Education in Michigan: Forward from NCLB

(Adapted from an email I sent some of my high school buddies who think about public education)

At the risk of inducing a snoozefest, I'm sharing this article. Each of you has evidenced some interest in all things NCLB, policy, and the general mess in which schools too often find themselves, for too many years now.

The author shares what I think are accurate descriptions of the effects of the legislation, and the ways in which it influenced attempts at school improvement over the course of time since its adoption in 2001.

I will say its roots were nurtured earlier. Johnson signed the first Title I law in 1965, which provided significant federal resources for education, By '72, when I got into the field, some principals were retiring in part because of all the paperwork... with the money came the accountability. I thought they were whiners, but that was just me.

What schools did with the money, kinda sorta directed by the law, was attempt to serve the lowest-performing students. A good thing. But that meant hiring Title I teachers and aides who almost universally pulled out to the hallway or bookroom those neediest kids in order to deliver whatever (more on 'whatever' later). My wife Linda was one such hire, as a reading teacher.

By the time I first became a principal, in 1985, Title I had evolved for twenty years and I inherited a program. That program included six instructional assistants, and one reading teacher (no, not Linda haha!). The drill was, you line the kids up based on test scores, and start serving them from the bottom up until the funds run out.

But if you dig more deeply, and I'm always wielding a shovel, some "inefficiencies" existed.

To start, the aides never connected with the classroom teachers, and the reading teacher didn't either. Everyone had their own approach. This is the 'whatever' which I mentioned earlier.

So what I saw was, our neediest learners were assigned to a variety of approaches. And, because the logic of the day was to serve the youngest first, the problem was exacerbated: imagine K and 1 kids being taken out of their classroom by some probably nice lady, at various times of the day/week, to do "learning stuff" that may, or more likely may not, mirror/support what they were doing/learning in the classroom. And, aides need not be certificated. Not that a certificate means you're stellar: just that, they had no training. Or, minimal training.

Second, if you line the kiddos up, 1 being top dawg and 200 is barely conscious, based on test scores (no more on that later...you know too much about the problems with that), and then you have to make some cutlines. "Ok, we have X staff, at six kids in a group, we can serve Y kids." Second pass, how many of those should be K, 1, 2, and so on?

My issue with that was, if you decide you can serve 40 kids, that's grabbing numbers 160 down to 200 from the queue, roughly. How different a learner/performer is 159, who gets no support, from 160 who gets support, as fractured and difffuse as it may be?

And third, you could bring services to all (school-wide, no making of lists, help whoever needs help), but you had to have a free-reduced percentage of 75 in your school.

Mine was 73, then 72 the next year, then 74... you get the picture.

In subsequent reauthorizations, that was changed to 30%, and then dropped, for the good.

And then came NCLB in 2002. The author of the article picks up the narrative from there, but it's important to understand the routines that had been established under Title I prior to 2002. Mix in the accountability mindset, mix in the control freaks (hello Betsy, and oh, hey, Texas led the way nationally for many years in prescriptive, scripted, teacher-just-needs-to-say-what's-in-the-manual learning approaches) and NCLB was the locomotive, as it tuned out, attached to the light at the end of the tunnel.

I'm not sure I agree with the author about ESSA being "all that", as there's still way too many top-down fumes in the system at the state level. But I heartily concur that your job is to support and help those below you to do and be the best they can be, whether you are a state superintendent of instruction, a local district supe, a school principal, a teacher, or, heaven forbid, a parent.

In loco parentis.

Words to live by.