Schools Carry That Weight of Bush Magical Mystery Tour

In less than a year, the Bush administration’s Magical Mystery Tour approach to education will come to an end. The belief that schools magically improve without resources or funding or relationships with educators, administrators or school districts – all that will fade like a flashback. The mystery of how this Administration believed it could sell a policy that says fewer resources plus reduced time to teach plus more testing equaled greater student achievement will never be solved.

Listen to the podcast, and send your questions to Joel@nea.org.

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The transcript follows:

Hi. This is Joel. Welcome to the podcast.

If President Bush and Education Secretary Spellings had to use a song to describe their funding policy for No Child Left Behind they might have picked the Beatles’ “Can’t Buy Me Love”. You know “'cause I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love.”

But most educators and state and local officials would instead pick another Beatles’ song, “Money” and think of these words as music to their ears:

“Money don't get everything it's true.
What it don't get I can't use.
So gimme money that's what I want.”

It’s true. Money “don’t get everything” needed to help close achievement gaps, improve student achievement for all students, or ensure all students have great public schools, but without the resources and investments needed so educators can get the job done, we won’t reach the goals.

Yes, it takes money to pay for smaller class sizes, expanded professional development for teachers, after-school programs, quality PreK, new textbooks, technology, and modern schools.

Yet in each of the past three school years, an average of 63 percent of school districts have received LESS Title I money than they got the previous year.

Title I provides federal money for extra reading and math help for educationally disadvantaged students in schools where low-income students are concentrated.

These cutbacks should not be a surprise because since the enactment of NCLB in 2002, funding for Title I is more than $54 BILLION below what was proposed in NCLB. And sadly, President Bush’s budget for next year would further shortchange children and public schools under Title I by another $10.7 billion; more than 4 million low-income children will NOT receive the full range of services and programs they need and deserve.

That’s not even the worst of it. When you compare the overall mandates of the law to the overall money committed, by the end of the Bush years the funding short fall will be more than $85 billion.

In a report last year, the Center on Education Policy found that in recent years approximately 80% of districts have assumed costs to carry out NCLB for which they are not being reimbursed by the federal government.

NEA and eight school districts have filed a lawsuit challenging the right of the federal government to force states and school districts to spend their own funds to meet the NCLB mandates. The suit is still pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals with several states now supporting our effort.

The funding squeeze becomes worse each year as the federal mandates become more stringent. Annual standardized testing of students in reading and math originally was only required for three grades -- once in elementary, once in middle school, and once in high school. Starting in the 2005-06 school year, every state had to test every student annually in reading and math in seven grades - each of grades 3-8 and once in high school. Starting in the 2007-08 school year, each state had to annually test students in at least three grades in science. All teachers of core academic subjects had to be highly qualified by the end of the 2006-07 school tear. And of course, by the 2013-14 school year, 100% of all students must be proficient in reading and math.

Mandates piling up, dollars draining away. It may be the worst thing the Bush Administration has done to public education. And what has the President proposed in his budget for next year?. How about over $1 billion for two new private school voucher programs. How about eliminating funds for arts education and parent information centers? How about cutting state grants for safe and drug-free schools by 66%?

In less than a year, the Bush Administration’s Magical Mystery Tour approach to education will come to an end. The belief that schools magically improve without resources or funding or relationships with educators, administrators or school districts – all that will fade like a flashback. The mystery of how this administration believed it could sell a policy that says fewer resources plus reduced time to teach plus more testing equaled greater student achievement will never be solved.

The Bush education policy tour isn’t over, but it has more than lost its way, now it’s just plain lost.

Education Smackdown -- No Child Left BeHype vs. No Child Left BeReal

It’s time for Congress to reject the hype and outright falsehoods too often marking the final months of Bush policy.

Listen to the podcast, and send your questions to Joel@nea.org.

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The transcript follows:

Joel Packer Has All the Answers Podcast -- May 13, 2008

Hi. I’m Joel Packer. Welcome to the podcast.

Get ready for some numbers. I promise you’ll be smarter in just a few minutes with our famous Joel Packer Has All the Answers individualized instruction. And there will be no test needed to move on to the next podcast.

What’s the main objective of No Child Left Behind? Increasing student test scores. Sure, the law is more than 1,000 pages long and contains some 50 programs, most of them unfunded mandates by the way. But the major “bright line” to quote Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, is that by the year 2014, every single student – 100 percent - will be proficient on statewide reading and math tests.

Every year from the start of the law in the 2002-03 school year through the year when all children will be above average and living in Lake Wobegon, increasing percentages of students must score proficient or higher on these two tests.

So, has it worked? Are the children now all above average, just as in Garrison Keillor’s fantasy world?

Secretary Spellings says everything is fine. She says scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have increased, so she says NCLB is “like Ivory soap: It’s 99.9 percent pure…there’s not much needed in the way of change.” Even President Bush said, “These scores confirm that No Child Left Behind is working.”

But is it?

The percentage of fourth graders who scored at the proficient or higher level on NAEP only increased by 2% between 1998 and 2002 (pre-NCLB). Yet from 2002 to 2007 - after NCLB began - the increase in the percent proficient was also just 2%. Based on 4th grade math scores, the percent proficient rose by 9% from 2000 to 2003 but only 8 points from 2003 to 2007.

For 8th graders in reading, the percent proficient improved by only 1% between 1998 and 2002 but actually went down by 2 points between 2002 and 2007. The only area where performance was better post-NCLB than before was in 8th grade math, where the percent proficient went up just two points between 2000 and 2003, but rose 4 points between 2003 and 2007.

FairTest co-Executive Director Monty Neill criticized the Administration for its claims saying, “NAEP shows educational improvement across the nation slowed significantly since NCLB went into effect…despite the fact that curriculum narrowed in many schools to little more than test preparation in reading and math.”

The NY Times in a September 2007 article said, “…gains in reading achievement have been marginal, with performance declining among eighth graders… The results also showed that the nation had made only incremental progress in narrowing historic gaps in achievement between white and minority students, a fundamental goal of the federal law.”

The Civil Rights project at UCLA (formerly at Harvard) in a 2006 study, Tracking Achievement Gaps and Assessing the Impact of NCLB on the Gaps, reached the following conclusions:

• NCLB did not have a significant impact on improving reading and math achievement across the nation and states.
• NCLB has not helped the nation and states significantly narrow the achievement gap.
  The Bush administration’s hard spin on its failed education policy doesn’t straighten out away from NCLB issues either. Spellings recently said about the Reading First program, “If ever there was a program that was rooted in research and science and fact, this is it,” she said. “This is [like] the cure for cancer.” Two months later her own Department’s research arm issued a report saying the Reading First program had no real effect on reading comprehension in Grades 1-3.

It’s time for Congress to reject the hype and outright falsehoods too often marking the final months of Bush policy.

It’s time to fundamentally overhaul NCLB and shift its focus from testing, labeling, and punishing. It’s time to support states and districts to build capacity, use comprehensive meaningful measures of student learning and school quality, and provide resources for proven programs like smaller class size.

And finally, it’s especially time to stop pretending when it comes to closing the achievement gaps – to allow school systems flexibility to put in place appropriate interventions targeted to the underlying problems in struggling schools – instead of failed one-size-fits-all mandates.

Thanks very much. I’m Joel Packer.

Welcome to Joel Packer Has All the Answers

In the inaugural podcast, Joel explains why he's here, why he's focusing on the No Child Left Behind law, and how the law became so toxic. But he needs your questions -- so ask Joel@nea.org!

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The transcript follows:

Joel Packer Has All the Answers Podcast - May 1, 2008

Welcome to the podcast. I’m Joel Packer, Director of Education Policy and Practice at the National Education Association.

For more than 20 years I’ve been at NEA helping to represent the views of educators to the Congress and four different presidential administrations. Our goal over the next several months is to keep you informed and updated on the No Child Left Behind Act and to give you a sense of what we can do together to make a difference in education policy.

Let me start by saying I don’t have all the answers, but I do know why they picked this name.We are determined to be interactive. There’s a national dialogue about this law and that dialogue is going to be reflected here. Having answers means I’ll be getting questions - and you better believe, with a title like that, if I don’t HAVE the answers, I’ll get them. But the title also means I’ll be asking some questions and sharing YOUR answers. We may even have a guest from time to time. There’s an email address on the website nea.org and at the end of this podcast where you can ask me specific questions, suggest topics and share stories and tips and your experience under this law.

So why focus on No Child Left Behind?First of all, since the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, nothing has had a more sweeping effect than NCLB. From testing to funding to the curriculum and more, NCLB reaches out and touches some aspects of almost every school.

NCLB passed Congress with overwhelmingly bipartisan support in 2001, but controversy and confusion over the law among educators and the general public grows every year. And support has rapidly eroded. Even the House of Representatives Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, one of the original four authors of the law, recently said that NCLB “has become the most negative brand in America.”

While the law officially expires September 30, it is virtually certain that due to divisions between Congress and the President, divisions in Congress between Democrats and Republicans, as well as divisions within each party, that the law will not be renewed this year. The reality however is that the law doesn’t really expire or go away. As long as Congress continues to fund the many NCLB programs including Title I, Teacher Quality grants, and after school, the law’s requirements and mandates stay in effect.

What this means for all of us is a chance to influence the way the law is rewritten in the coming months into next year. Yes, 2008 is an election year and elections can make a difference in shaping policy. But this podcast won’t be about politics or elections. We’ll be talking about how the law has affected your schools and students and communities and how we can create federal policies that help rather than hurt.

Why has NCLB become so toxic? We’ll explore the reasons in depth in upcoming episodes, but here’s a brief list:

• NCLB has failed in its own fundamental purpose – to raise student test scores and close achievement gaps.NCLB is narrowing the curriculum.
• NCLB is too focused on standardized tests.
• NCLB is a severely underfunded mandate that is shortchanging our students and public schools.
• NCLB will eventually result in almost all schools failing.

In case you can’t tell, the National Education Association opposes the law and is leading the way to a fundamental overhaul. We were the first national organization to propose substantive changes and helped organize a coalition of 144 groups calling for changes. We initiated a lawsuit challenging the unfunded mandate provisions of the law and have worked with members of Congress from both parties to draft bills to change the law. There are actually 134 bills on NCLB pending in Congress that we support

…So there’s our first podcast. Stay tuned to nea.org and please, if you have a question you’d like addressed on future podcasts, a comment, or an idea or experience to share with our vast national audience – Hi Mom! – send an email to joel@nea.org. That’s joel j-o-e-l @nea.org.

Thanks.