Resolution seeks Legislature’s support for changes to NCLB

As a highlight of CSBA’s annual Legislative Action Conference, more than 300 school board members from around the state came to Sacramento this week to urge the state Legislature to support urgently needed changes to the federal government’s No Child Left Behind Act.

Ongoing state budget deliberations, high school graduation requirements and other issues were also raised in meetings with legislators, but NCLB’s immense impact on public schools throughout California and across the country prompted the association to put the federal education law on the state legislative agenda.

Congress adopted NCLB in 2001 to reauthorize the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Schools Act. Championed and signed by President Bush five years ago, the far-reaching law requires every student in every public school to achieve proficiency in core academic subjects by the year 2014, and it establishes escalating penalties for schools and districts that fall short of that goal. It also establishes an “adequate yearly progress” measure of success that conflicts with California’s Academic Performance Index, which is geared to measure growth in learning by individual students. NCLB is up for reauthorization in Congress this year.

“NCLB reauthorization may be on a fast track, and therefore we must act very quickly,” CSBA President Kathy Kinley told Legislative Action participants. Also the president of the Chaffey Joint Union High School District Board of Education in San Bernardino County, Kinley noted that her own district is listed for Program Improvement under NCLB simply because two parents chose to opt their children out of tests that figure in NCLB’s performance calculations.

Assembly member Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, has introduced Assembly Joint Resolution 23 urging the Legislature to support greater flexibility in a reauthorized federal education law.

“More than four years of operational experience in implementing the NCLB has resulted in unintended consequences, including the identification of some of California’s highest-performing schools and school districts as being ‘in need of improvement,” Hancock’s resolution says in part.

CSBA is urging local board of education members throughout the state to ask their legislators to coauthor AJR 23.

Related links:

• Download AJR 23 here
• Find background information, a sample board resolution and more at CSBA’s Fix NCLB campaign.