Obama administration seeks sweeping overhaul of NCLB
The Obama administration is proposing a major overhaul of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), says the New York Times. The proposal calls for broad changes in how schools are judged to be succeeding or failing, and the elimination of the law’s 2014 deadline for bringing every American child to academic proficiency. Those with whom administration officials have shared their proposal say it would eliminate or rework many of the provisions that teachers’ unions, principals’ associations, school boards and other groups have found most objectionable. The administration, however, is not planning to abandon the law’s commitments to closing the achievement gap between minority and white students and to encouraging teacher quality. The proposal would also change federal financing formulas so that a portion of the money is awarded based on academic progress, rather than by formulas that apportion money to districts according to their numbers of students, especially poor students.
Educators have complained loudly in the eight years since the law was signed that it was branding tens of thousands of schools as failing but not forcing them to change. Instead of the current system which issues the equivalent of a pass-fail report card for every school each year, an evaluation that administration officials say fails to differentiate among chaotic schools in chronic failure, schools that are helping low-scoring students improve and high-performing suburban schools that nonetheless appear to be neglecting some low-scoring students, the administration proposes a new accountability system that would divide schools into more categories, offering recognition to those that are succeeding and providing large new amounts of money to help improve or close failing schools. A new goal would be for all students to leave high school “college or career ready.”
The administration hopes to apply similar conditions to those in Race to the Top (RTTT) to the distribution of the billions of dollars that ED hands out to states and districts as part of its annual budget. “They want to recast the law so that it is as close to Race to the Top as they can get it, making the money conditional on districts’ taking action to improve schools,” said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy. The last serious attempt to rewrite the NCLB law was in 2007. That effort collapsed, partly because teachers’ unions and other educator groups opposed an effort to incorporate merit pay provisions into a rewritten law.
Source: New York Times, 1/31/10, By Sam Dillon
[Last month, the Washington Post reported on President Obama’s plan to expand RTTT. The article pointed out that the promise of federal money has prodded 11 states to revamp their laws to allow for changes encouraged by the RTTT program such as more charter schools, new plans to remake failing schools, and incentives to attract better teachers. It also noted that 48 states and the District have joined in an effort to develop a common core of rigorous educational standards to replace the current system in which states have wildly different benchmarks for what should be taught in school. A summary of the article is available below. To review NSBA’s advocacy work on NCLB, see the second link below.]
NSBA School Law pages on plan to expand RTTT
http://www.nsba.org/MainMenu/Advocacy/FederalLaws/NCLB.aspx