Educators, Lawmakers Cry for No Child Left Behind Reform
By Emily Beaver
WASHINGTON, April 26-If you ask how the No Child Left Behind Act has affected her district, Dr. Doris Kurtz, superintendent of New Britain Public Schools, will begin by telling you, “Well, that’s a tall order.”
Teachers and students are struggling to improve test scores, a slew of administrators who can’t or don’t want to handle the stress are opting for early retirement, and educators’ overall morale has sunk, Kurtz said.
In an April telephone interview, Kurtz said that at the same time budget cutbacks have forced the district to eliminate administrative jobs and “phase in” textbooks with only some students in a class getting new books, the federal government is asking schools to raise student performance.
“Everything has been cut to raise student achievement,” she said.
Kurtz is one of many educators in Connecticut and across the country who have begun to challenge the law they call an unfunded mandate. Changes to the act have been proposed in Congress and lawsuits challenging the law have been filed in court.
The Connecticut chapter along with nine other state chapters of the National Education Association filed a lawsuit in April against the federal government for what it calls a failure to fully fund No Child Left Behind. And earlier in the month, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal announced plans to sue over the “unfunded mandates” of the federal education reform act.
The term “unfunded mandates” is sometimes applied to provisions of federal laws that require states to implement costly programs without providing the money to pay for them. The National Education Association lawsuit is based on a paragraph in the No Child Left Behind Act that says no state or municipality will be forced to spend local funds under the law.
Now, three years after the landmark federal education act was passed into law, Connecticut lawmakers and interest groups are pushing to change No Child Left Behind at the state and federal levels.
Local educators like Kurtz say these attempts at reform, including more federal funding to track student achievement and more flexible requirements for certifying qualified teachers, are well-intentioned but don’t address some of the most fundamental problems of the law.
Kurtz said she knows the district needs a better system to assess student and teacher performance, smaller class sizes and more pre-school programs.
“But you need resources for all those things,” she said.
Under the No Child Left Behind Act, schools are required to monitor and report student achievement using standardized tests. All students must meet the tests’ proficiency requirements by 2014. Schools that fail to make “adequate yearly progress” toward those goals must provide services such as tutoring or allow students to attend other schools in the district. Schools that do not comply with the law cannot receive federal education aid.
Two Democratic members of the Connecticut congressional delegation have introduced a bill to change the federal law. Sen. Christopher Dodd and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, 3 rd District, in April introduced the No Child Left Behind Reform Act. In addition to giving schools funds to track students’ yearly progress and increase flexibility in guidelines for teacher qualification, the bill also would allow measures other than testing to evaluate student performance, according to a statement from DeLauro’s office.
Using one test to judge all students is one of the most controversial provisions of the act, especially when testing students with disabilities or students learning English as a second language.
Kurtz said teachers who work with children learning English are physically and emotionally drained from the challenging work, but their students may still be labeled “in need of improvement” under the law.
“It’s very rewarding to me to make a difference in a needy child’s life, but it’s also very demanding,” she said.
Rosemary Coyle, president of the Connecticut Education Association, said the proposed changes address some of the major issues educators have with No Child Left Behind. The association, which represents 35,500 educators in Connecticut, is one of the plaintiffs in the suit filed by the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union.
“We have always supported the goals of the law,” Coyle said. “But we have two issues with the law. It’s an unfunded mandate.and it’s trying a one-size-fits-all approach that says every child’s going to improve at the same rate.”
The lawsuit focuses on the “the unfunded piece,” she said.
A report by the Connecticut State Department of Education in March estimated that meeting the requirements of No Child Left Behind will cost the state $41.6 million by 2008. The report, which is the basis for Attorney General Blumenthal’s promised lawsuit, blames the shortfall mainly on the requirement that Connecticut administer tests in every grade from second through eighth. The state currently tests students only in grades two, four and six.
The U.S. Department of Education, in an April statement, , called the report a “flawed” cost study that “creates inflated projection built upon questionable estimates.”
This kind of bickering between federal and state government over funding issues is typical, said Jay Greene, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
But paying for No Child Left Behind is just one source of the resistance educators are showing to the law, Greene said. The other source is the pressure of being forced by the government to raise student achievement, he said.
“As that vise is being squeezed, some people are not making progress and are upset,” he said. “You can either say, ‘We’re not doing as well as we should, we need to improve,’ or, ‘There is something wrong with this vise that is squeezing me.’”
Although many educators like Coyle said they supported the aim of No Child Left Behind, Greene said it was much easier for educators to support the law “before it starts to squeeze you.”
Connecticut Voices for Children, a children’s advocacy group, surveyed educators across the state about the law. In March, the group recommended changes to the state legislature, such as tracking the progress of one group of students over time and accommodating children with disabilities.
Daniel Fernandez, a Yale University law student who worked on the study, said the feeling that No Child Left Behind isn’t really necessary and that the state’s former testing system was adequate exists among some educators.
“Down deep, a lot of these educators feel the law is doing more harm than good,” he said. “They feel the entire thing is more of a mistake. Most educators would just be as happy to go back to the old system.”
However, the government is unlikely to do away with No Child Left Behind now that a system of testing and reporting is in place, Greene said.
“I can’t see the constituency that says, ‘We no longer want to see how our kids are doing,’ ” he said. “I think it’s hard to go back.”
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