succeed or fail under adequate yearly progress (AYP). Twenty-nine percent of districts reported that science instructional time had been trimmed and 22 percent said art and music had been cut back. And the report suggests that this narrowing of instructional time is even more pronounced in urban districts.

The report also shows that NCLB’s accountability requirements pose the greatest challenge. In particular, “states and districts voiced concerns about how students with disabilities and English language learners are tested and how their progress is judged,” the report stresses. “And several states and districts questioned their ability to bring 100 percent of students to the proficient level of achievement by 2014.”

On the positive side, a large majority of states and many school district respondents cited NCLB requirements as a factor for gains on student test scores, although far more respondents credited school district policies and programs for the boost. Also, districts surveyed said the law’s focus on the academic performance of student subgroups is having a positive effect.

But the report also stresses that NCLB’s emphasis on sanctions tied to subgroups, rather than constructive interventions, has put urban schools directly in the crosshairs of sanctions.