The choice provisions—to transfer and to obtain supplemental services—are individual decisions made by parents on the basis of test score results. Perhaps the most troubling issue raised in the PEN hearings is NCLB’s unintended consequence of
pitting parents’ concerns for their children against their desire for acknowledgement and respect. This is not what the public wants to happen. When schools are stigmatized, students, parents, communities, and the public feel the pain in various ways.

Labeling schools as failing, or “needing improvement,” is a stigma that tears communities apart. Perhaps the theory is that, once labeled, communities and schools will rally and turn around. In a few instances, parents and students believed the labeling had increased parent involvement at the schools and heightened teachers’ attention to student needs. For the most part, however, students, parents, and communities become demoralized. School personnel panic and react in ways that divert resources from good instruction. Public education supporters have a more difficult challenge in raising local support for schools from taxpayers and community resources. Before attaching failing
labels to schools, a community representative from Erie, Pennsylvania, said that schools must have adequate resources. To do otherwise, “is cruel and it is unjust.”

Parents and students described conditions
in low-performing schools that help explain why
the schools have not been able to get better.
Inexperienced teachers are assigned to needy
students and schools, students often must
share outmoded textbooks, classrooms are overcrowded, computers are broken, and
teachers lack basic resources. A Philadelphia
high school student, who had a balanced view
of NCLB—“a good law that is badly implemented”—was critical of incompetent teachers but sympathetic toward others,
explaining that they needed more resources.
“You can be the best basketball player in the
world,” he told the hearing officers, “but nobody would know you unless you have a court and a basketball. That’s how it was in my high school career. We’ve got a lot of smart students in
West Philadelphia High School, it’s just that they
don’t have a lot of resources.”

Without knowing the context that schools
operate in, it is unfair to publicly label schools,
said a Los Angeles businesswoman. Because
the labeling encourages flight from the school, efforts to deal with the contexts that contribute
to its failure—internal and external—are undermined, she said. The context does not
always stem from urban blight. A Memphis
high school student, attending what he said
was called the “gem” of the city school system, felt the sting of labeling when his school did not make AYP because it houses the school system’s hearing impaired program. His private school friends teased him, and he only found out the background because he insisted upon an explanation from his principal. This student studied the issue and decided that the shorthand used in sign language did not prepare hearing impaired students for the state’s writing test. The public didn’t know this, however, and not llowing
for special circumstances, he said, undermines public faith in public education.

Adults in Memphis blamed the stigma of failure for demoralizing the community and discouraging economic investments. Said a great-grandmother, who was proud of the standards the schools once held, even though in a segregated system, and sure that the schools her children and grandchildren attend will improve:

A representative of the Memphis Urban League, as well as testimony from other sites, also called for balancing the public accounting of schools.“ We don’t need to overly stigmatize,” she said,“ and we know there are success stories in every group at every school, and we need to hear those stories….There are students succeeding and parents working diligently and educators working diligently in every one of our schools. We need to lift up those examples and help them learn from each other.”

The Memphis Urban League and the Business Council of New York State were two groups that had acted upon a strong recommendation from several hearing sites—that progress and success be the basis or part of the assessment of schools. Both groups sponsor recognition programs. Other witnesses, however, wanted specific changes in
NCLB that would take progress on improvement into consideration when assessing students and schools, as in a value-added system.

All those who commented on the negative effect of stigmatizing schools and communities also strongly supported accountability. They recognized the dilemma of not tolerating failure but keeping community hopes up. The answers seemed to be two-fold: give the schools the resources they must have to improve and use the strengths that parents and communities are waiting to provide.