On Feb. 9, President Barack Obama announced that 10 states had been approved for some flexibility in meeting the requirements of the No Child Left Behind federal education law. Mississippi was not among them.

In exchange for setting higher goals for their students than the 2001 Act required, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oklahoma and Tennessee get leeway in meeting its mandates, such as not having to meet certain student and school performance standards by 2014.

“The goals of No Child Left Behind were the right ones,” Obama said in announcing the waivers. “We’ve got to stay focused on those goals. But we need to do it in a way that doesn’t force teachers to teach to the test or encourage schools to lower their standards to avoid being labeled as failures.”

The No Child Left Behind Act changed the federal government’s role in K-12 education by asking America’s schools to describe their success in terms of what each student accomplishes, the Mississippi Department of Education stated in its original plan to meet the federal mandate.

Mississippi is one of about 26 states seeking flexibility in meeting those standards. Mississippi submitted its application last month, four days before the deadline for the second round of waiver applications, and the date for the announcement of the winners has not been set.

The application includes provisions for student testing, teacher and principal evaluations and other aspects of rating schools and is viewable online at the state department’s website.

“Teaching to the test” has been a frequent complaint leveled at the law, which was passed in 2001 and took effect in 2003.

“The emphasis since No Child Left Behind makes it appear test-driven,” said Dr. Malinda Butler, chairman of the Department of Education and Psychology at Alcorn State University. “I see us losing the creativity of the teacher.”

“Teachers need to be able to respond to the students,” said recent Vicksburg Warren School District retiree Cheryl Israel, a 40-year teacher. “I think we need to do away with the standardized test as a measure of student and teacher performance, but that’s not going to happen. When you require kids to take that kind of test you are just setting yourself up for failure.”

“The teacher’s success is determined by how successful their students are,” said Dr. David Daves, chairman of the Department of Curriculum, Instruction and Special Education at the University of Southern Mississippi.

It doesn’t stop there, he added. The school also is judged by those test scores, the district by its schools, and even institutions such as USM are judged by the teachers it has trained. “Their success reflects on our success,” he said.

The pressure that comes from being judged by student performance on a test is “something we cover as soon as they get into the professional courses,” said Daves. It’s more than just covering the requirements of the law, various learning theories or children’s developmental timetables.

“We get them into (classroom) observations as soon as possible and build in exposure to the kind of things they will deal with in the classroom,” he said. “We want them to understand the delicate balance that exists in the classroom, where they are going to be required to teach and meet the individual needs of every child at the same time as they are managing the whole class of children.”

Butler echoed the importance of field experience for prospective teachers. “They go into the classroom so they can experience the child in the environment,” she said. “We do tell them that accountability is the bottom line and that everything is data-driven.”

In trying to raise student test scores in the VWSD and its resulting accountability ratings, the superintendent, Dr. Elizabeth Swinford, has added a district department of curriculum and instruction, headed by an assistant superintendent. Initiatives Swinford has implemented include PBIS, a program of positive behavior intervention for students; differentiated instruction, teaching methods that address learning differences of individual students within a classroom as a whole; and a mandated 90-minute reading block at the beginning of each school day.

The initiatives are not just best practices in American schools today, Swinford said, they also are those recommended by a Department of Education team tasked with overseeing the district’s implementation of “schools at risk” action plans for Warren Central Intermediate and Vicksburg Junior High School, which have been labeled At Risk of Failure two consecutive years and could be taken over as charter schools if they do not improve.

Swinford has not been fazed by criticism that it’s been too much too soon, or resignations by unhappy teachers.

“It’s the right thing to do,” she said in a phone interview.

In January she told VWSD trustees, “Many times, the number of resignations does not measure the quality of what’s happening in the classroom. Maybe these resignations are not a bad thing. We have to look at the evidence. What does each person bring to the table?”

While some teachers have reacted negatively to the mandates, Daves said the methods are among those his department teaches.

“It’s a relatively common practice,” he said of the reading block, for example. “I think you will see more and more of that.”

Both Butler and Daves stressed that the state’s and the nation’s schools also are moving toward implementing the Common Core Standards.

Set to take effect in the 2013-14 school year, Common Core will represent “the first national curriculum,” said Daves, and ask students to go beyond recall of facts and dates to a mastery of concepts and ideas — more difficult to test, and upping the ante for already stressed teachers.

“That changes everything as far as the teachers are concerned,” Daves said. “It changes everything as far as teacher prep is concerned.”

Still, Daves and Butler note no shortage of teacher prep applicants, and Swinford said she has had no problem filling vacancies.

“People want to come here because they know we are doing good things,” Swinford said. “Teachers leaving and test scores rising? That is a good correlation, especially in a bad economy.”

No Child Left Behind

NCLB is the 2001 federal law intended to improve K-12 schools, under the theory of standards-based education reform. Key components include:

• States are required to establish standardized testing, so that all high school graduates meet the test criteria.

• States are also required to give options (school choice) to students who attend schools that fail to meet NCLB’s Adequate Yearly Progress.

• The controversy over NCLB currently focuses on funding: Opponents argue that states are provided inadequate federal funding for implementation of NCLB, and that therefore NCLB represents an “unfunded mandate” on states. Proponents argue that the law provides accountability for schools; fights against incompetent teachers; and provides alternatives to failing schools.

• Progress is measured in the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly know as the “Nation’s Report Card.”

Source: Issues2000.org