Is NCLB ever going to be reauthorized?!

Yesterday I received a call from an NCTE member in Colorado who asked,"Is NCLB going to be reauthorized soon? Will it ever be reauthorized?" I understand that member's puzzlement. Each day in Washington, a pronouncement about a probable schedule for voting is heard in the Capitol, in the newspaper, or on the air.

For example, in the middle of October Senators Kennedy and Reid issued language for portions of a possible NCLB bill; they continue to hope for action on a full bill by the end of the year. Since earlier in the summer in the House a full bill draft has been circulating, with a range of responses from enthusiastic endorsement by a number of legislators to President Bush's October 15 statement that he will veto any bill that "weakens" NCLB, including any changes in accountability measures like those in the House bill.

NCTE is keeping close tabs on almost daily statements from legislators, associations, and other groups that have definite stands on what needs to be changed in NCLB. Our organization's own latest action has been to write joint letters with four other subject area associations to both the House and the Senate committees responsible for NCLB to advocate for increased support within the bill for professional development for teachers. Encouraging news is that more and more legislators are talking in public forums about their understanding that teachers are the most important asset in our schools and, therefore, deserve support through professional development.

NCTE members have been wonderfully proactive in sending letters to their legislators when prompted by a call from NCTE or on their own initiative. These letters matter. They matter a great deal right now when legislators need data and experiences from classrooms, districts, and states as they sort out all the calls for changes in NCLB. When NCTE suggests or when you have ideas to share, please continue to write or to visit your legislators. They need to hear the voices of those professionals who count most, teachers who act on behalf of promoting their students' learning.

Our Voice Has Been Heard

"Serious changes" in NCLB must be made before House education committee chairperson George Miller (D-Calif.) will bring the law to the floor for renewal. For example, based on constituent input (including that from NCTE members), Miller insists that multiple measures must be allowed to assess student achievement fairly. Although Republicans like Buck McKeon (Calif) say that attempts to, in his words, "weaken the law" will draw Republican resistance, Miller said in a presentation yesterday that he expects that the House will vote in September on legislation to renew the law and that changes will be included.

With a September vote or not, NCTE member letters to their legislators can be influential in advocating for changes that support student learning. NCTE's recent call for letter writing was highly generative, and second contacts by those writers or first contacts for those who didn't get to write before are still quite important. As shown by Miller's adamant stand about multiple measures, legislators do pay attention.

AFT releases new policy report: Smart Testing, Let's Get It Right

This week, the American Federation of Teachers hosted a forum that featured the presentation and discussion of a paper authored by education writer and consultant Paul Barton. The paper, “Smart Testing: Let’s Get it Right: How assessment-savvy states have become since NCLB?” asserts that only 52 percent of states’ tests are aligned to strong standards, allowing some to conclude that states are doing a better job in developing content standards than in using them to drive assessment. As a result, testing that is not aligned with strong standards drives many accountability systems. This “drift into test-based accountability” is troubling to many educators.

Two years ago, the NCTE Executive Committee adopted Framing Statements on Assessment that describe the Council's guiding principles on assessment. Further, NCTE has endorsed a Joint Organizational Statement on the No Child Left Behind Act that emphasizes the need for the law to "to shift from applying sanctions for failing to raise test scores to holding states and localities accountable for making the systemic changes that improve student achievement."

What assessment practices do you value? Does the current policy emphasis on accountability make it easier, or more difficult, for you to engage in the kinds of assessment practices you believe work best?

Reading First Controversy

Have you had a chance to read the Inspector General's report on Reading First Grant Reviews? It's a revealing, even explosive, report. What do you think it means for the future of NCLB? What reforms are needed to keep this kind of corruption from poisoning the grant review process in the future?

Richard Allington to Discuss NCLB at NCTE Annual Convention

Richard Allington will discuss how the influence of NCLB does not encourage engaging children in independent reading activities or in rich and varied composing activities. Instead NCLB's influence is to place children in one-size-fits-all controlled and contrived packaged programs. He will also share research-based but unprofitable scientific strategies for improving reading improvement. A discussion session will follow the presentation.

Has NCLB Affected Your Teaching?

Today more than ever we need to speak up to
policymakers and members of our communities and tell them our personal stories
of good teaching and learning! Please take a few minutes to write a letter
to the editor of your local newspaper and share your story of how NCLB has
affected your work as a literacy educator.

• Write your own story and feel free to use information from
  these NCTE resources:
  
• results from an April 2006 survey
  on how NCLB has affected NCTE members' teaching
• the NCTE Legislative Platform
• talking points on Teacher Quality, Assessment, Narrowing of Curriculum, and
  Professional Development
  
• See our Tips for Writing Letters to the Editor
  
• Print or open in a new window these instructions for using Congress.org to submit your
  letter, then click on the logo below to go to
  Congress.org
  
  
  
• Take a moment to complete our September 2006 survey about how NCLB has affected
  your teaching and your students' learning.
  
• Did you send a letter to the editor of your local
  newspaper? Please forward a copy of your letter to slate@ncte.orgslate@ncte.organd
  complete this short report form.
  
• If your letter does run in the newspaper, please send us a
  clipping: SLATE Responses, NCTE, 1111 W. Kenyon Road, Urbana, IL 61801-1096;
  fax: 217-278-3760

Hearing and Hearings

Congress holds lots of hearings on important matters. And sure, we can watch these on C-SPAN. But sitting in on one, the listener (at least, “this listener”) expects more substance…. This is especially true if the Hearing has a lofty title, such as “How Innovative Educators are Integrating Subject Matter to Improve Student Achievement.” Before attending, one conjures up great expectations about how NCLB has fostered this “new way of teaching” (or perhaps, how it has not).

NCTE recently did a survey of more than 2000 members to get their views on how NCLB had impacted them. (Results of the survey will be released soon.) So I thought the Hearing would provide some testimony that perhaps our survey had missed. While it was clear that all who testified had tapped into the energy and learning potential of their students, to my dismay, I heard nothing that was illustrative of innovative ways of teaching. And none of even the best ideas (and that is stretching it) seemed directly related to NCLB. Where was the connection? Where were the transitions? Where were the cause and effect examples? What could I report? Ahh, but maybe I am thinking too much like an English teacher, or maybe just a careful listener – waiting for/hoping for the point?

How has NCLB fostered new innovative teaching? Tell me in clear identifiable ways.

NCTE Weighs In on the TEACH Act

Over the next few weeks, members of Congress will be hearing from NCTE about provisions of the Teacher Excellence for All Children Act (TEACH Act) of 2005. The bill was introduced in the House (H.R. 2835) by its author Representative George Miller (D-CA), and in the Senate (S. 1218) by Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and Dick Durbin (D-IL). It’s an ambitious piece of legislation that seeks to amend the two most powerful laws influencing education today—the Higher Education Act and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (No Child Left Behind). And, in its current state, it has no chance to become law.

So, why bother? Why tie up NCTE resources to improve a bill that almost certainly won’t revolutionize NCLB, access to higher education, or regulation of teacher education programs?

I think it was that wise sage Woody Allen who once said that 80% of success is just showing up. When you look at some of the legislation enacted this decade, it’s easy to see how this old maxim applies in Washington DC. Just this week, an energy bill that had failed in two consecutive Congressional terms suddenly became law. Passage of a bill like No Child Left Behind would have been very unlikely in the mid-1990’s, but by 2001, it was the law of the land (as we know too well!). The policy pendulum will, inevitably, begin to swing the other way. So, we must not only be present, but influential, when opportunities for real reform emerge.

The TEACH Act could be a blueprint for substantive changes in how federal monies can be used to support student achievement, entry into the teaching profession, and lifelong learning across a teaching career. A group of NCTE leaders gathered at a summer meeting of the College Forum to discuss the merits of the TEACH Act, among other matters. They offered suggestions to Anne Gere, Director of the Squire Office for Policy Research in English Language Arts, and Anne backed their points with research culled from recent policy studies. Working with NCTE legislative consultants Ellin Nolan and Lyndsay Pinkus, with Federal Relations Program Officer Sandra Gibbs, and me, Anne pulled together this letter and research summary that will go to Congressional leaders next week.

In the past, this was as much as NCTE could do to "show up" in deliberations about federal policy. But since we opened our Program Office in Alexandria, Virginia in early July, we are now positioned to do much more. In August, program officers Sandra Gibbs (Federal Relations), Paul Bodmer (Higher Education), and Barbara Cambridge (PreK-12 Education) will be arranging meetings with congressional staff to help them understand our positions on the TEACH Act, the Higher Education Act, Striving Readers legislation, and other pending bills. We can all learn from their experiences by monitoring their blogs, and the blog maintained by the NCTE West Office Director, Dale Allender.

You’ll still be hearing from me, too. NCTE will only really begin to show up on the policy radar when we get active at the grassroots. So watch for calls to action, newsletter postings, and e-mailed invitations to join us in helping our professional community begin to steer literacy policy (rather than being run over by it!). Many thanks for doing all that you can to ensure that the knowledge and sensibilities of English language arts teachers shows up in federal policy on literacy education.