The No Child Left Behind Disaster: how many schools left behind?

There is a growing crisis in our schools and, contrary to George Bush’s claims, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is making it worse. Jessie Muldoon, a teacher in Oakland and member of the Oakland Education Association, explains why.

The No Child Left Behind Act is the Bush administration’s deeply flawed legislation that claims to be the solution to the many problems of public education. Signed into law in January 2002, it won bipartisan support—most notably, from liberal Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy.

NCLB promised to close the achievement gap between middle-class suburban students and those at under-funded inner-city or rural schools. Bush and others spoke of accountability and equity, but the critics of NCLB see through the rhetoric for what the law really is—an attempt to privatize education and transfer the responsibility and cost of educating our children from the federal government to individual and often impoverished school districts.

The law is built around the use of standardized tests—with the promise that gaps in testing will be gone by 2014. Progress toward this goal is to be measured by Average Yearly Progress (AYP) scores, with sanctions imposed on schools that don’t make the annual goals. NCLB also promises parents that their children will be taught by “ highly qualified” teachers and allows them to request a transfer to a different school. It also opens the door to vouchers and charter schools, threatens to privatize services currently provided by unionized public school employees and welcomes faith-based groups into school programs.

Thirteen schools in the Oakland Unified School District were slated for major restructuring in the fall of 2004. Using provisions in NCLB, Randolph Ward announced that all thirteen would become charter schools. The Oakland Education Association launched a campaign to halt this "charterization" of the schools on the basis that charter schools historically contribute to the erosion of union rights, if not eliminate them altogether, and open the door to privatization of services and programs.

By organizing for months with parents and community members, and mobilizing for school board meetings, the district may now only be able to force the charters onto two schools, Hawthorne Elementary, and Cox Elementary. Efforts to back the district off these schools continues, and in the end, the OUSD may get no new charters in Oakland.

The crisis in the Oakland schools extends beyond the charters. The Oakland Education Association has been negotiating a contract for over a year. OEA members have been working under an extension of the old contract since last summer, and it is unlikely this contract battle will end anytime soon. At a ratification meeting on April 27, OEA members voted down a concessionary increase to the caseload for middle and high school counselors. The contract would also cap health care, meaning that OEA members would have increasing out of pocket monthly payments for health care: the equivalent of an ongoing pay cut.

The OEA is banding with SEIU and AFSCME, two of the other unions that represent OUSD workers, to fight off the caps. The next steps are unclear, but a fight is inevitable.

The National Education Association (NEA)—the country’s largest teachers union—has filed a lawsuit against NCLB, charging that due to under-funding, the law forces states and school districts to comply with impossible demands. School districts are required to implement curriculum, structure and restructure programs, and hire or lay off employees.

Since 2002, shortfalls in federal funding for NCLB are estimated at $27 billion.

Ultimately, state governments have made up the difference, putting a further strain on their budgets. This burden has caused a quiet rebellion against the law. The state governments of Michigan, Texas and Vermont are protesting the law and participating in the lawsuit.

However, teachers have a joke about this question: “Republicans won’t fund No Child Left Behind, and Democrats say they will. We don’t know which is worse.” The point underlying the joke is that there’s no reason to believe that NCLB, even fully funded, would really improve the educational system.

For one thing, NCLB’s overemphasis on testing forces teachers to “teach to the test”—by focusing mainly on areas covered in the standardized tests. Currently, math and reading are the most-tested areas—so social studies and science, and even more so, art and music, are shoved to the side.

Most education experts believe that an educational program has to be balanced. Cutting the arts or history to make way for test prep will likely improve a student’s test scores—as will eliminating libraries so that a school can buy required test prep materials or replacing a literature class with a one-size-fits-all scripted reading curriculum. But this does little for students beyond helping them “bubble in” answer sheets.

What happens when a school “fails”? If a school falls short of its AYP goals two years in a row, it becomes a “Program Improvement” (PI) school. PI schools become subject to a complicated, high-pressure timeline in which they are set up to fail. By law, if PI schools don’t make satisfactory progress—as measured by NCLB—at the end of four years, they face major restructuring.

Becoming a charter school is one of the NCLB options for a “Year Four” school, along with reconstitution, when the entire staff of a school is transferred, and a new staff is brought in. In many cases, charter schools are non-union, and sometimes even run by for-profit companies.

The most famous charter school corporation is Edison Schools, which was affiliated with Gap Corp. Edison was touted as the solution to the problems in public education when it took over several elementary schools in San Francisco in the late 1990s. But within a couple years, the schools were faring no better, and many suffered from massive teacher turnover.

In Oakland, the state administrator tried to play a clever shell game. Most of the 13 schools on the list to become charters were to be governed by a new company launched and staffed by...the Oakland Unified School District itself!

The school district described these schools as “internal charters”—something that the California Teachers Association says is illegal and needs to be negotiated through the regular bargaining process. This is precisely what school administrators are trying to avoid.

One little-known provision of NCLB requires high schools to turn over names, phone numbers and addresses of all students to the military, or risk losing NCLB funding. Parents have the right to opt out, and many school districts have organized to educate students and families of their rights.

In Montclair, N.J., schools tell parents about the requirement as soon as their child enters 9th grade and follow up with letters home and reminders. The school district reports that at last count, 92 percent of families had requested that their child’s information not be sent to the military. At many high schools in the Bay Area, teachers have organized similar opt-out campaigns.

With the military regularly falling short of its recruitment goals, this NCLB provision is becoming even more important to the Bush administration. The movement to kick recruiters off campuses is a natural ally to the teachers’ unions and parent organizations opposing No Child Left Behind.

Nationally, the NEA’s lawsuit is drawing attention to the flaws in NCLB. It is highlighting what school districts have had to cut—arts, music, extended-year programs—in order to comply with the law. Fighting against these harsher elements of the law calls NCLB into question as a whole.

Some educators are working to reform the law. But tying funding to scores, punishing teachers and students in the most difficult districts and privatizing public education are not things that can be reformed—nor is the Bush administration likely to let go of these provisions easily.

Pushing for reforms may put a dent in No Child Left Behind, but ultimately, the law has to be scrapped.

Full funding of quality education should be a top priority. Money should flow into the schools until every child has what they need, until every teacher has all the resources and space they need, and until every school is renovated or rebuilt into a safe, asbestos-free learning environment.

Why doesn’t this happen? The politicians say, “You can’t just throw money at the problem.” Instead, they blame the teachers, scapegoat students and parents, and test, test, test. In fact, the U.S. government has always been willing to throw money at the Pentagon, and corporations and the wealthy in the form of tax breaks. But when it comes to education, health care and other services that impact our human and civil rights, they say no. We shouldn’t stand for it.
This article originally apeared in Socialist Worker Newspaper