Articles
Testimony and Statements
Reports on Recommendations for NCLB
Resources
Articles
Testimony and Statements
Reports on Recommendations for NCLB
This document provides the American Association of School Administrators’ recommendations for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. They include: improving the focus of Title I of ESEA, improving the implementation of Title I, improving the accuracy and instructional usefulness of Title I accountability, and improving teacher quality.
When the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) became law in 2002, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) hoped that the resources earmarked for NCLB would be provided and that the law would be implemented in a way that would strengthen public education while raising the academic achievement of all students. Unfortunately, AFT believes that flaws in the law are undercutting its original promise. AFT's recommendations to improve NCLB focus on four areas: adequate yearly progress; highly qualified staff; school improvement and services for students; and funding.
Career and technical education (CTE) is a major and long-standing enterprise within the United States’ education system that has evolved to meet 21st century needs. More than 95 percent of students take at least one CTE course during high school, and the strengths and resources of CTE play an important role in improving outcomes for all students. This paper by the Association for Career and Technical Education gives their recommendations for the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. Recommendations include: integrating academic and technical education to better engage and prepare students for their futures; supporting comprehensive guidance and career development strategies to assist students in determining clear pathways to postsecondary and workforce goals; increasing the focus on secondary school completion through comprehensive dropout prevention and reentry strategies; ensuring that highly effective educators are supported and available across the curriculum in all schools; improving adequate yearly progress and accountability provisions to more accurately reflect student learning progress; and providing support and incentives for innovation, replication and improvement.
Commission on No Child Left Behind: Beyond NCLB – Fulfilling the Promise to Our Nation’s Children http://www.aspeninstitute.org/site/c.huLWJeMRKpH/b.938015/k.40DA/Commission_on_No_Child_Left_Behind.htm In February 2006, 15 leaders in education came together to form the Commission on No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a bipartisan, independent effort dedicated to improving NCLB. The Commission traveled across the country, listening to the experiences of students, educators, parents, administrators, state and district officials, experts and policymakers. Their work uncovered shortcomings in both the implementation of the statute and in some tenets of the law itself. They believe that to do better, the law must be dramatically improved, and this report outlines specific and actionable recommendations for establishing a high-achieving education system. Recommendations include: having effective teachers and principals, improved accountability, better school improvement and student options, fair and accurate assessments, high standards for all, improved high schools, and reliable and accurate data.
In January 2006, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) launched an Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) Task Force to help states identify and achieve consensus around the key principles that must be addressed when Congress reauthorizes ESEA. As a result, CCSSO developed a comprehensive Policy Statement regarding ESEA reauthorization and the type of state-federal education partnership that the nation needs to maintain its leadership in the 21st century. CCSSO’s Reauthorization Policy Statement urges Congress and the US Department of Education to pursue a new partnership model based on three core themes: (1) innovation, including continued support and increased autonomy for states to build on the foundations of standards-based reform, (2) capacity, including greater focus on building the ability of state and local education agencies to improve learning opportunities for all students and to intervene in consistently low-performing districts and schools, and (3) research and development, including increased investment in research, evaluation, technical assistance, and collaboration to help inform state and local efforts to improve student achievement and close achievement gaps. This document builds upon the Policy Statement and provides more specific recommendations to Congress about how to update and improve upon ESEA to help ensure that all students are prepared for postsecondary education, work, and citizenship in the 21st century. Recommendations include: promoting innovative models and reinventing peer review; improving accountability determinations; differentiating consequences; improving assessment systems; properly including students with disabilities; properly including English language learners; enhancing teacher quality; and strengthening resources.
This report provides recommendations for the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind. First and foremost, The Education Trust seeks to protect the foundational elements of the original law that are crucial to boosting overall achievement and closing gaps between groups. These include results-based accountability, accountability for academic gains of individual student groups, explicit timelines and goals for raising overall achievement and closing gaps between groups, consequences for consistently low-performing schools, a focus on boosting the quality and effectiveness of teachers, particularly in high-poverty and high-minority schools, and providing the public in general and parents in particular with information about their schools so that they can effectively engage with schools and advocate for students. Recommendations include changes in the following: data systems, teacher quality, high-quality curriculum, high-quality assessments, more funding for high-poverty and struggling schools, new tools for parents to advocate on behalf of their children, high school resources and accountability, reforming AYP, improving the school improvement process, and public reporting requirements.
The National Association of State Board’s of Education’s (NASBE) Governmental Affairs Committee undertook a year-long review of the No Child Left Behind Act in preparation for the reauthorization of the federal education reform law scheduled for 2007. The result of this work is a document that reflects the consensus of the committee after a year of presentations and discussion with congressional leaders, education policy experts, and state board members about their perspective and experience in implementing No Child Left Behind. Recommendations include: flexibility in state assessment requirements (particularly for testing of special needs students such as students with disabilities and LEP students); better alignment of state and federal accountability systems, and allowing the use of growth model measures in all states; accommodations in teacher qualifications and deference to state licensure procedures to take into account the challenges of staffing rural areas and high-need subjects; increasing the federal investment in state capacity, which would solidify the state-federal partnership in improving low-performing schools; transparency in all dealings, negotiations, and approvals between state and federal officials; and that Congress strictly adheres to its own timetable for completing NCLB reauthorization in 2007.
The National Association of Secondary School Principals’ NCLB Task Force, which includes a diverse body of principals and policy experts, released its legislative recommendations in June 2005. Many issues of importance to school leaders, such as adequate yearly progress (AYP), special education, data, assessments and testing, highly qualified teachers, and English language learners were addressed during the development of these recommendations. The recommendation calls for common-sense changes to the law that will allow for easier implementation at the school building level, while maintaining the law’s positive emphasis on reducing achievement gaps and increasing student achievement.
The National Conference of State Legislatures' Task Force on No Child Left Behind released Delivering the Promise: State Recommendations for Improving No Child Left Behind, which provides over 40 recommendations to help NCLB achieve its goal of narrowing the achievement gap among our nation's students. Recommendations focus on three themes: the federal role in education reform, adequate yearly progress for all students, including students with disabilities and English language learners, and flexibility for states to address unique schools and districts.
The National Education Association believes that the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is fundamentally flawed. It argues that NCLB undermines existing state and school district structures and authority, and shifts public dollars to the private sector through supplemental educational services and takeovers of public schools by for-profit companies. However, its stated goals -- to improve student achievement and help close the achievement and skills gaps that exist in our country -- are important to NEA and to society. NEA wants to retain the positive provisions of NCLB and change those that are flawed. This report offers five priorities that are crucial to realizing the goals of improving student achievement, closing the achievement gaps, and providing every child a quality teacher. These priorities are: accountability that rewards success and supports educators to help students learn; smaller class sizes to improve student achievement; quality educators in every classroom and school; students and schools supported by active and engaged parents, families, and communities; and resources to ensure a great public school for every child.
Local school boards across the nation welcome the goals of NCLB – including increased accountability for student performance. However, almost from the beginning, local school boards voiced concerns regarding NCLB implementation. Many school boards believe that some of the current provisions in the law do not recognize the complex factors that influence student performance. Others raise questions regarding the unintended consequences resulting from these provisions. Of major concern is the belief that the current accountability framework does not accurately or fairly assess student or school or school district performance. Local school boards continue to be concerned that unnecessary blame is being directed toward specific groups of students whose performance has resulted in the identification of schools as “in need of improvement ” and subject to more severe sanctions. The National School Board Association’s recommendations include: increasing the flexibility for states to use additional types of assessments for measuring AYP—including growth models; granting states more flexibility in assessing students with disabilities and students not proficient in English for AYP purposes; creating a student testing participation range, providing flexibility for uncontrollable variations in student attendance; allowing schools to target resources to those student populations who need the most attention by applying sanctions only when the same student group fails to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in the same subject for two consecutive years; ensuring that students are counted properly in assessment and reporting systems; allowing supplemental services to be offered in the first year of “improvement”; strengthening federal responsibility for funding; and requiring NCLB testing and reporting for non-public schools for students receiving Title I services.
Between September 2005 and January 2006, the Public Education Network (PEN) held a series of public hearings to give students, parents, and community members – audiences very much affected by the law, but usually left out of the policy debate – an opportunity to tell their side of the NCLB story. While education organizations and Congress hold forums and hearings to solicit
feedback from educators and school administrators about the impact of NCLB, they seldom look beyond schools to see the impact of the law on the public and on communities. But because schools play such a critical role in community life, understanding how the law affects students, families, and the broader community is critically instructive to policymakers and to others who are trying to make sure the law meets its goals. The hearings serve four purposes: (1) they provide venues through which a public record of the local capacity to implement NCLB can be compiled; (2) they serve as a means to inform and mobilize the public on issues pertaining to public education and what it takes to improve its quality; (3) they give PEN and its national partners the information needed to bring public voices and concerns into the debate about reshaping NCLB and (4) they create a public “résumé” for review by policymakers in the context of the law’s reauthorization. This report is a summary of those meetings.
This report provides recommendations from the US Department of Education on how to reauthorize No Child Left Behind. The authors argue that the following needs to be done in the reauthorization: a stronger effort must be made to close the achievement gap through high state standards and accountability; middle and high schools must offer more rigorous coursework that better prepares students for postsecondary education or the workforce; and states must be given flexibilities and new tools to restructure chronically underperforming schools, and families must be given more options. The US Department of Education concludes that the Bush administration will continue to work with Congress to give educators, policymakers and parents the tools to get the job done, without straying from NCLB’s core principles, including: all students reading and doing math at or above grade level by 2014; annual assessments and disaggregation of data to close the achievement gap; qualified teachers in core academic subjects in every classroom; and timely information and options for all parents.
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