an open letter to Senator Obama re: NCLB

[ulysses]

Dear Senator Obama,

You stand to be elected the 44th President of the United States in a mere three weeks. Not only that, but you also stand to have the backing of an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, perhaps even
a filibuster-proof Senate. Given the state of the nation, I'm not sure whether or not congratulations or condolences on your impending win are in order, so I'll settle for thanks. Thank you. Thank you.

The Bush administration will have left fires, both small and huge, burning in a variety of places when it leaves office in January. Extinguishing those fires - Iraq, the terrorism threat, the economy, the list goes on and on - will undoubtedly have to be the first priority of your administration.

I would ask you, however, to consider, and consider soon, what is to become of the No Child Left Behind Act; or, perhaps more bluntly, what is to become of our public schools. This is not an issue that will wait until 2014.

I mention 2014, of course, because that is when NCLB requires that all American school children be grade-level proficient in reading and math. I'm certain that I'm not telling you anything you don't know when I say that that is an unreasonable, and unreachable, goal and has always been. Even schools that have consistently succeeded in making Adequate Yearly Progress in the past - excellent schools, with dedicated staffers - are now finding themselves on the "Needs Improvement" list, with more schools to be added at alarming rates in the years to come.

Of course, part of what drives the push behind No Child Left Behind is international test scores, which consistently show American children falling behind their peers in other nations. This, of course, is specious: no other nation in the world so dutifully reports on the ability of their most economically and socially neglected children to read at grade level or to understand word problems the likes of which they've never encountered in their lives outside the classroom.

So the first education reform needed - a massive reinvestment in the inner cities, the poor, the working poor, and the rural poor...call it a new War on Poverty - doesn't even affect NCLB directly.

Beyond that, let me start by saying that I am a special education teacher. I like accountability. I want to be held accountable for my students' achievement, and for my school to be held accoutable. I don't want to return to the time when students with disabilities were carted off to the basement corner room and forgotten. My kids can and do achieve, that I will continue to push them to do more.

But we can afford to change the punitive measures that remove resources from struggling schools that need more, not less, of them. I spent three years in a middle school just west of downtown Atlanta, a chronically "failing" school in a painfully poor neighborhood in which threats of punishment, whether leveled at the students or at the teachers, meant little. We need education reform that offers supports where they are needed. It isn't overstating the point to say that our future as a nation depends upon it.