Nickelbee, what are you doing?

            In 1999, 72% of the public said that the standards in the K-12 public school system were lacking. 90% thought that students should pass standardized tests and it didn’t matter if a majority of kids were held back.

Then came reality.

The No Child Left Behind Act  is a public accountability system which means that it can not function without the support of the public. However, the heart of NCLB is full of arbitrary measures such as testing and adequate yearly progress (AYP) which is what the public debates about.

Most significantly, NCLB requires annual testing in reading, mathematics, and science in grades 3-8, and once again in high school. Each state must establish an acceptable system that uses those test results to determine whether schools and districts are making adequate yearly progress (AYP). These determinations must be based not only on the aggregate performance of all students, but on the performance of mandated subgroups (including those determined by ethnicity, income, and native language). Critically, AYP is not determined by how much students progress in the course of a school year, but on the basis of whether a sufficient number of students are deemed “proficient” each year–regardless of how close to or far from proficiency the students were when the school year began.Schools and districts that fail to make AYP are identified as “in need of improvement,” and required to adopt a series of mandated remedies each year during which they do not improve. These remedies include allowing students to attend another public school, offering federally funded after-school tutoring, and “restructuring” persistently low-performing schools.[2]

So is this what the public supports? There has not been a comprehensive study done on this, but this article attempts to assess what the public thinks with the help of polls.

There are several well-known surveys, however, that can be used to begin to gauge the public’s attitudes toward the key elements of the historic law. I have drawn on two polls that provide longitudinal and in-depth examinations of public opinion about schooling–conducted annually by Phi Delta Kappa (PDK)/Gallup and the Educational Testing Service (ETS)–and on one widely respected poll conducted by Public Agenda.

In 2003 24% of the public knew what NCLB while ¾ of the public did not. The numbers got better in 2006, 45% knew about NCLB but the majority (55%) did not. When people were surveyed about their opinions of NCLB in 2003 18% said it was good thing, 13% said is was a bad thing and 69% didn’t know what they thought about it. Once again in 2006 the numbers changed a bit 32% said it was a good thing and 31% said it wasn’t.  Therefore the only conclusion to draw is that there is the “…emerging picture was of a moderately informed public with mixed feelings.”

In 2002, there seemed to be a strong emotion towards a national standard even though this is a rather aggressive method. Ironically, this idea was left out of NCLB on purpose because the congressmen thought the public would utterly oppose it. However, even though the people wanted a national standard, they still wanted the states to decide the curricula. They even wouldn’t mind narrowing the curricula to focus more closely on only English and math in 2002. Conversely, in 2006, this was not a widely accepted idea. The public changed their mind to say that only focusing on math and English would not give a fair picture of a student’s abilites. The funny thing is, this was the public opinion without them even realizing that an achievement gap exsists. Even when the government raised public concern about it, they still didn’t care. With all of this, the author of this article concluded that
America is torn on the uniform standard issue. (Genius!)

As for remedies to this little problem we have here in
America, surveys were given asking whether it would be better to fix the education system we already have or find an alternative. The masses responded that we should simply try and fix what we already have. Suggestions included after school tutoring and possible change in school districts. To further this reconstruction, the two ideas were to overhaul the faculty or close down inadequate schools. To my surprise (remember I’m not actually in the field yet so I don’t know reality only theory) the public would rather overhaul the faculty before anything else. Nonetheless, the one thing that all parents asked for was more money for the schools and smaller classrooms. (Something’s never change.) Now with all this said, has NCLB actually done anything? Does the public actually care?

Evidence suggests that most Americans continue to be relatively happy with their local public schools, but are mixed on the state of the nation’s schools as a whole. This pattern has existed for decades and there is no evidence that three or four years under NCLB have altered it. In fact, there is little evidence that the existence of NCLB has affected public judgments about school quality, school choice, testing, or harsh measures for low-performing schools at all.

So what did NCLB do? It divided the public opinion and made people feel very uncomfortable with the methods our school system is using. Overall people do not want to stray from traditional remedies for fear that a radical idea is not the answer. They’re not giving up on our public school system, they just recognize that it needs major improvements. Yet, when they look to the government for answers, this is what they come up with? I think we can do better.

Now what does this have to do with literature? Well, apparently the promoters of NCLB think it is a big issue.

Finally, it is worth noting that NCLB has emboldened its proponents to a degree that could leave them out of step with public sentiment. While Americans are of two minds on the urgency of the racial achievement gap, the responsibility of the schools for the gap, as well as the practice of disaggregation, the Bush administration and NCLB allies have been aggressive about using the law’s emphasis on disadvantaged children as a cudgel with which to hammer reluctant states. When
Utah was on the verge of opting out of the law in 2005, the U.S. Department of Education mounted a full-scale assault, charging that NCLB critics were insufficiently concerned about the plight of minority children. The Education Trust, the militantly progressive, hard-line champion of NCLB, charged that “[s]ome lawmakers and educators in
Utah are expending enormous energy to fend off . . . the federal law that aims to raise overall achievement and close gaps between [ethnic] groups.”[24] Similar rhetoric has been directed by the Bush administration toward
Connecticut. Because it is unclear that the public fully endorses the assumptions or machinery of NCLB, the long-term effectiveness of such tactics is uncertain. If history of other areas of policy serves as a guide, these tactics may eventually provoke a backlash against moral posturing and federal overreach.

The public hasn’t even fully recognized there is a problem yet that’s what the NCLB supporters are focusing on? Now I know that the achievement gap is a serious issue but how are we supposed to teach literature or even literacy when the administration focuses our attention of testing, standards and bureaucracy??

It’s mind boggling.

Full Article

“No Child Left Behind:What the Public Thinks”

Frederick M. Hess

Feb 22, 2007

American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research

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