Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra feature stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework, or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write an 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: Lawmakers Target Mandatory Testing in Education Law, 03/21/07
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/jan-june07/nclb_3-21.html

Initiating Questions:

1. What are standardized tests? How many do you take per year?

2. What is the difference between a public and a private school?

3. What do you know about No Child Left Behind?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. What is the No Child Left Behind Act? When was it enacted? When will it expire?

President Bush signed NCLB into law in 2002, but it is set to expire this year.

The law, an extension of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, requires schools receiving public money to set and achieve Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) targets in reading and math. AYP must be raised each year to reach an overall goal of 100 percent student proficiency by the end of the 2014 school year.

It also seeks to close the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students and ensure a highly qualified teacher for every core academic subject.

2. Why are some people critical of the law's emphasis on testing?

"If I were a student, I would be spending most of my year doing test preparation and thinking that the whole purpose of school was to pass a test rather than receiving a well-rounded education," said Michael Shaw, a professor at St. Thomas Aquinas College and a member of the National Council of Teachers of English's commission on reading.

"I would be angry that other subjects were being diminished because of this focus on tests."

Lisa Guisbond, policy analyst for the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest), a group advocating alternatives to standardized testing, said testing pushes some good teachers out of the classroom.

"There's tremendous dissatisfaction amongst experienced teachers with this sort of straight jacketing," Guisbond said. "Teaching to a test, that's not why they went into education.

3. How do the act's supporters respond to critics?

But Connie Garafalo, principal of Reading Central Community Elementary, a NCLB Blue Ribbon school in 2005 for lowering low-income students' achievement gap, said that while the days of doing "cute little units" have passed, teachers maintain the ability to inject their own styles into their courses.

"The good teachers will take the standards and apply creative teaching strategies," she said.

"If we don't have these kinds of measures, then how do we know that our kids are achieving and meeting the standards?"

4. What happens to schools who fail to meet the NCLB targets?

Under the law, states with schools who fail to meet the targets must offer students after school tutoring and the opportunity to transfer to a different school. If a school fails for four consecutive years, it must replace staff, restructure the curriculum and extend the school day/year.

5. Other than testing, what is an additional criticism of No Child Left Behind?

But according to Democratic Representative Dennis Moore of Kansas, a member of the U.S. House Education and Labor Committee, total NCLB funding is $55 billion short of the levels outlined in the 2002 authorization. Moore supports a House bill that calls for "a moratorium on compliance with Adequate Yearly Progress regulations that are not fully funded."

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. What do you think are the pressing problems in American schools? If you were in Congress, how would you work to improve education opportunities in America?

2. Do you think NCLB is a good education policy? Why or why not?

3. Do you go to a public or private school? If it's public, how do you think No Child Left Behind has impacted your education? How much emphasis is placed on tests in your school? What is positive? What is negative? If you go to a private school, do some research about who goes to your school. Who can afford it? Who can't? What are the public schools in your neighborhood? How are they different than your school?

4. What do you speculate might happen if the A-PLUS legislation in the Senate became law? Explain your reasoning.

Write a 300-500 word essay on either of these topics providing clear examples. Send your completed editorial to NewsHour Extra (extra@newshour.org). Exceptional essays might be published on our Web site.