(full disclosure CTA has hired me do to online outreach on NCLB)

It is well known that the current focus of NCLB on testing forces teachers to teach to the test. In fact, according to a recent national study by the Center on Education Policy, a majority of the nation’s school districts report that while increasing time for test preparation they have decreased class time for science, social studies, art, music, and physical education. In some elementary schools time for student lunches has also been cut to spend more time to prepare for the standardized tests mandated by the feds.  How depressing is that, kids forced to eat quickly and lose out on valuable social time to cram for a test.

The Miller/Pelosi reauthorization proposal continues to punish lower-performing schools, rather than providing assistance and resources to help all students and schools succeed. Their proposal creates four new levels of sanctions for struggling schools. This year NCLB labeled one out of every four California public schools as failing.  As an example of how ridiculous NCLB’s school rating system is, a California distinguished school, after successfully passing 45 of the 46 components of the NCLB rating system, was labeled a failure because ten English language learners did not score high enough on one test.

This relates directly to what I wrote about on Friday on the problematic usage of benchmarks rather than progress to assess school’s performance.  By California standards they were achieving, but missing just one benchmark, in this case 10 kids just learning English did not score high enough on one test taken on one day.

Remember that the Miller/Pelosi reauthorization proposal creates a new federal mandate to pay and evaluate teachers based on student test scores.

We know that test scores by themselves don’t fairly measure student achievement and they certainly will not be able to accurately evaluate a teacher’s effectiveness.  At a time when California will need more than 100,000 new teachers in the next 10 years, this proposal will discourage the quality teachers our schools so desperately need from ever entering the profession.

Call, write and fax your Congresscritter.  Plus contact Pelosi and George Miller.  Find out more at CTA’s NCLB page.