Federal Issues Council

No Child Left Behind Act (part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act)

At issue: CSBA has launched its Fix NCLB, Phase II campaign to advocate for needed changes in the No Child Left Behind Act, which is up for reauthorization this year. Five years after the law’s enactment, it’s painfully clear that many requirements are unrealistic. Especially problematic are requirements that all children test proficient in math and reading by 2014 and that 95 percent of all students take the benchmark tests, which penalizes schools in California when parents exercise their legal rights to opt children out of testing.

Pressure to raise test scores has forced schools to focus almost exclusively on English language arts and math, dramatically cutting programs for the arts, science, history and social science, and physical education. The law makes no provision for California’s own accountability system, implemented before NCLB was introduced, which gives schools credit for academic growth. It’s also extremely difficult to accurately assess the performance of students learning English and students with disabilities.

CSBA’s position:
• It’s crucial that Congress use NCLB reauthorization as an opportunity to fully fund the law and to fix it by instituting realistic policy objectives, multiple achievement measures and much greater state and local flexibility.

What California needs:
• Greater flexibility to use alternate methods of defining student performance that integrate California’s accountability system with NCLB measures.
• Ability to hire excellent teachers. NCLB’s definition of “highly qualified teacher” must be amended so that excellent career and technical education teachers and special education teachers qualify.
• Flexibility to use alternate assessments for English learners and to permit disabled students to take modified tests when their Individual Education Programs recommend such accommodations.
• Freedom from cumbersome bureaucratic requirements.