President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act is up for renewal. The federal program wants to raise student achievement across the country. Many San Diego teachers and principals say the law needs to be changed. KPBS Education Reporter Ana Tintocalis has more.
Elizabeth Gillingham is the principal of De Portola Middle School. It’s located in the San Diego middle-class neighborhood of Tierra Santa.
Gillingham: We are a distinguished school by California standards and we became a model middle school for the state of California, one of 14, last year.
But in the eyes of the federal government, De Portla is failing despite the fact that student test scores improve every year. Under The No Child Left Behind Act, the school has failed to meet all the federal academic targets. Gillingham is frustrated.
Gillingham: The one measurement isn’t fair, its confusing to parents, and if they step foot on any campus, once they meet the teachers, they’re going to see people who care about kids.
President Bush proposed and a Republican Congress approved the No Child Left Behind Act five years ago. The law requires every child to be proficient in reading and math. A school can be punished if some of the students don’t satisfy the academic benchmarks. It could lose federal money. It may have to adopt a new curriculum. Or parents could ask the district to bus their child to another school.
There wasn’t supposed to be conflict between federal and state standards. The federal law was clear about that. But states like California pressured the federal government to allow them to keep a separate system.
Arun Ramanathan is director of governmental relations at the San Diego Unified School District. He says having two ways to measure a school’s success inevitably caused confusion.
Ramanathan: You have a federal system that says all of these schools are failing, and you have parents whose children are in these schools, and in many cases they working real hard and doing a job. And that doesn’t work out in their heads. How could my school be identified as failure by the federal government but at the same time the state accountability system says it’s doing a good job?
State educators see the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind act this year as chance to fix the program. They want the system to mirror California’s model of accountability. They say the state’s system provides a more accurate picture of how students are doing.
Ramanathan: We’re going to have more and more elementary schools falling into the other failed category, and more and more of our high schools, until we reach a point where literally every single one of our schools is a failure.
Some states like Colorado have weakened their state standards and tests so students can make the federal targets. Jeff Simmering calls this “gaming the system” to avoid penalties -- penalties such as losing federal funding. Simmering is the legislative director of the Council of the Great City Schools. His organization believes No Child Left Behind needs an overhaul.
Simmering: This act needs more than tweaking. As they say the devil is always in the details, but the details really need to be reworked.
President Bush calls No Child Left Behind a “significant education accomplishment.” He says it forces states to look at how they teach poor and minority students.
U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings says the program is working. But she admits the program could be improved.
Alan Bersin used to be Superintendent of San Diego schools and was education secretary for Governor Schwarzenegger. Bersin still serves on the state education board. He believes No Child Left Behind can be salvaged.
Bersin: Reauthorization will bring change and much of that change I expect will be positive. The important matter is that we fix No Child Behind and not scrap it. It would be a huge step backward to simply go back to the days that everything goes where there isn’t an accountability system for holding adults responsible for the learning of children.
Look for a political battle to take place this year over the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind. Teachers unions will be pushing the Democratic controlled Congress for drastic changes. Conservatives will want to keep most of the program intact. Some observers say the issue won’t be settled until after the 2008 election. Middle School Principal Elizabeth Gillingham hopes for relief. She says educators can’t continue to work under dueling standards.
Gillingham: I don’t know one school principal that doesn’t pull they’re hair out trying to figure out how to do things better, I don’t know one teacher who doesn’t look at every student in that class and try to help them succeed.
Other administrators agree. They spend a lot of time explaining two systems of accountability and which one applies when.
Ana Tintocalis, KPBS News.
