The Tide is Turning

NEA President Reg Weaver

What a difference a couple of years and 2.7 million NEA members can make! When the President of the United States signed into law the so-called No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act on January 8, 2002, the acclaim was almost universal.

The new law, after all, was big and bold--more than 1,200 pages of directives, prescriptions, and mandates for every public school in America--and it had broad bipartisan support in Congress. Plus, it had a catchy title.

There was one organization, however, which was not fooled--and that was your Association.

NEA refused to jump on the bandwagon and endorse this new law, although we were under tremendous pressure to do so.

We stood our ground. We said then what we still say today: NCLB's goals are laudable--but its implementation plan is critically flawed.

Moreover, we embarked on our own "mission impossible" to educate our members, the media, policy makers, and the general public about NCLB.

And things have changed, dramatically.

Today, public officials from both political parties, including governors, are raising tough questions about NCLB. In the media, the articles, editorials, and columns about NCLB are running five to one against it. What's more, the most recent Phi Delta Kappa-Gallup poll clearly shows that the more people know about NCLB, the less they like it.

What don't people like about NCLB?

Well, for starters, they don't like that it imposes a one-size-fits-all approach on all children, regardless of their different abilities and needs. While every child can learn, parents and educators agree that every child can't learn at the same speed or in the same way.

People also don't like that at a time when budgets are tight and many schools have to cut foreign languages, music, and the arts, NCLB forces states and school districts to waste scarce resources on more bureaucracy, paperwork, and even more standardized tests.

We can take some of the credit for the turnaround in people's views about NCLB, but not all of the credit.

The fact is NCLB's inherent absurdities have caught up with it. When some of the top high schools in New Jersey and the best elementary schools in Michigan, including a school praised by the President of the United States, are warned that they have failed to achieve "adequate yearly progress," under the federal law...when schools across the nation that have been rated "exceptional" under their state assessment systems are labeled "in need of improvement" under the federal law...when the Teacher of the Year in Montana does not meet the "highly qualified" standards of the federal law, it becomes apparent that there is something seriously wrong with this law.

But we cannot assume just because the tide is turning that NCLB will automatically get fixed. To the contrary, all indications are that we face a long, hard, legislative struggle. The Administration sees NCLB as its number one domestic achievement so the Republicans are reluctant to touch it. And the Democrats in Congress are in no hurry to admit that they were misguided in their support of NCLB.

We must keep up the pressure. In 2004, it is up to us to make candidates address the shortcomings of NCLB.

It is up to us to do whatever we can to elect candidates who support fixing this law so that children and schools can get the real help they need in the classroom--quality teachers, smaller class sizes, and up-to-date books and materials.

We can't become discouraged. We can't give up. We can't step back. The issues are too important. The stakes are too high. We must do what it takes to make great public schools for every child--we must make our voices heard and our votes count in 2004.

Keep up the great work on behalf of children and public education. The NEA appreciates you and so do I.