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Obama's plan to shape up the education system would give states more responsibility By Kathleen Mcgrory and Hannah Sampson President Obama's overhaul of the No Child Left Behind education law will focus more on raising the bar for students and teachers -- and less on punishing failing schools. That's something the heads of Florida's two largest school districts said they can get behind. "Overall, this is a step in the right direction," Miami-Dade Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said. "It provides a laudable goal. And it provides an approach to student achievement that recognizes growth, rather than the ability to meet an arbitrarily established cut." But South Florida teachers unions, like their counterparts nationally, criticized the bill for not going far enough to promote reform. "This is not a program that is going to improve achievement for children," said Karen Aronowitz of the United Teachers of Dade. "The bill goes forward with some of the worst practices we currently have." If approved by Congress, Obama's bill will revamp the federal No Child Left Behind legislation, which was signed into law in 2002 by President George W. Bush. No Child Left Behind aimed to have all schoolchildren on grade level by 2014. But it came under intense fire in recent years, in part for labeling more than a third of all public schools as failing. Teachers also said the law focused too much on standardized testing as a way to evaluate teacher performance and school progress. "The previous law was too punitive, too prescriptive," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Monday. "It lowered the bar for teachers and too often, lowered the bar for students. We have to flip all that." Obama's plan gives local districts and state education departments more control -- and responsibility -- when it comes to school reform. Districts and state education departments will now have the flexibility to decide how to best fix chronically failing schools, rather than following an approach handed down from the federal government. Additionally, the plan: - Requires all high-school graduates to be ready for college and careers by 2020, instead of requiring all children to be on grade level by 2014. - Evaluates school achievement based on both performance and growth. - Puts more money toward teacher training and mentoring programs. - Rewards progress and excellence in high-performing schools, while also keeping a close watch on middling schools. Broward Schools Superintendent Jim Notter was most enthusiastic about the plan to reward successful schools and the proposal to measure student growth and progress. "Those are radical changes," he said. "Although to the American public, they may seem like a shrug of a shoulder, those of us who have been under the unfair weight of NCLB certainly see this as the light at the end of the tunnel -- not the train coming at us." In addition to the proposed changes, the Obama administration would like to increase federal education spending by about $4 billion. Unlike in years past, however, much of the money would be distributed competitively as a means of rewarding innovation. The blueprint goes before the House Education and Labor Committee on Wednesday. It is too soon to tell how the proposed law would change Florida's own system of school accountability, the A+ Plan for Education. The Associated Press contributed to this report. |
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