GOP-led Senate begins mission to fix No Child Left Behind

In its first hearing of the new Congress, the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions tackled a topic that has plagued lawmakers for years: How to fix No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

Thirteen years ago, President George W. Bush signed NCLB, mandating standardized testing and consequences when schools failed to show “adequate yearly progress.” The law came up for reauthorization over seven years ago, and although almost everyone agrees it needs reform, Congress has not reached a conclusion on how that should be done.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., is chairman of the committee and hopes to get a bill fixing NCLB on the floor by the end of February. He began Wednesday’s hearing by addressing what he called the center of the NCLB debate—standardized testing and high-stakes consequences.

Two teachers testified before the hearing about how high-stakes testing can hinder good teaching. “I am a teacher who, every May until last year, would get up and apologize to my students,” said Stephen Lazar, a teacher at Harvest Collegiate High School in New York City, in his written testimony. “I would tell them, ‘I have done my best job to be an excellent teacher for you up until now, but for the last month of school, I am going to turn into a bad teacher to properly prepare you for state Regents exams.’” He told the committee how he would forego research and discussion for writing “formulaic essays” and practicing “mindless repetition of facts.”

Jia Lee, a fourth and fifth grade teacher at The Earth School in New York City, told the committee over 50 percent of the parents at her school withheld their children from taking the Common Core-aligned English and math tests. “I will not administer tests that reduce my students to a single metric and will continue to take this position until the role of standardized assessments are put in their proper place,” Lee wrote in her prepared testimony.

Yet others hold up the benefits of annual testing as a transparent way to measure student progress, especially in light of the large amounts of money the federal government pours into public education. “When it comes to our nation’s largest federal investment in K through 12 education, it would be irresponsible to spend billions in federal taxpayer dollars without knowing if the law is making a difference in students’ lives,” said ranking committee member Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.

Lazar proposed solutions to excessive testing such as “grade-span testing,” where students take standardized tests every few years instead of every year, or “sampling,” where only a portion of students undergo testing to collect information about school performance.

Others argued annual testing is important, but proposed more efficient methods and different accountability for results. Martin West, associate professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, suggested the new law keep annual math and reading tests in third through eighth grades and once for high-school students, but give states the freedom to decide what constitutes “underperforming” and what the consequences should be. Tom Boasberg, superintendent of Denver Public Schools, echoed the need for annual testing, but advocated shorter tests and measuring student growth instead of status.

Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, also supported testing because of the light it has shed on the plight of underperforming groups. He expressed concern over whether African-American, Latino, low-income, and special-needs students would fall through the cracks without federally mandated accountability.

The committee will continue its discussion on NCLB, with another hearing scheduled next week. In an opinion article for The Washington Post, U.S. education secretary Arne Duncan said, “While the legislation could move fast enough to escape wide public notice, its consequences will be profound.”