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Unions in push to repair NCLB law
Sep 20, 2007 5:12 PM
With Congress taking up reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind education law, UFT officials are increasingly concerned that some of the changes being contemplated are inadequate or wrongheaded and they are urging union members to get involved in the debate by lobbying their national representatives.
There are many concerns, particularly the speed with which the House wants to adopt the flawed bill. One of the most troubling problems, according to UFT President Randi Weingarten, is that the chair of the House Education Committee, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), is calling for performance pay and evaluation of teachers based on standardized test scores of students in teachers’ individual classrooms. That is a notion that has gained wide currency across the country, despite its opposition by many educators. The latest local to adopt a pilot program using the idea is the AFT local in Austin, Texas.
At congressional hearings on the bill in early September, representatives of both national teacher unions objected to such use of test scores. Antonia Cortese, executive vice president of the UFT’s national affiliate, the AFT, and Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, said they cannot support the bill in its present form.
Weingarten has for years rejected individual performance pay, particularly based on individual teachers’ student test scores, calling them both unfair and unreliable.
The AFT is trying to get Congress to correct a number of shortcomings in the present law including a flawed definition of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and the failure to provide the resources for school improvements and needed services to students.
A major problem, according to the AFT, is the haste with which Congress is trying to push through the reauthorization legislation. AFT President Edward McElroy called it “reckless” and warned that it would lead to a “sloppy law that is worse than the current law.”
McElroy said educators have had five-and-a-half years of experience with NCLB and during that time “good schools have been stigmatized by the law’s unfair and unscientific ‘adequate yearly progress’ measure. Teachers have faced increasing pressure to teach to the test, and students have learned less history, science, art and music. Struggling schools have received punitive sanctions instead of needed help. Tens of millions of dollars in No Child Left Behind funds have gone to private tutoring companies with unqualified employees and no reliable data that demonstrates they are effective.”
Funding by the Bush administration for NCLB has consistently been far below what Congress approved. In fiscal 2006, for example, Title I, the cornerstone of NCLB, was supposed to be funded at $22.75 billion, but President Bush requested only $13.3 billion.
As a result, New York State received about $1.3 billion in Title I funding in 2006, not the $2.2 billion Congress had authorized. The near-billion-dollar difference, the AFT estimates, would have been enough to provide smaller classes, hire reading and math specialists and improve technology in the 600 elementary schools that are struggling most to meet standards. It could also have provided a smaller learning environment and rigorous academic after-school programs for the 152 secondary schools whose students face the most difficulty on state tests.
One of the contentious areas of the original NCLB legislation has been holding schools and school districts accountable for making adequate yearly progress with a goal of having 100 percent of students reaching proficiency on math and English tests by 2014. The rules and the formulas are complicated and a number of states have rebelled.
The AFT believes that the current system not only doesn’t measure progress but it fails to distinguish between effective and ineffective schools. “Although the A in AYP stands for adequate, the evidence shows that AYP targets are not merely challenging, they are unrealistic. By 2014, almost all schools, very many of them high-performing, will have failed AYP,” the AFT maintains. It argues that much more realistic approaches are needed.
A majority of parents are also unhappy with all the high-stakes testing the NCLB law precipitated. A recent Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll found that 52 percent of public school parents felt there was too much testing, up from 32 percent five years ago. Moreover, 75 percent of public school parents said the focus on testing was leading teachers to teach to the test, not the subject matter.
UFT recommendations on testing
UFT members have long been concerned with excessive testing, as well. Last year, the union set up a Testing Task Force to help craft the UFT’s position on mandated testing in order to participate in the NCLB reauthorization debate, and in April the Delegate Assembly adopted the task force’s recommendations. They included:
- New York City must stop the compulsory administration of standardized tests every six weeks. Tests and assessments are diagnostic and instructional tools and must not be the sole determinants for student placement, promotion, graduation and other high-stakes judgments.
- Student test scores should not be used to evaluate teachers.
- New York City and State should not rely solely on standardized test scores or other absolute measures of performance to evaluate schools but must use a variety of indicators that recognize sustained growth over time.
- New York State Education Department should fully incorporate the use of performance-based assessments in its accountability program that will allow students to demonstrate, over time, strengths, skills and knowledge in a variety of ways.
- States, schools, teacher unions and other educational organizations around the country should work together and with the federal government to explore uniform approaches to assessment and accountability based on a sampling of students from all grade levels similar to what the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) uses.
Political divisions on law
While the White House is taking a hard line in favor of reauthorization, albeit with a few modifications, the major Democratic presidential contenders have expressed reservations about NCLB. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said at a recent debate that he would scrap it. Sen. Barack Obama told a group of union teachers in July, “Don’t come up with this law called No Child Left Behind and then leave the money behind.”
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who voted for the original law, also now has misgivings. “While the children are getting good at filling in all those little bubbles, what exactly are they really learning?” she asked delegates at a National Education Association meeting in New Hampshire earlier this year.
Still, there is strong support for reauthorizing the law. Business groups, Bush supporters who see NCLB as a major achievement of his administration, and other “accountability hawks” are adamantly in favor.
The UFT and the national teacher unions are not opposed to reauthorization but want significant changes that go far beyond what the White House is seeking. And they are completely opposed to mandating the use of test scores to evaluate teachers.
Whether teachers and their allies can sway the argument is unclear, but that is the reason the UFT and the AFT are urging members to get involved rapidly as the debate accelerates in the House; the Senate is slated to take up the measure later. “It is vital for our members to have their voices heard now,” Weingarten said.
UFT members who live and/or work in Rep. Yvette Clark’s Brooklyn district — she is the only city representative on the House Education Committee — raised their concerns about the legislation with her staff earlier this week. Weingarten raised those same concerns with the congresswoman herself.
UFT political action coordinators are also contacting the Washington offices of every member of the city’s congressional delegation.
