We’ve heard tonight a lot of discussion about the testing provisions of the NCLB and the stress that it causes for students, in particular. What we haven’t heard so much about is...the foundational requirements for [accountability] that all students have full and equal access to highly qualified teachers. It’s fundamentally unfair to hold students accountable for test score gains if we’re not providing them with highly qualified teachers.
Tara Kini, Public Advocates, Inc.

While the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act may set the right priorities for public education, California residents want policymakers to know that the strategies used to implement the law are either insufficient or in need of a reality check. This theme permeated a hearing held in San Francisco that gave students, parents, and community leaders – 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.

When it comes to enacting laws, the public voice should not be an afterthought as it was in the case of NCLB, commented Katie Albright, director of the Public Engagement Initiative of the San Francisco Education Fund, at the opening of the hearing. She spoke to an audience of more than 200 people, dozens of whom stood in line waiting to testify along with formal panels of witnesses.

NCLB’s Positive Points
For the most part, witnesses lauded NCLB for its ambitious goals and for some of its specific provisions. At the very least, a few noted, it has focused the public’s attention on education.

The strongest support came from Russlynn Ali, director of The Education Trust–West, whose parent group in Washington, DC, negotiated many of the law’s provisions. Despite its imperfections, she believes that NCLB “is working to focus more attention, energy, and resources on improving the education of poor and minority students than at any time since Brown v. Board of Education.” Like many state accountability systems, California’s Academic Performance Index (API) “accommodated persistent patterns of school failure,” according to Ali, while NCLB’s adequate yearly progress (AYP) accountability requirements actually force schools to do something about the achievement gaps. Acknowledging that the law is underfunded and needs more flexibility, she warned that proposals to make it easier to implement could mask underperformance and even perpetuate achievement gaps.

The accountability mandates of NCLB are an important tool, testified Kim Shipp of the Oakland parent advocacy group. “That accountability,” she said, “says that we are not going to let one group overshadow another. Everybody must perform, and everybody must get a quality education.” Monique Dollonne, a parent activist from Ventura, accused district and state officials of undermining the accountability provisions of NCLB and creating a climate in which its provisions are ”booby trapped.” She called for a “strong NCLB paired with an unquestionable accountability process.”

Flaws in Test-Based Accountability
Most witnesses, however, were troubled by the NCLB mandates, especially in the areas of test-based accountability, teacher quality, parent choice, and parent access to information. California’s test-based accountability system, now used to determine AYP, along with the addition of high school graduation exams, seemed unfair to some of the students who testified.

To reward students, teachers, schools, and school districts that test well, and then turn around and label, hold back, and discourage those that don’t, goes against what NCLB seems to be about, said Leslye Lugo, a student at San Francisco’s School of the Arts. Roger Le, a Balboa High School student, pointed out that students with disabilities and English-language learners are being held to the same testing standards – even though they may know the content, they are required to take a test they do not understand. He also objected to the “standardization” of the curriculum because of testing: “If you just teach those standards and not really work on critical thinking skills...that really matter to students, then what you’re getting is a bunch of kids remembering stuff....If they’re unable to have critical thinking skills for themselves and actively perform those skills in school, then what really are we doing here?”



Adult witnesses were equally frustrated with test-based accountability. A teacher certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards described enrichment activities, along with curriculum content, that have been eliminated at his school because the school did not meet its AYP target even though student scores had improved. “All I’m allowed to do is read the script and hand out dittos,” he said. Sandra Halladey, founder of Parents for Public Schools in San Francisco, accused the test-based system fostered by NCLB of “squeezing out the love of learning in our children.”

Eric Mar, past president of the San Francisco school board, submitted testimony citing several research studies on the negative effect that testing has on learning. Multiple-choice technology cannot measure attributes such as deeper understanding, subtlety of thought, creativity, leadership, or perseverance. As Mar explained in his written testimony: “The stated purpose of the No Child Left Behind Act and state testing mandates is to raise standards of academic achievement. Yet, the law is doing just the opposite for the vast majority of low-income children of color throughout the United States.”

Some student witnesses proposed alternatives to the current assessment system. In eloquently written Spanish, several high school students submitted testimony asking that they be tested on content in their native language. Other students suggested grade point averages, student demonstrations and portfolios, and more accommodations for special education students as better testing strategies. Todd Wanerman, a San Francisco parent and pre-school teacher, said that when it came to selecting a school for his children, he did not depend on test scores:

Test scores were not so important to us. At our children’s elementary school, children who are learning English and students with special needs both tend to bring test scores down. Yet, we feel the presence of these members of our community greatly increases the quality of our children’s education.

The Teaching Crisis
NCLB requires all teachers of core academic subjects to be “highly qualified” by the end of the 2005–06 school year. The definition of highly qualified is primarily left up to states, with the federal law stating that teachers must have a degree and certification in the core subjects to which they are assigned, and must meet any additional state standards such as passing a content test.

According to witnesses, California faces two major issues regarding highly qualified teachers: one, there aren’t enough of them, and, two, the state definition falls far short of what “highly qualified” should mean.



Access to a highly qualified teacher is the most critical factor to student achievement, said Tara Kini of Public Advocates, but she cited a report showing that 10,000 teachers in California are teaching with emergency permits, and one in five teachers assigned to minority schools is not fully prepared. Other witnesses called for equal distribution of “highly qualified” teachers to students in high-poverty schools to help make NCLB work. Linda Shore, director of the Exploratorium Teacher Institute, also said NCLB was addressing a “staggering” problem that existed in California for a long time, namely, an insufficient number of new teachers replacing those who retire:

It is estimated that at least 30,000 teachers across the state – or 10 percent of the workforce – have not been formally prepared to teach the subjects they are assigned. In the sciences, the situation is even more serious where surveys suggest that 25–35 percent of the state’s teaching workforce is teaching out of field. In large urban districts serving traditionally underserved at-risk students, the number of unqualified teachers may well exceed 50 percent.

Placing qualified teachers in schools is much more complicated than NCLB allows for, Shore said. California’s middle school science curriculum, for example, is multidisciplinary, meaning science teachers must pass at least three, and as many as five, individual subject matter exams. Most of the exams are at the high school level. Because of the lack of high school science teachers, teachers are often assigned out of field, so even though they may have certification in biology, they are assigned to teach chemistry. Professional development that will enable teachers to pass content exams out of their field costs about $3,000 per teacher, she said, but state and federal funding to help teachers has dried up.

Good teachers know more than content, many witnesses added. Leslye Lugo of the School of Fine Arts told of her “misfortune” in having a math teacher who may have known the content but “was disrespectful to the Latinos, African- Americans, and underprivileged youth who made up half the class.” She had to repeat the math class and only passed thanks to the tutoring and cultural empowerment offered by Mission Dignity, a community-based organization. “You’re testing teachers’ knowledge of a subject,” she said, “but you also need to make sure they know about the students, where they come from.”

This concern over a teacher’s “cultural competency” was mentioned by several other witnesses. As Omega Lockhart, an Oasis High School student put it: “highly qualified” means nothing if a teacher has “a phobia of the neighborhood, or the predominant population, or even the culture.” Parent Lateefah Simon described her children’s teachers, experienced and beginners, who had skills that were effective in diverse classrooms but these skills were not taught in college classrooms. “They both knew how to build a learning community that’s holistic and where children...from different socio-economic groups, and with language barriers, and different learning styles know how to learn from one another and push each other academically.”

One substitute teacher who has been successful in diverse classrooms testified that he would not try for certification because of NCLB, which has put “scripted reading” in the place of “the ability of teachers to teach creatively with thought and with caring.” Others told of experienced principals and teachers leaving education because of the narrowing of the curriculum and what they considered unfair accountability strategies.

Parent and Community Engagement
One precept of NCLB is that the more involved and informed parents become, the more they will be able to pressure schools to improve and/or make choices about appropriate interventions for their children, such as transferring to more successful schools or selecting providers for supplemental educational services (SES). None of this appears to be working well in California.

Many parents and parent advocates testified that, despite hundreds of references to parent involvement in NCLB, there has been little if any change in school and district policies. Activist Kim Shipp said that NCLB put “stronger teeth” into federal policies on parent involvement, but “I’m . nding that this aspect of the law has not caught up with state departments of education, school districts, and de. nitely not at the school level.” Parent activist Monique Dollonne had the same complaint:

Our minority parents are...being left behind, untrained. Districts are supposed to spend 1 percent to train parents, [but] this is an irony in the law. Districts are not interested in relinquishing any share of their power over the educational process. The law mandates it, but no one is there to enforce it, so the majority of parents have no clue about their legal responsibility....There is no structure defending parents’ rights, no effective complaints procedure. NCLB has to be reformed and reevaluated to serve the public....

This inattention to parent involvement and to communications with parents particularly affects language-minority parents, according to several witnesses. While some districts, like San Francisco, have given translation services a priority, others rely on the generosity of parent volunteers, testified Christina Wong, an Asian-American activist. A survey conducted by her group found that even in San Francisco, two-thirds or more of the Asian-American families said they did not receive sufficient help in communicating with schools and teachers. A majority of parents, she said, were unaware of school site councils, English literacy advisory councils, and the district’s parent advisory council.

Students as well as parents said that communications regarding NCLB were wordy and confusing. One student said students and families should receive updated information about the act in a variety of languages so that they would “be able to speak up about it and give their ideas and their feedback.”

When schools are consistently low-performing, NCLB calls for them to be “reconstituted.” But one parent said parents were not being informed about the reasons for or the process of reconstitution. In Oakland, parents had to organize and force their involvement in the reconstitution of more than a dozen elementary schools. Even though NCLB mandates that teachers and parents should be involved in restructuring such schools, the district turned schools into charters without notifying parents.

Dollonne of the Ventura district said that notices regarding SES were also a problem, either arriving late or with confusing content, and that SES providers were not being held accountable. She said that school personnel tended to be hostile toward providers of tutoring services, and, therefore, there was little collaboration with them. Representatives of community-based organizations said their groups should be given more responsibility for SES tutoring because they are close to their communities. The transfer policy in NCLB apparently was not an issue for witnesses at this hearing, but full funding of NCLB, and especially greater funding for schools that are low-performing, were frequently mentioned.

The California hearing was one of nine hearings on NCLB held across the country from September 2005 to January 2006. Th is is the second set of hearings organized by PEN to convey the public’s concerns and recommendations to policymakers in advance of the scheduled 2007 reauthorization of the law.

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1	Title I Report, Vol. 7 Iss. 4 (LRP Publications 2006). Data for columns 1-6 were taken from this report.
2	California Department of Education, State Accountability Report Card 2004-2005. http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/ac/sc/documents/reportcard0405.pdf
3	National Education Association, Rankings & Estimates Update (2005). Figures are computed from NEA Research, Estimates databank. The figures are based on reports through August 2005.
1	National Education Association, Rankings & Estimates Update (2005). Figures are computed from NEA Research, Estimates databank. The figures are based on reports through August 2005. This source provided the Student Enrollment and Per Pupil Expenditure data.
2	Hoffman, L. and Sable, J. (2006). Public Elementary and Secondary Students, Staff, Schools, and School Districts: School Year 2003–04 (NCES 2006-307). U.S. Department of Education. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics. Data were taken from this source for the following columns: Students in Title I Schools, Students Eligible for Free/Reduced Lunch, Students with Disabilities, English Language Learners.
3	Public High School Graduation and College-Readiness Rates: 1991-2002, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (2005). Figure calculated using the Greene method, which estimates the number of students who enter a ninth-grade class, makes some adjustments for changes in population, and divides the resulting number into the number of students who actually graduated with a regular diploma. It is not a four-year graduation rate; as long as there is not a substantial change in the number of students in each class that graduates in more than four years, such students are included in the calculation.