No Child Left Behind must be reexamined

Spectrum, by Susan Stitham

Washington touts the No Child Left Behind law as a step forward for American education and a landmark reform bill. Apparently, Lisa Murkowski agrees, although she says it just needs a few regulation changes to make it livable in Alaska.

Tony Knowles says the law is a massive, unfunded intrusion into state and local authority to run our own schools, and wants to replace the law with federal support for already existing state and local accountability systems, designed by Alaskans.

So which is it? An essentially noble law that just needs some tweaking or the most destructive piece of educational micromanagement in U.S. history?

Here's what my eight years on the Alaska State Board of Education and 35 years of teaching in Fairbanks has shown me: even if Secretary of Education Rod Paige allowed regulation changes and even if the federal government sent a gazillion dollars just to Alaska to implement the law, it would still be a terrible law that not only fails to help schools, but actually puts obstacles in the way of programs Alaskan children need -- all in the name of one-size-fits-all, Washington-knows-best philosophy.

I ask you to consider just a few things:

The Fairbanks longtime parental choice program for schools had to be dislocated this year in order to comply with the federal law's provisions for providing parental choice. Make any sense to you? All because the administration doesn't trust local or state leaders or educators to make the right decision. Washington imposes a rigid structure, which makes it impossible for many families to plan on which school their child will attend.

In the name of higher standards, the law imposes a simplistic formula for school accountability, based entirely on arbitrary scores on standardized tests. Failure to have 95 percent of students in a particular subcategory show up on test day can label the entire school as failing.

And our federal government consistently refuses to allow states to use a value-added factor, to at least give a school credit for the growth a student makes in a year; credit for improvement is simply basic fairness to students and schools in a state as diverse as ours.

Another example of the law's absurdity is that in North Carolina (which pioneered one of the nation's most sophisticated accountability systems), more than 32 schools ranked as excellent by the state failed to meet Washington's criteria for academic progress. In California, 317 schools showed tremendous academic growth on the state's performance index, yet the federal law labeled them low-performing.

The problem isn't the schools or the students; it's the arbitrary, narrow federal yardstick being applied. And the damage is just beginning to be felt not only here in Alaska, but throughout the country.

This list of their willful blindness goes on and on. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the Bush administration continues to claim that this law helps schools and students.

Since 1990, first under Gov. Hickel and then Gov. Knowles, Alaskans from across the state developed standards and accountability systems that fostered our values about what students should know and be able to do. We were well on our way to implementation of a successful system in 2001, when it all came crashing down because the federal government told us that it knows better than we do.

Despite what she says, Lisa Murkowski has not and cannot stand up for Alaska's children on the vital issue of education. Disappointingly, she has shown time and time again that she would rather side with her Washington friends than with Alaskans.

Tony Knowles as governor demonstrated his firm belief in the education of all Alaskans, bringing together parents, citizens and educators from across the state to design our own quality schools initiative.

In my 35 years in Alaskan education, no other governor has demonstrated such a deep commitment to education. I believe Tony Knowles can help lift this terrible burden off the backs of our children, and let us take control of our own schools again.

With the NEA endorsement, there should be no doubt in people's minds that former governor Tony Knowles is truly committed to the future of all Alaska's children. They need his voice in the U.S. Senate, as do we all.

Susan Stitham is a former member of the Alaska State Board of Education, from 1994-2002.