NCLB Finally Not Making Sense to Lawmakers; What Took so Long?

I receive automatic email messages from my elected U.S. House of Representative Sam Graves (MO-R) on a weekly basis.  Admittedly, I usually send many of these directly for the inbox, but today I held back and decided to read it because of the title line–”Our Education Standards Must Make Sense.”  In short, because some of Missouri’s “good schools” are now being deemed as failures, due to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandates, public sentiment is FINALLY growing to repeal NCLB.

Quite frankly, many education policy analysts and educators saw this coming.

My teaching career started the very year NCLB regulations were fully enforced.  As a teacher in an underperforming urban school district, we saw NCLB as a real threat, knowing that our school district could be further placated as a “failure,” which we knew was unfair.  As teachers, we worked on overdrive to improve student achievement scores in math and reading…and worked even harder to have our students demonstrate math/reading proficiency above cut-score levels.  But all in all, our efforts were always overshadowed by the ultimate goal of NCLB–that by 2014, all students will demonstrate proficiency in reading AND math.  All students.  Proficient.  Reading.  And math.

Wow.

All students, means all students–urban, rural and suburban.  This also means that our nation’s best performing schools will, at some point, not look “good enough” because they will unlikely demonstrate 100% proficiency of all their students.

Sure, we were peeved at this law and did what we could to share our sentiment with our local elected officials.  But we also knew the new landscape of education accountability was going to change, until it directly impacted our nation’s “top performing” and “best” school districts.

Once the stakeholders of our nation’s “best” schools realize their school is labeled a failure (by NCLB standards), perhaps the REAL change will occur.

At the present time, 82% of our nation’s schools have been labeled underperforming.  Quite a statistic, eh?

It just doesn’t make sense.  And it doesn’t make sense to Rep. Graves either:

That doesn’t make any sense to me. Missing one or two questions on a test is different than getting all of the answers wrong.

We recognize the difference between getting a B and an F in the classroom. We should also recognize it when it comes to grading our schools. I will propose this common sense change so that we can identify the school districts that truly need help and stop punishing good schools.

So to you Rep. Graves, and other elected officials, thank you for FINALLY sensing the lunacy in certain aspects of this law.  Unfortunately, you’re all just a tad late entering the discussion.

Tags: #cpchat, #k12chat, 100% proficiency of all students, AYP, common core standards, corrective action, cut scores, education reform, featured, nclb, no child left behind, no child left behind reauthorization, proficiency, Rep. Graves, repeal nclb, Representative Sam Graves

Category: Education Law, Education Reform