On Thursday, the Massachusetts Board of Education voted to seek to waive the No Child Left Behind program and replace it with requirements of their own.
“The federal system demands perfection. It expects every school and district to get 100 percent of its students proficient,” Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester said after the vote.
About 40 other states have sought a waiver for similar reasons, as the 2002 law set a goal for all public schools receiving federal funding to have all their students proficient in reading and math by 2014, a goal deemed by most to be both unreasonable and unrealistic.
Although Massachusetts still wants to replace NCLB with its own set of requirements, any measure that can be taken to distance public education from the logistical train wreck of No Child Left Behind is a step in the right direction. The program placed an unfair burden on teachers to bring their students up to par, many of whom lack the resources and opportunities to improve the caliber of their education. It is completely unfair to demand the same standards of public schools that fall under different demographics and work with different types of students.
What remains an issue is the nature of the replacement program Massachusetts is considering. Ideally, they should move away from using standardized testing as a method by which to measure student achievement altogether. Testing should not be the be-all, end-all measuring stick for student progress; if anything, it should only be a contributing factor. Students are not defined by their test scores and should not be reduced to a number on a score sheet when the government attempts to measure their progress.
States who have not taken the step toward waiving NCLB requirements should follow Massachusetts’s example and take the initiative to rid themselves of this burden on public education. The Obama administration, as much as they espouse concern for the flaws in the NCLB program, have understandably placed the issue on the political back burner in light of recent events and problems with the economy and foreign policy. For these reasons, states need to take charge on this issue and remedy the problem created by the Bush administration.
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Massachusetts should join California, in demanding a “no strings attached” waiver from destructive NCLB provisions, for every state, until and unless NCLB is renewed by congress. The waiver is a false promise, under the stealth takover conditions the US DOE has unilaterally put on it.
This editorial is misleading because it implies that states might “escape” the disasterous demands of NCLB by applying for Duncan’s extra-legal exemption. The conditions attached to the “waiver”, however, are for the state to accept the worst provisions of NCLB up-front.
We should be fighting to actually free our schools and our children from “this trainwreck of a law”, as Duncan himself has put it.