I am attending the United States Distance Learning Association's (USDLA) virtual conference, and Dennis Bega from the US Department of Education opened it by speaking about upcoming changes to the No Child Left Behind educational act. There was also quite a lot of discussion concerning ways that distance technologies would help improve and alleviate some of our educational problems in the USA right now.

The moderator started with some scary facts: 27% of America's youth drop out of high school. The USA is 24th out of 29 developed nations on international math tests among 15 yr olds, and 17th out of 29 for science.  The US Ranks 10th in the world in the rate of college completion for 25-34 year olds, a generation ago we were 1st. We have consistently dropped in most educational categories in international standards for over a decade.

According to the speaker, we are now behind Mexico and Albania in math literacy. Not to say that this isn’t fantastic for other countries to be doing so well, but why is the USA now falling so far behind them? The representative, Dennis Bega, from the US Department of Education (USDOE) talked about this point. He said that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has not been working, and that associated problems have only worsened our educational problems in the USA. He and others at the USDOE are now submitting a new educational act to congress that would completely revamp and change NCLB. It remains to be seen what changes will be made, though, as they are waiting on approval from congress.

"We still see ourselves as #1 in the world, but the data shows that we are not. We see ourselves as the smartest students in the world, but the data shows that we are not. Why do we have these discrepancies? The students in today's schools may be the first generation that does worse than their parents in quality of life" (Dennis Bega, USDOE).

NCLB also was ultimately a revamp of previous educational acts, such as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act  (ESEA). NCLB became a new metric measure of educational performance. You either meet it, or you do not.

One main problem with NCLB is that states have been left to set what the standards are for their high schools, so they just lowered them to make sure their averages were above the bars needed to get the necessary government funding each year. The moderator of this talk called these state-determined standards the “race to the bottom standards”, since they only encouraged states to lower standards rather than meet them. If they did not, then the teachers were laid off and schools closed. The speaker said that in the last month, over a quarter-million teachers in the US were told they will not be brought back next year. A quarter-million! This is also happening due to economic problems and budget-cuts, as well as NCLB methods cutting ‘failing’ teachers. Between the both, that now leaves less teachers and schools in the US, and as many as 35-50 students per course in some schools. This hardly is going to improve educational problems.

The next problem is that since each state may decide their own standards, those standards don’t necessarily correlate with another state. So, an A-grade in one state is not the same as in another. The next problem is that the state does not have to adopt college-entry standards. That is to say, students graduating from high schools do not have the skills necessary to enter college, because the state-determined standards were not set that high, they were set lower.

Another problem with NCLB is there is no measurement of growth as well as performance, it only measures metric achievement. In the new Educational Act, teachers who make a major difference in children’s’ learning will now be recognized. An example given by Mr. Bega was this: right now, if a child enters a 5^th grade course with a 2^nd grade reading level, and the teacher and student work hard and at the end of the year the student leaves with a 4^th grade reading level, under NCLB this they are still considered a failure due to across-the-board metric measure comparisons of this student to others in his grade-level. But, in reality, he and the teacher were extremely successful. There was measurable, successful, growth in his learning. His reading level went up two grade-levels in just one academic year. In NCLB this is not recognized. In the new Educational Act the USDOE is working on, it would be.

Goals for the new educational act reauthorization will be (if approved by congress):

1. Raise standards
2. Reward excellence and growth
3. Increase local control and flexibility while maintaining the focus on equity and closing achievement gaps.

“We have to meet students where they are, not where we are. We have to shift the paradigm…technology will help this” (Dennis Bega, USDOE). We have to revolutionize the way we teach students and shift our practice so that they are using the latest in technologies for the advancement of our educational goals and needs. Also, even though research has shown again and again that after-school programs improve student learning and achievement, these programs have been cut under NCLB and current economic problems. “We have to restore the school as an instrumental part of the community, a community gathering spot, an asset that defined an identity” (Dennis Bega, USDOE).

Distance learning (DL) technologies could help alleviate some of the current problems with teacher shortages, such as having expert teachers in other areas do a virtual learning program with students at schools lacking that expertise. In effect, where there are a lack of teachers currently, teachers from others schools can do online synchronous lectures and educational programs for the schools missing those subjects.

Dennis Bega of the USDOE said they are working on a reauthorization of ESEA (Elementary and Secondary Education Act), to transition from NCLB to a new educational act in the coming year that would:

1. Disaggregation and focus on improving performance for all groups of students.
2. Focus on equity.
3. Standards-based reform and accountability.

The speaker pointed out that we do need benchmarks, and so testing would not be eliminated. We do strive to meet benchmarks, and they do help guide schools towards educational goals. We do need to measure learning as testing does measure student achievement. But, it should be to demonstrate integration of knowledge and learning, not just teaching for a test so that schools can make the state standards, which vary from state to state anyhow and are not consistent and do not prepage student for entry into college. There should also be more measurement of growth and other educational success of the teacher and student, not only quantitative metric measurements. That is a major change in the new act from NCLB.

The speaker said that they want to move away from measurement practices to more innovative practices, which encourage creative teaching and learning methods that help improve student learning, and less teaching to the test.

A quick gander at how NCLB will change in the new educational act, this chart was in Dennis Bega's presentation:

Source:

Bega, D. (2010). Virtual Session #1. USDLA virtual conference proceedings: http://www.usdla.org/2010_national_conference/home.html