NEA: April 2006 NEA Today Cover Story - NCLB: It Doesn't Add Up

April 2006

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Cover story - continued from page 2

Educators get blamed for problems they can’t control

In its mandated punishments for schools where students score low, NCLB seems to assume that educators can just shove America’s deep social problems—poverty, racism, drugs, crime, and the rest—right out the classroom door. Students must pass the same tests regardless of whether they lead lives of privilege or despair. But educators know the outside world is always in their classrooms, sitting with each student.

Oscar Hernandez teaches language arts to at-risk teens at Reedley High School near Fresno, California, in a rural, low-income area where many children speak Spanish at home.

“Many of these kids come in with no dreams. They think, ‘This is my life.’ Some of them are into gang membership and drugs,” he says.

A bipartisan NCLB Commission is considering changes to the law and is collecting stories from educators.

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Hernandez and his colleagues work to make the academics relevant. They focus on critical thinking rather than test prep, because “what they need to learn for life is different from what they need to pass the tests.”

Right now, he’s teaching a unit about gangs and “the kids are eating it up. They can’t put down the books. They’re totally engaged.” Last year, he connected just as powerfully with a unit on migrant labor.

Can these students reach high levels of academic achievement? Yes, they can, Hernandez insists, but the state test won’t show it—and the school will be labeled “failing”—because many of the questions are so divorced from their world.

More Teaching to the Test, Less Teaching for Understanding

The single-minded focus on test scores as the only measure of a school’s success forces educators to concentrate their time and effort on raising those scores. Teachers know that’s no way to educate children.

Lilia Olivas teaches a bilingual fifth grade in Tucson, Arizona. She turned a Valentine’s Day party into a math lesson: If each student gives every other student a valentine, how many is that? The session was videotaped for a nationally distributed library of exemplary lessons. But these days, it’s getting harder for her to carve out time for creative lessons because she has so many topics to cover for the all-important test. “Kids are judged by a number, not by what they understand,” she says. Even if they know how to find a test answer, many can’t apply what they’ve learned in new situations because they didn’t understand it in the first place. The result: “Many of our students are getting turned off by math. They try to get into fields without math, especially minority kids.”

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