Its warnings now look prophetic
CTA members and leaders have left no question that the current version of ESEA — No Child Left Behind — should have “major changes and not just tinkering around the edges” when it comes time for reauthorization, says Becky Pringle, chair of the NEA ESEA Advisory Committee and a member of the NEA Executive Committee.
“CTA members provided significant input to the many drafts of our report, ‘ESEA: It’s Time for a Change,’” adds Pringle. The reauthorization plan passed at the July meeting of NEA’s Representative Assembly includes many of its suggestions.
“California has played a huge role in this,” she says. “CTA members provided not only vocal testimony, but also written documents to make sure we understood the issues that teachers are facing in California, which has been heavily impacted by NCLB. And they helped us move beyond focusing on these issues to concentrating on solutions to the problems.”
Three Californians serve on the committee that she chairs — Pat Whyte from the Vallejo Education Association; Theresa Montaño from the California Faculty Association; and Justo Robles, manager of CTA’s Instruction and Professional Development Department. Both Whyte and Montaño are members of NEA’s Board of Directors.
Following up on their success at the NEA convention, CTA’s Board of Directors has created an ESEA Reauthorization Campaign Task Force to work in cooperation with the national effort, developing and implementing strategies focused on grassroots organizing, member involvement, congressional lobbying and community coalition building. It was created at the request of CTA’s ESEA Workgroup, which has been meeting since 2002, when newly elected President Bush first presented NCLB as the centerpiece of his administration.
“CTA has been in the driver’s seat of helping our members get informed about NCLB and making sure that procedures to implement the law always had our input,” says CTA Board member Pixie Hayward Schickele, chair of the workgroup. “CTA members mobilized quickly and got involved at every level of NCLB.”
They served on advisory groups with state legislators, worked on regulations for implementing NCLB in the state, testified at hearings on NCLB’s impact, conducted workshops and trained members how to meet its requirements, devoted entire conferences to helping Program Improvement schools cope, kept members informed, and advised chapters about the need to bargain NCLB implementation.
To make sure teachers could attain “highly qualified teacher” status as smoothly as possible, CTA worked with state legislators and the California Department of Education to develop the High, Objective, Uniform State Standard of Evaluation (HOUSSE) procedure for veteran teachers.
CTA continues its commitment to making HQT status feasible for its members. While the federal Department of Education asserts that the HOUSSE process for existing teachers expired on June 30, CTA is fighting for teachers’ rights to utilize the HOUSSE process indefinitely. CTA has sent out a legal advisory to chapters and staff to clarify the ongoing viability of the HOUSSE process, encouraging chapters to assert themselves at the local level.
CTA also lobbied to extend the timeline for support professionals and teacher aides to comply with NCLB’s HQT requirements through testing or college credit.
Another of CTA’s causes has been to push for increased flexibility for English language learners and special education students. There has been some success in these areas, but not nearly what it could be.
“We lobby in Washington and we lobby in California,” says Marc Knapp, a member of both the CTA and NEA boards as well as CTA’s ESEA Workgroup. “We have never stopped putting pressure on people to change this law and to understand what NCLB could do to schools.”
“NCLB was a ‘blue sky initiative’ that sounded like it was all about doing the right thing,” recalls Knapp. “But CTA, in its wisdom, immediately saw a lot of bad things in the legislation. It was clear to us that NCLB was setting up public schools to fail and paving the way for private companies to take them over.”
As the years have passed and increasing numbers of schools have fallen into Program Improvement despite improving API scores, CTA’s predictions have come true.
“Suddenly, we don’t look so stupid,” says Knapp. “We have become prophets — not doomsayers. Suddenly, everyone understands the urgency of the matter.”
The California Department of Education didn’t anticipate that schools would go into Program Improvement at such a fast rate. “When we first talked about it, nobody listened,” says CTA Board member Lynette P. Henley, a workgroup member from Vallejo. Now plenty of people are listening as they gear up for the reauthorization of ESEA that comes before Congress in 2007.
“But the reauthorization should not be our only hope for the future,” says Alum Rock Educators Association member Martha Wallace, a member of the workgroup that monitors the State Board of Education’s implementation of NCLB on a monthly basis.
“We also need to elect new leadership for this country that is willing to understand the complexities of teaching and learning. That should be our ultimate goal.”
