In addressing Booker T. Washington High School graduates in Memphis last month, President Barack Obama cited the school’s dramatic transformation from dropout factory to a place where four of five students now earn a diploma.
“If success can happen here at Booker T. Washington, it can happen anywhere in Memphis. It can happen throughout Tennessee. And it can happen all across America,” Obama told the graduates.
Obama referenced the Memphis school in comments later in the month about the need to replace No Child Left Behind with more flexible federal education policy.
“So Booker T. Washington High School is no longer a story about what’s gone wrong in education,” he said in his national weekly address. “It’s a story about how we can set it right. We need to reward the reforms that are driven not by Washington, but by principals and teachers and parents. That’s how we’ll make progress in education — not from the top down, but from the bottom up.”
Obama is not likely to find disagreement from the nation’s 3.2 million educators who have long complained about what they consider the onerous and unrealistic requirements of No Child Left Behind, the sweeping education law passed nine years ago with the goal that all 49 million public school students reach proficiency in reading and math by 2014.
The law added a new and reviled acronym to education’s alphabet soup — AYP or “adequate yearly progress.”
Schools that don’t meet annual performance targets as measured by test scores are reported as failing AYP, a label so dreaded that some schools in Georgia have tried to escape it by doctoring poor test scores.
In testimony before Congress in March, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan warned that 82 percent of America’s schools could fail to meet the ambitious goals set by No Child Left Behind.
“This law has created dozens of ways for schools to fail and very few ways to help them succeed,” Duncan said. “We should get out of the business of labeling schools as failures and create a new law that is fair and flexible, and focused on the schools and students most at risk.”
But teachers counter that students are at greatest risk from factors outside the classroom that neither No Child nor Race to the Top considers.
“In the No Child Left Behind lexicon, ‘no excuses’ became the battle cry to promote high expectations and heightened achievement for our poorest students,” said former Cobb teacher Rebecca Sayler.
“However, when we use the mantra ‘no excuses,’ we mask the realities that poor children deal with,” Sayler said. “‘No excuses’ becomes our excuse as a society to continue neglecting the neglected. We don’t want to solve the problems of childhood hunger, unstable homes or transience. We don’t really want to look at why children in poverty have such different education outcomes than children of affluence.”
While No Child Left Behind was the handiwork of former President George W. Bush, educators contend that the Obama White House has not eased the pressures or the bureaucracy. Worse, they argue that the escalating data demands have forced schools to hire statisticians while laying off teachers.
In its annual survey, the American Association of School Administrators found that districts nationwide expect to lay off 227,000 employees in 2011-12 due to shortfalls, 57 percent of whom will be teachers, 27 percent support personnel such as maintenance workers and custodians, and 6 percent administration.
Yet, districts are confronting ever-expansive reporting stipulations through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Education Jobs Fund, said Anne L. Bryant, executive director of the National School Boards Association.
“The question is, are we supposed to lay off teachers to hire data collectors?” Bryant asked.
States that won Race to the Top grants, including Georgia, face even more data mandates. For instance, teacher evaluations eventually will require submission of all student transcripts.
The school boards and school administrators associations are asking Congress to stave off sanctions on failing schools and hold off on labeling new schools as needing improvement for a year to give financially strapped districts a chance to catch their breaths. They don’t want school-by-school waivers, but a blanket reprieve.
“The waiver process requires districts to jump through hoops and involves more red rape and more data,” said Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of the administrators association.
“We are looking at the perfect storm over the next year that is not so perfect. We are now facing current and new regulations from the federal government,” Bryant said. “Our districts are literally dying from the increased bureaucracy placed on them.”
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