"As English Department chair, I create our curriculum teaching schedule each spring, and I try to accommodate everyone's requests and certifications. By district policy, we must offer remedial classes in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades to assist students who have failed our Utah Basic Skills Competency Test (U-BSCT), but none of these classes are funded in our school's full-time faculty equivalent (FTE) scheduling formula.

In other words, these classes require FTE to cover the approximately 150 students who need remediation, and then those numbers are 'absorbed' into our other grade-level classes, increasing the total English classloads by three to five students each. In our already-crowded classrooms (in Utah, we stack 'em deep and teach 'em cheap!), this sometimes results in enrollments as high as 40 to 45 students per class. That's not teaching; it's crowd control!

A one-half FTE to cover these English remediation classes costs approximately $25,000. Our math department offers similar classes, so in our high school alone the unfunded FTE for both English and math amounts to about $50,000. We have nine high schools in our district, so the total for our one district comes to nearly a half-million dollars in unfunded services.

"Besides the added burden of managing more students each day, the paper load for an English teacher under these circumstances is staggering. Also, these remediation classes have morphed into a teaching-to-the-test curriculum instead of what had been slower-paced and smaller classes with more individualized instruction and lower-level skills taught. Now, we just download sample tests from the state office, so students will know how to navigate the test. The joy of learning and of teaching has disappeared from these classrooms, and students are merely widgets we must manipulate, so they can pass the almighty test.

"We are just a small sample of the unfunded mandates of the NCLB law. Please fund it and fix it!"

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