Today we welcome Mark Pullen, a classroom teacher with a unique viewpoint on No Child Left Behind, as our guest blogger.
All students – no matter
their race, gender, academic ability, or financial well-being – deserve a free,
quality education as a basic human right.
In the United States
Primarily as a result of
these unintended consequences, many educators believe that No Child Left Behind
should be eliminated. Without mandated
annual high-stakes reading and math testing, they argue, schools would be able
to be more child-centered and to expand the curriculum to once again focus more
heavily on things like science, social studies, and the arts. This fails to address the initial concern of
No Child Left Behind, however – that many students are not currently receiving
a quality education in their public school.
I propose an alternative to
eliminating No Child Left Behind: adding to it a clearer definition of exactly
what it means to be “left behind.” No
longer should multiple-choice tests be the sole determining factor for whether
or not a student (or school) has made “adequate yearly progress.” Instead, we need to devise a Student Bill of
Rights, clearly laying out the minimum standards of what we believe all
students deserve from the schools they attend.
This Bill of Rights would have the power of law and would operate
alongside the current No Child Left Behind legislation. While No Child Left Behind focuses on
assessing student learning, the Bill of Rights that I am proposing would focus
on assessing student learning conditions.
It would also serve as a form of checks and balances by denying schools
the opportunity to narrow their curriculum and teach to a standardized test.
Let’s imagine how this could
look in practice. Imagine a Bill of
Rights with requirements such as these:
1. All students have the right to attend school
in a clean, safe environment.
This may seem like a simple,
obvious requirement, but in one sentence it demands that schools take care of
everything from leaky ceilings to ongoing bullying issues.
2. All students have the right to attend schools
with significant technology integration in all core subject areas.
Students who are not taught
to be digitally literate will be at a huge disadvantage in their future college
and career journeys. Technology
integration can no longer be an option for schools. I personally believe that beginning in third
grade (if not sooner), every student deserves to be in a 1:1 environment, where
each child has his/her own tech device to be used whenever needed. My proposed Student Bill of Rights would
allow for other forms of tech integration as well, however, such as small
groups of students sharing one device.
As with the first statement, however, the inclusion of this in a Student
Bill of Rights would immediately shift a school’s focus away from how well kids
can fill in bubbles on a test to ensuring that the student learning environment
in a school was as conducive to learning as possible.
3. Elementary students have the right to
physical education, art, and music classes at least once per week. Secondary students have the right to choose
at least one elective per year in the area of physical education, art, music,
or world languages.
Again, this simple mandate
would force schools not to teach solely to the test, and it would renew art,
music, and physical education instruction in districts that have eliminated
it.
It’s easy to envision other
possible rights which students arguably deserve, such as class size limits, the
right for a student to be appropriately challenged in all subjects, the right
to daily recess for elementary students, the right for secondary students to be
taught by teachers who at least minored in college in the subject they are
teaching, and so on. All of these could
be vigorously debated, and many more could be devised as well. Whatever the outcome, I am convinced that
even a very conservatively-written Student Bill of Rights could be effective in
turning the public’s attention and dialogue away from our collective obsession
with test scores and toward the conditions under which we require students to
learn. Schools should not be penalized
for having low test scores when those scores can be a function of poverty,
large numbers of ELL students, or high rates of transiency. Instead, schools should be judged based on
the learning environment they offer to the students they serve. Schools with crumbling walls, few functional
computers, and no classes in the arts are the ones who should be penalized.
In the comment section, leave
a response to this question: What statements would you include in a Student
Bill of Rights?
About the Author:
Mark Pullen, 1:1
classroom teacher, on behalf of Worth
Ave Group. Worth Ave Group provides laptop, tablet computer, and iPad
insurance to schools and universities. They have been insuring schools since
1971: http://www.worthavegroup.com/education
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