President's Viewpoint
ESEA: The Stakes Just Got Higher

Purported education reform--the recently reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)--is in many instances, a murky and misleading piece of legislation. But two things are crystal clear to me about ESEA:

• It embodies much that we as education professionals have historically espoused, but were unable to mandate or fund;
• This legislation, as it is currently crafted, sets up children and public schools to fail.

NEA's 2.7 million members have never wanted anything less than a highly qualified professional in every classroom and high standards and expectations for students and for ourselves. But how do you craft and implement an education reform plan without the expertise of educators who will implement it? You can't.

By setting admirably high goals without providing crucial resources to already cash-strapped state and local governments, Washington has built a house of cards--and it is now blowing those cards down on top of the very students it claims to shelter.

We know that using high-stakes tests as a measure of "accountability" is a fundamentally flawed concept. The Center on Education Policy recently reported that "state-of-the-art in testing is not yet reliable or consistent enough for year-to-year changes in scores to always be an accurate reflection of progress. Studies suggest that as much as 70% of the year-to-year fluctuations are due to outside factors."

Outside factors such as hunger and homelessness; abuse and neglect, are factors for which neither we nor our students should be held accountable, yet we will.

Local newspapers are rife with stories about test scoring mistakes. The Boston Globe recently reported on Jennifer Mueller, a high school senior in Massachusetts who convinced state officials to accept an alternative method she used to correctly answer a high-stakes math question. Her persistence ensured that 449 seniors are now eligible to graduate. Yet Mueller remains ineligible, because her score fell just below the minimum to pass.

That fact alone should be revealing as well as chilling to parents, students, and teachers.

But perhaps what's most insulting is that relying on high-stakes tests is an assault on our professionalism. Teaching to the test is the very antithesis of teaching. Our background and experience--and a student's talents and abilities--are oftentimes diminished when tied to a high-stakes test.

Obviously, I'm not against testing. Used correctly, it's a tool to assess student progress. But used to determine promotion, graduation, college placement, and scholarships, testing becomes a weapon.

We must ensure that tests are appropriately used and aligned with curriculum. Otherwise our children will be robbed of their thirst for knowledge and mindlessly memorize "facts" without a true understanding of their genesis.

Let's work together to ensure that policy makers recognize and respond to the fact that high-stakes tests are not the answer. They must ensure that we measure student performance to assess their needs, not to predetermine their fates.

Highly qualified teachers and education support professionals, high standards and expectations, small class sizes, environments conducive to good teaching and learning will set children, students, and public education on the road to greater successes.

Our job as educators has just gotten a lot more difficult. We can't just focus on our classrooms and our students; we must also focus on our policy makers to ensure that they know how accountability should look.

My friends, the stakes just got higher!

Comments? E-mail Reg Weaver at RegWeaver@nea.org.