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EDITORIALS

Too Many Ways to Fail

Posted Sept. 30, 2011, at 4:04 p.m.
Last modified Sept. 30, 2011, at 5:04 p.m.
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With rapidly growing numbers of schools in Maine and across the country labeled as needing improvement, a new approach to raising educational standards was clearly needed. So the president’s announcement last week that his administration was easing portions of the No Child Left Behind law was welcome. As was its pledge to return more control to local school systems.

Simply replacing one federal mandate with another is not a solution, however, so the Obama administration must follow through on its pledge to give states more power to determine the right solutions for their students.

“As a nation we have an obligation to make sure our children have the resources they need to learn,” President Barack Obama said during a briefing at the White House last week. “The goals behind No Child Left Behind were admirable. Higher standards are the right goal … but No Child Left Behind had some serious flaws that are hurting our children instead of helping them.”

The 2001 education law was well-meaning — its goal was to improve educational outcomes for all students. But, there were so many ways for schools to fail to meet standards — not having enough students in specific subgroups show up for tests, having too few students in other subgroups show improvements in their test scores — that it too often felt like an exercise in futility.

That’s why a move to more state control, as the president pledged, makes sense. But, as with NCLB, the key to the workability of any new system is how progress toward standards is measured.

Flexibility, the president said, was the new watchword. But there are still strict federal parameters that states must meet. Teacher evaluations must be linked to student performance, for example. This has been highly contentious in Maine and is likely to remain so even though it is strongly supported by Education Commissioner Stephen Bowen.

“Today’s announcement will provide important support to our efforts in Maine and in the other states,” Commissioner Bowen said last week. “It stresses the leadership role of states in developing the next generation of accountability measures. It stresses the continued importance of assessments and accountability, while calling for us to be smarter and more flexible about it — something we’ve been asking for years.”

This more cooperative approach holds promise. Guiding schools to avenues of success — rather than highlighting their shortcomings — must remain the focus.

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  • Anonymous

    Was this Kennedy’s aim when the law was written?

  • Anonymous

    Maine’s communities gave up local control over their children’s
    education to the state in the 1970′s and the state increasingly
    relinquished their sovereign educational responsibilities over to the
    Federal government in years since. The inept Federal Department of Education
    failed miserably and our children future has been forsaken. It’s time to
    do a reality check and reverse this past trend to end the insanity.
    Pandering politicians, District consolidations,  and increasing top end,
    far away bureaucracies favored towards the NEA unions are not the
    solution .. it is the problem.

  • Anonymous

    Much of the problem with NCLB was that schools, instead of accepting the fact that achievement levels were low and making swift moves to address that fact, decided to take the other tact of spending time and money fighting against the accountability systems.  In order to pass the test, teacher’s began teaching to the test instead trying to bring the student’s knowledge in a particular subject up the point where they could pass an assessment exam.  As a result, not much has changed so more and more schools are getting swallowed up by the rising tide of expectations.

  • Anonymous

    Quoting “The 2001 education law was well-meaning — its goal was to improve educational outcomes for all students.”

    Apparently the BDN has fallen under the spell that NCLB was well meaning. No, it wasn’t. It was  the result of ROBthePUBLICans trying to ram school  vouchers down our throats for the last 30 years..With NCLB they finally figured out how to do it…Under the guise of “helping those pathetic schools” NCLB was rolled out which put every public school in the nation on the conveyor belt to failure. 

    You might be able to avoid going on the “bad” list for a few years, but eventually we’ll get you through a combination of higher AYP targets, ridiculous rules, and poor methods of assessment…and once your on the bad list it’s almost impossible to get off…and eventually you reach penalties such that parents can pull their children from failing schools and enroll them in any school of choice…TA DA! VOUCHERS!!

    Of course this one-size-fits-none ROBthePUBLICan plan is a joke for Maine where those ‘other’ schools can be 100 miles away, but the ROBthePUBLICans didn’t care…They were here for vouchers, not an education.

    And for those who claim that some Dems had to go along with it…Politically they had to…Hard to come out for what’s right and then be painted by ROBthePublicans as “against education.”

    C’mon BDN…Stand up and get the story right.

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