News
A Tough Law Deserves Tough Questions

Four Maryland elementary teachers examine the new "No Child Left Behind Act" and tell NEA Today exactly what they think.

In January, President Bush signed a bill reauthorizing and amending the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), dubbed by its sponsors the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. As NEA members learn more about ESEA's sweeping provisions, they've got a lot to say.

Recently, four teachers from the pre-K-2 New Hampshire Estates Elementary School in Silver Spring, Maryland aired their views on ESEA in an interview with NEA Today. Here's an excerpt from that interview with Matilde Arciniegas (first grade ESOL/reading/writing teacher), Melissa Landa (writing specialist), Chris Manzone (reading specialist), and Alexis Stern (first grade teacher).

The No Child Left Behind Act has a 12-year goal to make every student 100-percent proficient in state reading and math tests. Any thoughts on that?
We agree that we like the name of the law. But we have some questions about its objectives.

Just what is "proficiency?"

Everybody has to read and do a certain amount of math, but does everybody have to take trigonometry?

We're thinking of the ESOL children who come to our schools from countries all over the world and have an interrupted education--they may arrive in high school with barely a fifth-grade education. At what level is the federal government expecting these children to perform in the end?

Under this law, a struggling school in the first year of an improvement plan must, where state law allows, provide public school "choice" to parents. Will it be possible to leave no child behind?
If you have a situation where parents can start pulling their kids out of these schools one by one, there are kids who are going to be left behind.

Laura Bush recently testified in Congress on early cognitive development, what happens before kids come to elementary school. She really honed in on the fact that her children learned on her lap, as she read books to them.

That's something a lot of the students in our school don't have. We have to play catch-up with them in pre-school or kindergarten, making up for hours of experience they are lacking when they start school.

The new law requires states to administer annual reading and math tests of their own design in grades 3-8. Your reaction?
Which tests are states going to use, and how will they compare those measures?

An educator named Ellin Keene, whom we know and love, once said, "If you teach the children how to think, they're going to do well on a test." But this isn't true if the test doesn't provoke thought.

Will these be tests with truly thought-probing questions that require the children to use life skills--analyzing, thinking, writing, and reading? Or, will they have narrowly focused, minutiae-types of questions that have nothing to do at all with thinking?

The danger is that some states will choose tests that are cheaper to implement rather than performance-based, critical-thinking, thought-provoking tests that are much harder to score.

What are your thoughts generally about testing?
Tests are important. We all know that you need SATs to get into college. But we get into trouble when we use the information that tests give us we to judge teachers and schools.

We know that appropriate assessments can drive instruction based on student needs and be very helpful, but standardized multiple choice tests don't do this.

The standardized tests that exist in elementary school do not reflect what the kids actually know and how well they've been taught.

These tests don't measure an individual child's progress. They just measure the child against the norm.

In our school, we see children who don't have the advantages our own children have, yet these children make unbelievable progress.

Our school has a revolving door. Many of the children in grades 3-5 are not the same children who started with us in kindergarten.

Our school is changing all the time. Unless the individual test score follows the child and can be made useful for that child's teacher, it doesn't make sense.

Teachers are very anxious about the whole testing situation. There's a small fear that someday we might be forced to change our teaching in ways we don't believe in, just so we can achieve those test scores--which may not really be measuring how much children are learning.

Most of us believe that standardized tests really measure socioeconomics. They reflect who the children are and whether they have educated parents at home supporting them in school, rather than what is being taught and learned at school.

Those are strong opinions. Let's hear your views on the "teacher quality" aspects of the new law.
We want to have stricter standards for teachers. To have a standardized notion of what being a certified teacher is about is really, really important.

But the certification and being able to pass exams does not really tell you if this is a wonderful teacher, because there's a part of teaching that is an art that involves your inner self, your ability to inspire children.

You must also ask: Does this teacher understand children? Does this teacher understand the art of teaching?

Then you must ensure that this teacher has proper mentoring and proper placement.

How do the people who sponsored this law think they're going to get fully certified, highly qualified teachers to come into this hostile environment?

We know teachers with less than five years' experience who are already burned out--they're tired of the testing, testing, testing. Some of them say: "I just want to teach. I just want to be with the kids." They're very frustrated.

And how are you going to get teachers and principals to go to these buildings that are under school improvement plans if test scores alone are driving the success or failure of a school?

What will it really take to turn around struggling schools?
The problem is not the goals and the testing and all that. It's delivery of services.

We know that some children do not come to school with the same assets to learn. And yet we give everybody six hours a day of instruction across the board.

Somehow, we have to replace what kids don't have in their home. The only difference between our students and students in more affluent parts of our county is their breadth of experience--and somebody being there to guide them through that.

If we could design a program or a school, we would have these children there until six o'clock. And most afternoons would be spent in a museum or nature center or in some enriching kind of experience. Along with that, we would do some remediation.

We would work collectively as a team, and we'd work collaboratively to see how we could bring a child to the next level.

To read the full text of the No Child Left Behind Act, go to http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c107:h.r.1.enr:. For specific ESEA information from NEA, call 866/373-ESEA (3732).

ESEA's Student Testing and Teacher Quality Provisions

These are just two provisions of the newly reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act that will directly affect either you or a colleague:

• A 12-year goal to make every student "proficient" on state reading and math tests. By the 2005-06 school year, each state must administer annual reading and math tests of its own design in grades 3-8, and once between grades 9-12. The tests must be aligned to state standards and must include multiple measures of achievement.

  State achievement tests must measure both the performance of a whole school and that of disadvantaged "subgroups," to ensure that no single group of students is allowed to consistently underperform.

  A school that displays a lack of "adequate yearly progress" will be given technical assistance and placed on a long-term improvement schedule with progressively stronger corrective measures, culminating in school "restructuring" or "reconstitution" in the seventh year.

• Strong teacher quality provisions. Beginning with the 2002-03 school year, each district receiving Title I funds (to help disadvantaged children gain basic and advanced skills) must ensure that all teachers in a program supported by Title I are "highly qualified"--meaning they have been fully certified or licensed under state law and have demonstrated competence.

  Moreover, all new teachers entering the profession must take a written test. And every state must develop a plan to ensure that all teachers (not just those supported by Title I) teaching "core academic subjects" are highly qualified no later than the end of the 2005-06 school year.

  NEA lobbied hard--and won--continued support for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, which had been slated to lose its federal funding.

School Profile
"We Know These Children Need Much More"

• New Hampshire Estates at a glance: New Hampshire Estates Elementary School, in Silver Spring, Maryland, is a pre-K-2 reading/language arts magnet school with more than 500 students.

  The school is both socioeconomically and culturally diverse, serving families from more than 35 countries. Class sizes are small--14 students--and there are additional resources because of high student needs. Some 80 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced cost lunches.

• A source of pride: "We teach kids who are facing unbelievable challenges of poverty how to read and write," says one New Hampshire Estates teacher.

  "We have a staff of people who want to teach children," she adds, "and the school has always exuded a nurturing atmosphere. Kids are all happy, teachers are all happy, and I think we do a good job of teaching them to read and write and do math. When the kids come in and they're waiting to go down to their classrooms, they're sitting in the hall reading books."

• What it takes: "I'm a writing specialist," says Melissa Landa. "I'm probably the only one in the county. In fact, we've got all sorts of specialists. Our positions exist because we've got the funding, we've got the resources, and we know that these children need much more."