Maine School Boards Association
Maine School Superintendents Association
Position Statement on the

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has dramatically shifted federal education policy by assuming a far more expansive and intrusive federal role in the areas of standards, assessment, accountability, staffing, and budgetary allocations. This new direction in federal policy creates both opportunity and challenge. The Maine School Boards Association (MSBA) and the Maine School Superintendents Association (MSSA) welcome this national commitment to bring every child in this country to a meaningful level of proficiency in the key academic areas of language arts, mathematics and science. Since its enactment, however, significant concerns have arisen surrounding its implementation. Without revision, the act may have a number of unintended consequences, including:

• Interference with the ongoing implementation of Maine’s System of Learning Results;
• Compromising the ability of schools to address the unique educational needs of special education students and students with limited English proficiency;
• Penalizing successful schools that are making significant progress in raising student student achievement;
• Failing to consider the unique issues faced by schools when dealing with highly mobile student populations;
• Loss of many outstanding, experienced educators and paraprofessionals and exacerbating the shortage of teachers and paraprofessionals;
• Pressuring schools to provide choice options where there is no intra-district capacity or opportunity for such choice;
• Providing inadequate funding to cover costs of mandates imposed by NCLB; and
• Forcing schools, districts, and states to allocate resources inefficiently due to the rigid and confusing "supplement, not supplant" federal requirement.

Because Maine is committed to achieving the goal of high standards for all students and has worked diligently to develop accountability and assessment systems, we believe that NCLB should be amended so that Maine schools can employ the best educational practices available to help all of our students to achieve those standards. The MSBA/MSSA are concerned not only with the absence of best practices in NCLB, but more importantly about the presence of critical flaws in the legislation that substantially undermine its ultimate intent, and the failure of NCLB to foster precisely those practices that would enable schools to bring all students to a meaningful level of proficiency.

The primary weakness in the law is the fundamental contradiction between what it purports to foster and what it actually requires. On the one hand, NCLB permits only educational practices whose effectiveness have been established by educational research. On the other hand, the law requires specific and expensive practices for which there is little or no evidence of effectiveness. For example, the method that NCLB requires for assessing student learning in language arts, mathematics and science cannot be justified given what we know about best practices. Learning in these areas should be assessed by monitoring how much students grow in their knowledge and skills from the time that they enter a school until the time that they leave the school. Instead, the Act requires that judgments be made about student learning and school effectiveness by comparing how much students at a given grade level know in one year with how much different groups of students know at that grade level in subsequent years. In other words, judgments are being made about student achievement and school quality by comparing different groups of students with no consideration given to how much a difference in test scores might be caused by differences in the groups of students themselves. This is the educational equivalent of evaluating an employee based on the work of the individual who previously held the job.

Our Associations have identified the following critical issues under NCLB that must be addressed by the Congress and the President.

ISSUE: Adequate Yearly Progress

• Special Education Students - Instead of recognizing the unique needs and goals of special education students, the Act requires schools to judge special education students as a homogenous group and subject them to standardized testing. The Act fails to recognize that each special education student has unique needs that should be addressed individually.

The MSBA/MSSA believe that these testing requirements should be changed and suggest that special education students be identified as a separate subgroup for assessment purposes. Special education students should also be tested in accordance with an appropriate assessment based on the individual student’s Individualized Education Plan (IEP). Such assessment should measure the student’s progress toward achieving the instructional goals specified in the IEP and incorporate any accommodations called for in the IEP. Further, should the requirements of NCLB be in conflict with the intent of IDEA, then the IDEA requirements should take precedent.

• Limited English Proficient Students - Limited English Proficient (LEP) students are a subgroup of students whose test scores must be disaggregated for assessment purposes under the NCLB. The law further requires that all subgroups make Adequate Yearly Progress  (AYP) towards the goal of 100% proficiency. The MSBA/MSSA believe that it is impractical, if not impossible, for the LEP subgroup to achieve AYP if students who have no English language skills must be assessed, and if LEP students who become literate are no longer included in the subgroup. The MSBA/MSSA, therefore, suggest that LEP students should not be included in AYP assessments unless and until they have completed a minimum of three (3) full academic years of education in the United States. Moreover, once included in AYP assessments, LEP students, who meet LEP proficiency standards, should remain part of the LEP.

• School Sanctions - NCLB applies sanctions on an entire school for the failure of only one subgroup to meet AYP. This inflexibility defies logic and common sense. For example, a school may exceed AYP in every other area, but if one subgroup misses AYP then the entire school suffers. It is unfair to sanction an entire school for a subgroup’s failure to make AYP. If only one subgroup is struggling, then remediation should be devoted only to that particular subgroup. Resources should not be expended on reconstituting an entire school if only one subgroup needs assistance. The current law creates more problems than it solves by draining resources from subgroups that need assistance to make AYP. Sanctioning an otherwise successful school is wasteful and inefficient.

• Highly Mobile Students - The law fails to consider the unique problem of highly mobile students. Current law requires a student to be counted towards a school’s AYP if that student is enrolled in the current academic year. However, with highly mobile students, testing in the first academic year only provides an indication of the student’s prior education. Furthermore, the law fails to consider that these students are acclimating to a new school environment. A school should not be held accountable when that school has had only minimal time to educate the student, especially if the student just enrolled and is still adjusting to a new environment. Students should not be counted toward AYP unless they have been enrolled in a school for at least three full academic years. This would provide a valid assessment of a school’s progress in raising student achievement while allowing the time necessary for a student to acclimate to a new environment.

ISSUE: "Highly Qualified" Staff

• Teachers - NCLB requires that teachers be "highly qualified" in all "core academic subjects" including "English, reading or language arts, mathematics, science, foreign language, civics and government, economics, arts, history, and geography." This requirement, based on college course acquisition, creates a difficult burden on teachers who may teach multiple subjects, including teachers of special education, middle school social studies teachers, teachers in small/isolated schools, etc. We support the creation of alternative pathways (HOUSSE) for teachers to demonstrate their qualifications.

• Paraprofessionals - NCLB requires every Title I paraprofessional hired meet one of the following standards no later than January 8, 2006: complete at least two years of college study; obtain an associate’s or higher degree; or meet a rigorous standard of quality, and demonstrate the knowledge and ability to assist in instructing through a formal state or local assessment. We are concerned about the impact that this requirement will have on existing paraprofessionals who have been successfully utilized for many years. It is anticipated that many districts who cannot meet this requirement may have to terminate these longtime employees with no replacements available. Therefore, the MSBA/MSSA suggest a change in current law to permit the “grandfathering” of existing paraprofessionals in order to permit more time to allow long-time paraprofessionals to satisfy NCLB standards.

ISSUE: Funding/Expenditure Requirements

• Adequate Funding - The federal government has enacted another mandate for states and local school districts for which it has not provided adequate funding to enable us to achieve our goal of universal proficiency for every child. David Shreve with the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures has stated that, conservatively, NCLB will burden states and local school districts with an unfunded federal mandate of about $35 billion per year. This is starkly reminiscent of IDEA in which the federal government has not delivered on its promise to provide 40% of the funding for special education.

We believe that the NCLB requirements should be directly linked to the provision of sufficient federal funding to cover the cost of these new federal mandates. If funding is inadequate, the mandates of NCLB should be suspended until the Congress and President fulfill their funding obligations.

Maine has a long history of success in their locally controlled public school systems. As those who govern and administer Maine's public schools, we fully realize the need to set high standards and must continue to improve the education that we offer to all of our students. Since our state and local
dollars account for approximately 94% of the resources to fund Maine public education, the MSBA/MSSA believe that it is only logical that state and local governments retain control of the important decisions that impact the education of Maine’s children.

In conclusion, the issues we have identified in this statement demand serious philosophical and practical discussion. It is our hope that Maine's education community, leaders in state government, and members of Maine's Congressional Delegation will work collaboratively to truly assure that no Maine child is ever left behind.

Adopted by the MSBA Executive Board of Directors
January 10, 2004

Adopted by the MSSA Executive Committee
January 15, 2004