Renewal of No Child Left Behind September 2007

By Bill McDougle

Accountability in Public Schools? Yes. A guiding hand for struggling schools? Yes. NCLB setting goals so high that 90% of public schools will be "taken over" by 2014? No!

Teachers, especially new ones, began to leave the profession because of the additional stress of doing the best job they could trying to get the children in their classrooms up to federal standards and then being labeled as "Failures". The mass influx of teachers to take their places, led to public schools failing to meet NCLB mandates that all teachers be highly qualified by the end of the 2006-2007 school year. This will bring further sanctions down on struggling school districts.

NCLB is underfunded. Not once has the federal government fulfilled its financial obligation to public education during the seven years of its governance.

NCLB was written by legislators - not educators. Although some may think lawmakers would exhibit more objectivity, they do not have the empathy, having never spent a single day in charge of an elementary classroom with 30 to 35 highly energetic children. The main shortcoming of their legislation is that they deal with every child across America as having been cut from the same material and fashioned in the same mold. They believe every child in New York City learns at the same rate as every child in Chicago, or Salt Lake, or Los Angeles, or even Bakersfield.

As I said, I am for accounability - it keeps you on your toes. But as it now exists, No Child Left Behind is unrealistic and unfair - not just to the public schools but to the children who have teachers under pressure to "streamline" the curriculum and excise anything that is not directly related to an item on the standardized test. The punishing mandates of NCLB have transformed nurturing classrooms into rote labs, creatively lifeless as well as intellectually stagnant.

We need to let Washington, D.C. know. Our Congressional Representatives must understand that changes need to be made in the act. Accountability? Yes. Draconian sanctions that cause public schools to be taken over by private for-profit educational "companies" or charter, or state control? No. That doesn't solve the problems of present academic achievement or future education; it only sets the stage for chaos.