Jay Mathews seeks NCLB stories

["Monty Neill" <monty@fairtest.org>]

 washingtonpost.com 
Seeking Clarity on No Child Left Behind 
Most Proposals Are Unclear When it Comes to Real Classrooms 

By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 3, 2004; 8:47 AM 


My editors at The Post don't ask me to do many daily news stories any more. They suspect I am not longer capable of making a deadline and prefer to give those assignments to the several smarter, stronger and younger reporters in the newsroom who often pat me on the head and ask if I have taken my pills.

But last week, in an effort to stay up to date, I volunteered to do a couple of stories about what's happening with the new No Child Left Behind law, and I was surprised at what I found. 

One story was about the Virginia House of Delegates voting 98 to 1 to ask the federal government to waive the No Child Left Behind requirements, particularly the strict demand for annual improvements in test scores, for states like Virginia that have their own good ways of making sure schools are doing their jobs. The other story was about school superintendents in the Washington area asking the federal government to change the No Child Left Behind regulations so that they would not have to give tests that were way over the heads of disabled students and students with limited English. 

These were sensible proposals made by serious educators and elected officials, but I kept running into the same problem as I tried to write about them. I could not get anyone to tell me with any clarity how these changes would affect real kids in real classrooms today. All I heard were possible consequences for future children from the federal law's flaws.

Most of the discussion seemed to be about adults, and their political and ideological disputes, rather than kids. The Virginia House of Delegates, for instance, said in its resolution that the No Child Left behind law was going to be horribly intrusive and expensive for the commonwealth of Virginia, but when I asked how much money they would have to pay beyond the extra money they were getting from the federal government under the new law, they said $3.2 million out of a budget of about $220 million, and even those figures were not very clear. 

A congressman who helped write the new law said Virginia was already sitting on $169 million in federal funds to help with No Child Left Behind. The state said, no, that money would be spent in good time, and that funding dispute was just confusing the issue. 

The superintendents' plea for a change in the regulations also got snarled in different versions of the possible effects of the law. A federal official I spoke to said he sympathized with those teachers who felt it was wrong to give a test in English to kids who had just arrived from Guatemala, but the law allowed the schools in that case to give the test in Spanish -- or whatever their native language -- for their first three years in this country. The superintendents' spokesman responded that there were just too many different native languages for them to come up with enough tests for all the new arrivals, and many of them were not literate in their mother tongue anyway.

And so it went, a back and forth. Once again it seemed to be more about adults scoring debating points than children learning to read, write and do math. 

The educators, of course, were right to be concerned about where this would all lead, even if they could not be very specific about how it was affecting their kids. Mike Shisler, principal of Beach Elementary School in Chesapeake Beach, Md., told me he liked what the legislators in neighboring Virginia had done, because he saw trouble ahead. "How many times have we seen federal mandates without federal funds to deliver them," he said. But for now he anticipated getting enough money for family nights to explain to parents how the school is handling the teaching of reading, writing and math, as well as for before and after school tutoring and more books in his classrooms and his library. 

I asked everyone for stories of how students were being hurt right by the new law, so I could help readers understand exactly what was happening. But nobody had anything very concrete. And that made me want to know more. 

A long time ago I figured out that I was never going to be intelligent enough to work out the rightness or wrongness of government policies by considering them in the abstract. I had to see precisely how they affected people before I could make up my mind. With the No Child Left Behind law bringing more change more rapidly to our schools than ever before, and adding much more money than ever, even if many educators say it is still not enough, I could use some real life stories to figure out what I should be thinking about this.

So I hope that educators and parents and even students reading this will help me. If you have witnessed the actual consequences of the new law in classrooms, tell me what you saw. Maybe when you look at these effects up close, they are bad. Maybe they are good. Just give me the facts. No dissertations on the need for accountability or the bankruptcy of top-down reform, please. I have heard that before. Just take me into a classroom and show me what is going on. 

I don't need to know the names of the children involved, but I do want to know which school you are talking about and the source of your information. I plan to publish the most detailed and interesting accounts I receive, and then let you make up your own minds, based on examples of kids learning or not learning.

Political efforts have their place, but I would take a glance at a teacher and her students in a classroom over a nine-point resolution any day. 

mathewsj@washpost.com


Do NOT email me - Monty

Monty Neill, Ed.D.
Executive Director
FairTest
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