Teachers Address Education Law

Your question cuts right to the point, Doug, and it's one of the most important questions we should be asking in education. Across this country, too many schools have already eliminated music, arts, physical education, science, and social studies in order to redirect human, financial, and physical resources to these high stakes tests. In reality, they are jettisoning the very cargo that will save our nation - the arts and the sciences are the real-world playgrounds of reading and math and should never be sacrificed in the name of adequate yearly progress.

Everything we know about the global economy tells us that children who graduate without the advanced skills of innovation, creativity, and design will soon find themselves in a labor pool that is shrinking quickly because of the outsourcing and automation of high skill, high income jobs like engineering and financial trading. Now is the time when our nation should be producing the most creative students, but we are instead producing the least creative in an effort to ensure that every child has basic skills.

DC is a city constantly in transition. As a social studies teacher, I am just now facing the prospect of an end-of-course standardized test (we just adopted standards last year that go in to effect this year, which means a test is a year or two away). I feel a bit constrained by AP/College Board testing requirements. My hope is that students take the chance/challenge of taking my courses, but trying to find the time for covering all of the content that AP mandates in 18 weeks - in a creative manner - is a struggle.

There has not been much of a significant effect yet in how this affects the classroom environment. Our focus is still on the individual learner, particularly on skills and the ability to seek out meaningful content, My hope is that the classroom culture we create facilitates students' becoming more responsible for some of the content they must learn.

First off, thank you for asking what is a very good question. And I am quite sad to say that the undeniable truth is that NCLB has hampered not just me, but all educators, to teach creatively and to deal with students individually.

Why is it so easy for me to draw such a sweeping conclusion? Because NCLB, with its sole use of but one singular form of assessment of student achievement and growth, paints education into the box of being a one-size-fits-all type of endeavor (which all rational people realize it is not). The way students, teachers and schools are appraised by NCLB is through the administration of a fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice, bubble-sheet test. That's it. There are no other criteria other than these aptly named "high stakes" tests. They are either pass or fail, black or white, proficient or not. As a result, what we see in classroom after classroom is an emphasis on choosing the right bubble as opposed to an emphasis on students developing their critical thinking abilities. Whereas once the arts, field trips and consideration of the whole child were valued and validated in the classroom, NCLB forces teachers to make every other element in public education subservient to one foremost item: the test scores. Matter of fact, the tests are so important, we test before we test so that we can anticipate how to better prepare for the test. (You can't make this foolishness up; it's really going on in classrooms across America.)

Simply put, creativity is not being valued with the emphasis I feel it should in part because it's not easily measurable in any of the core arenas that are currently being quantified by NCLB to determine a teacher's - and school's -- effectiveness.

Additionally, as lunatic as it sounds, for most educators on the frontlines today, creative lesson plans are almost subversive activities. Many schools even have gone so far as adopting scripted programming nowadays whereby a textbook company has provided a day-by-day curriculum for the classroom teacher to follow. In these environments, on the fourth Tuesday in the third month of school during hour number one a teacher should be on page X.

Does that sound like anything that is responsive to dealing with students individually? Or creatively?

Ultimately, I think the way NCLB's focus on testing has most affected my classroom environment stems from the amount of time my students are forced to take these standardized tests. Literally, it's unreal how many tests a student will be forced to take over the course of a school year right now. (I did the math this last year and realized that one out of every 14.8 days I spent in the classroom were occupied by tests. That's one test every three weeks of school for an entire year. At some point, the students lost their edge and of course, the ones at the end of the year carry the most weight for the school, just as my kids are most burnt out from testing. Only the government could make stuff like this up.) I heard someone tell me about an old saying in India which goes something like, "When we want to grow the elephant we feed it, not weight it."

Wherever I go one thing is true from teacher to teacher to teacher. The assessments used by NCLB are not, in our opinion, giving an accurate snapshot of the student's as pupils nor of us teachers as professionals. The testing system of NCLB is riddled with flaws and people who defend these assessments are either doing so to make a self-serving point or they don't know what they are talking about.