North Carolina has taken a lead in raising criticism against the No Child Left Behind Act, the education improvement program President George W. Bush implemented in 2002. Although school officials said they agree with the spirit of the law, many criticize the way in which it measures school progress.
The upcoming November election will play a role in whether NCLB regulations are amended, school administrators said. “The election will have a big impact in determining the structure of the administration in the next four years,” said Katherine Joyce, assistant executive director of the North Carolina Association of School Administrators. “If the current administration remains, any changes will be implemented more slowly, but with a new administration there may be quicker changes.”
According to the U.S. Department of Education, the act deals with four main issues: accountability, local control and flexibility, new options for parents and record-breaking funding.
With legislation such as NCLB, “school administrators and teachers are doing the best they can to increase performance and ensure that achievement is happening,” Joyce said. He added that the way in which this achievement is measured is problematic.
In order to track student progress, NCLB requires the state to test student abilities in math and reading each year from grades three through eight and at least once between grades 10 and 12. By the 2007-08 school year, schools will also have to track progress in science.
The end-of-grade results are then categorized as each student is placed into defined social groups, based on race, family income, language and special needs. Each school must test 95 percent of each group. If one group does not meet minimum standards, referred to as “adequate yearly progress,” the school as a whole fails to meet federal regulations.
“Under NCLB a school that is doing quite well under existing state accountability measures can be labeled as low-performing by federal standards simply by a small number of students having low performance [and thus] by simply missing one target,” Joyce said.
North Carolina schools must also abide by the state education program, “ABC.” Under the ABC regulation, public schools must demonstrate progress from year to year rather than meet defined standards.
“We think the North Carolina state accountability under the ABC has a much better graph of how to evaluate performance of schools because it has a growth component,” Joyce said.
Kay James, executive director for the Durham Public Education Network, said the independent nonprofit organization she works for has aimed to explain the two standards to the wider Durham community. “The ABC is about school growth and NCLB is about meeting standard requirements,” she said.
In North Carolina, for the 2002-2003 school year, 356 schools failed to make adequate yearly progress by missing only two targets, and 286 schools failed to make AYP by missing only one target, according to a February 2004 letter that a coalition of North Carolina school administrators sent to Congress offering recommendations on how to change specific regulations and improve its overall effectiveness.
“In fact, some schools failed to make AYP because five or fewer students scored below the required level on the AYP reading or math test. ‘Achievement Levels’ of AYP should be established to distinguish between schools that miss one or two targets and those that miss all or multiple targets,” read the letter from the North Carolina Association of School Administrators.
When schools do not make AYP, NCLB requires the school to take further steps in order to ensure success. These range from providing students free tutoring opportunities to implementing a full restructuring plan.
In order to improve schools so that students can meet NCLB requirements, federal funding has increased. From 2000 to 2003, there has been a 59.8 percent increase in funding for schools, with federal funding now reaching $23.7 billion, or an average of $7,000 per student, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
In North Carolina, half of all public schools are Title 1 schools, which receive the largest amount of federal funding. Title 1 status is awarded based on student enrollment and census poverty data.
North Carolina has additional problems implementing NCLB because of the constant changes in school populations, James suggested. North Carolina is a “rapid growth state with a diverse student body,” especially around the Triangle, she said, and this makes it hard to standardize results.
The current teacher shortage in North Carolina, which is more severe than in many parts of the country, makes it harder to implement NCLB as well.
“The difficulty is that at a time when there is already a teacher shortage, when there is already the composition of our student population changing and an increasing need for English as a second language courses, it is creating additional requirements,” James said.
NCLB requires teachers of core academic subjects to be “highly qualified” by the end of the 2005-06 school year, which forces every teacher to meet certain education certifications. Because of this requirement, “in 2006 we will lose 13,000 teachers that have provisional licenses,” Joyce said.
Critics have also expressed concern about NCLB’s requirement that students with disabilities reach the same level as their grade-level peers.
“Testing special-needs students at grade level and expecting them to achieve at the same pace as their peers without special needs places an undue burden on the students and ultimately limits the school and school system’s ability to meet their AYP targets,” the NCASA letter stated.
In North Carolina, however, “we have a safety net,” Joyce said. “We have a state accountability system to help high achievers to grow.” Under ABC, even high performing groups of students must show improvement in order to pass regulation.
James noted that in North Carolina “we challenge the brightest children as well, and that’s the reason why the ABC and the NCLB together make for a good [system].”
Given the system North Carolina follows, officials said the state is on the forefront of revising NCLB.
“The law intends to ensure that every child has an opportunity to succeed through public education and all of our membership supports [this position] wholeheartedly,” Joyce said. “[But] I believe we are seeing concern on a national front. Other states are raising similar concerns about the ‘all or nothing’ nature of the law and the problems that it poses. So there is a unison of states that are asking for changes.”
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