It has only been within the last couple of years
that the greatest change in our standard operating procedures has
occurred in response to No Child Left Behind (NCLB). We have always had
one of the strongest Special Education teams in our district, and our
faculty, for the most part, consists of teachers who know the work in
ways that have traditionally always made Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) a
non-issue. We simply met the bar set by the Federal government year
after year. Recently, the bar has risen to a point where we have had to
be concerned.
We are looking harder, now, at the disaggregated
data after every test – benchmarks, unit tests, state
assessments…everything. We spend time scrutinizing the minutiae from
these results so that we have some idea of who our target populations
are and where we need to focus our energies with those groups and the
school as a whole. We spend more time worrying than we used to.
As we near the insanity of 100% pass rates in order
to demonstrate AYP, the worrying has given way, among many educators I know, to a detachment, almost apathy. Many of the teachers with
whom I work and have worked feel that there is a serious injustice in the idea that AYP
is based on a set of arbitrary measures that do not take into account
the past performance of the individual student. It is ridiculous, for
example, to expect a child who enters the 6th grade reading
at the level of an average student in the second month of third grade to
pass a test written at a lexile measure of 600-700 after a mere eight
months of middle school. Yet this is the child we see coming to school
each August for the last couple of years, and he comes in great numbers
with many faces, and she has many names.
We are tired of a program so ironically named. We
are tired of a program whose intent was to leave no child behind but
whose reality has done nothing other. The academic environment created
by a series of state-mandated standardized achievement tests that, when
tied to standards of progress and improvement become punitive by their
very nature, is one in which too many educators will leave no test score
behind and disregard the education of a child in the process. We are
now twelve years into NCLB, and a legion of children have been left
behind.
If one can describe a positive impact of NCLB, it
might be that teachers must be more qualified than they once needed to
be, but that has not been a problem where I work for as long as I have
been there. It might also be that when Congress reauthorized IDEA in
2004, they took a different approach to certain parts of the Act and
essentially created Response to Intervention (RtI). If anything saves
the debacle that is NCLB, it will be RtI, but to credit the former with
the creation of or even impetus for the latter is folly. RtI is just a
solid, logical education paradigm. NCLB, on the other hand, is a policy
whose greatest and, arguably, most prolific effects are now playing out
on the front pages of the Atlanta Constitution-Journal and the nation’s
news.
