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

April 2006

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Cover story - continued from page 3

If it’s not on the test, kiss it good-bye

Nowhere in No Child Left Behind does it say that programs like art, music, and physical education should be cut. But the law’s focus on reading and math doesn’t leave much time for students to try their hand at becoming the next Jackson Pollock.

“Art is your soul,” says art teacher Mollie Theel in Rochester, Minnesota, where middle school students used to get nearly 50 minutes of art daily. Budget slashing in the 1990s began consigning art to a death of a thousand cuts, but NCLB delivered a body blow, because art is not on the test, and therefore not a priority.

Now, sixth-graders in Rochester get half as much art as before, eighth-graders get only one semester, and seventh-graders get nothing.

Not enough money to improve learning

NCLB promised big increases in aid to high-poverty schools, but the promises have been broken. This chart shows the growing gap between the promised amounts and actual funding.

The cumulative FY02–FY06 gap between NCLB authorizations and appropriations totals $40.3 billion.

Source: National Education Association, December 2005

“I understand about math and reading,” says Theel. “I just want fair time and respect. Art is not fluff. We teach kids how to see in new ways. We touch the senses.” Theel has always helped students connect their creative art lessons to their other subjects. “A lot of what I do is applied math—proportion and ratio, scale and measuring.”

Art teachers feel more than a little undervalued in the era of NCLB, Theel says. “We get, ‘How nice. What pretty pictures.’ People have no clue what goes into pretty pictures.” And each year, it seems to get worse. “I have some very bright kids and I know that when they get to high school, chances are they will not get to take art.”

Impossible Mandates

What’s “proficient?” Under NCLB, the state decides, but because the law requires that every student be “proficient” by 2014, it should be a level that any student, if taught well, can attain. Study after study concludes that with the levels states have set, almost every school will fail to reach 100 percent proficiency by the deadline.

Some states have defined “proficient” to be so advanced that even successful adults can’t measure up. Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle had her senior policy advisors take her state’s fifth-grade math test. They failed.

So Lingle thinks the standard is unrealistic. “No matter how much effort we put in,” she says, “more and more students will fail.”

Military access—‘Opt out’ vs. ‘opt in’

School districts receiving NCLB money are required to give student information to military recruiters. But parents and students can “opt out” by asking that their personal information not be released. To help them, Portland, Maine, schools added this option to student emergency forms. Of the 1,341 students at Deering High School this year, 698 chose not to release their information.

Last year’s NEA Representative Assembly voted to propose that the law be changed from “opt out” to “opt in”: No contact information would be released without student or parent approval. NEA is supporting a bill in Congress, H.R. 559, to make that change.

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