By Tom
There’s a good reason why they don’t make movies about quiet, level-headed subordination: people would rather watch a group of oppressed college students stand up to authority and go down fighting in a blaze of rowdy mayhem than watch those same kids curb their excesses, buckle down and apply themselves to their studies.
Likewise, when the federal government applies pressure to a state in order to force compliance to an education agenda with which that state disagrees, the natural impulse is to stand up for our integrity and accept whatever consequences might follow.
And that’s exactly what happened in Washington. Arne Duncan followed through on his threat to withdraw our waiver from NCLB because our legislature didn’t mandate the use of standardized test scores in our teacher evaluation system. We stood up to our oppressor and lost. And now we face the consequences.
Here’s what that looks like in my fourth grade classroom. I have a student named Lamar who began the year reading seven words a minute. He struggled with basic addition facts. He had no idea how to write a sentence and his behavior was keeping himself and his classmates from learning.
Lamar now reads 70 words per minute. He can solve long division problems and add fractions. Last week he wrote a story with a credible main character, a clear setting and a cohesive plot. His behavior isn’t perfect, but it no longer compromises his learning.
Although I would love to claim credit for this turnaround, I can’t. Lamar gets thirty minutes of extra help for reading fluency every morning; he meets with a small group for reading comprehension and writing skills; he has a ten-minute meeting every day with a para-educator to go over his behavior and study skills; he meets with a math specialist for 45 minutes every afternoon. In other words, Lamar gets as much support as our school can possibly throw his way.
The reason we’re able to do this is that our school qualifies for Title 1 funding under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. When our state was granted a waiver from NCLB, the previous restrictions for how that money was spent were removed. Consequently, our school was free to spend money on kids like Lamar as we saw fit.
And it’s working.
But now that waiver has been replaced and Title 1 money comes with a lot of strings. Instead of paying for learning support and para-educator time, we now have to spend part of that money for teacher training and private tutoring. With all due respect to teacher trainers and private tutors, I doubt Lamar will benefit from either one as much as he’s benefiting from his current program.
I like standing up to authority and sticking it to the man as much as the next guy. But I’d much rather see Lamar grow up to be the first person in his family to go to college. And when he gets there, I’d like him go a little crazy and make a few mistakes; and then learn from those mistakes, buckle down, finish school and become a quiet, level-headed family man.
But that just got a little harder.
Tom, I agree with you. I feel like the impulse to resist “Big brother” overshadowed the consideration of all the pros and cons.
I think the feds are using children (like Lamar) as a way to blackmail states into a policy that would, in the long run, be even more damaging to the system as a whole. This would have been the cracked door that a future change would kick open.
I don’t believe for a second that aren’t other ways to make up for that flexibility in Title I funds. My own superintendent told me that the district’s reserve can make up for any shortcoming that this inaction (not changing the TPEP law) may cause, and we’re in a high poverty area with a significant amount of money impacted.
Well said, Mark; in a rational environment I would agree with you. But what’s happening here isn’t rational.
Although I disagree with him, I honestly believe that Duncan sees his policy as the best way to advance education. And frankly, I don’t think modifying TPEP will have as much impact as we fear, especially considering that we won’t even be able to use SBAC test scores until there’s a new administration.
For me it’s all about weighing the costs and benefits: the cost borne by Lamar and his ilk simply outweigh the benefits of keeping TPEP as is.
This is absolute proof of the flaws in NCLB. I get your concern about Lamar and the thousands of kids like him who will now be underserved, and this certainly is the collateral damage of the decision not to change the language in the law. Like I mentioned in my post, I’m not trying to minimize that.
What needs to change is the policy at the federal level. Taking funds away as punishment is utterly illogical. That’s like you saying to Lamar, “you don’t read well enough” and then taking away his books. Sadly, that is literally exactly what the federal policy is doing, and now unfortunately we will have real, tangible examples of the failure of this policy.
Tom, I know you and I are on different sides of this, and I understand and respect your position. For me, it isn’t as much about sticking it to the man as enabling the inherent flaws of the policy to expose themselves. Until now, with so many states earning waivers, the stupidity of the policy has been masked by such granted noncompliance. People tried to expose the flaws of this policy through reasoned argument, and that didn’t work, so now the federal government is choosing to use children such as Lamar as pawns in a political game to leverage their agenda that caters more toward testing companies than it does educational best practices.