Advocating for All Children

THE National Education Association (NEA) has been asked whether we endorse petition (see page 273) being circulated by Educator Roundtable that calls on members of U.S. Congress to vote against reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. The short answer? Absolutely not. While initiators of petition are well meaning and share many of same concerns NEA has about NCLB, petition does not represent our views. For example, it calls for dismantling of NCLB and does not propose any positive changes or alternatives, such as those articulated in our own document, ESEA: It's Time for a Change: NEA's Positive Agenda for ESEA Reauthorization. The NEA agrees with many of 16 reasons articulated in petition that argue why law cannot be salvaged. However, association disagrees with petition's conclusion--that NCLB should be repealed. Instead, we believe that several substantive changes that overhaul statute would produce a far better result. In addition, there is no chance that Congress will repeal NCLB. Those who do not articulate a positive set of changes to law will simply not be at table in negotiating any improvements to it. Furthermore, NCLB is current version of Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), so it's not clear what repealing NCLB would actually mean. Eliminating ESEA and its important programs such as Title I? Reverting back to 1994 version of ESEA, which would eliminate key provisions added in 2002, such as strengthened rights for homeless children? Or eliminating law's negative features, such as adequate yearly progress (AYP) and annual testing provisions? Among positive provisions mandated by NCLB is disaggregation of student data. That requirement alone has highlighted deficiencies in educational opportunities for several groups of students. In addition, NCLB has good intentions--closing achievement gaps between various groups of students, raising overall student achievement (at least as measured on statewide tests in reading and math), and ensuring that all students have highly qualified teachers. However, NEA has long argued that law's good intentions have gone seriously awry. While Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has said that NCLB is like Ivory Soap; it's 99.9% pure or something ... there's not much needed in way of change, reality is that it is not working. Among its myriad flaws and negative outcomes are a narrowing of curricula and projection that virtually all schools will eventually fail to meet its one-size-fits all, all-or-nothing AYP mandate. There is also little evidence that NCLB has directly contributed to its own major goal--raising student test scores. In addition, law has significant flaws in how it tests and counts test scores earned by both English-language learners and students with disabilities. And its regimen of consequences, sanctions, and punishments has no research base and has not been shown to help close achievement gaps. Finally, NCLB is seriously underfunded--with cumulative shortfall between amounts actually appropriated and amounts authorized in law exceeding $56 billion over six years. The NEA is not alone in calling for fundamental changes in law. A coalition of more than 129 national groups--including NAACP (National Association for Advancement of Colored People), Children's Defense Fund, National PTA, National Council of Churches, and National Alliance of Black School Educators--has called for 14 changes to law, noting that the law's emphasis needs to shift from applying sanctions for failing to raise test scores to holding states and localities accountable for making systemic changes that improve student achievement.(1) Let's take a look at some of these flaws and failures in more depth. …

THE FEDERAL journey into public has followed a long and winding road. Most educators know that the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act is simply the latest version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which dates all the way back to 1965. In the years since its initial passage, the ESEA road has taken a number of turns and has been reauthorized many times, in various forms, under various names. The 1994 reauthorization, for example, was called the Improving America's Schools Act. In the past, ESEA was seen as a positive, supportive law, designed to help local school districts provide equitable and adequate to children who face challenging and expensive hurdles to learning. This segment included students with disabilities, poor children, and children whose first language is not English. About five years ago, ESEA reached a fork in the road, and the decision was made to go down the very different NCLB road. This new path was carved out of the landscape by the kind of high-stakes accountability that is based on inexpensive standardized tests and comes with an extremely narrow focus on low-level knowledge and skills. In addition, NCLB replaces decision making by those closest to the students in the school community (e.g., teachers, parents, school boards, and site-based councils) with rigid control by the federal government. The NCLB path has been fraught with numerous unintended consequences. Most fundamentally, NCLB fails to address the needs of the whole child and reduces the guiding purpose of public from the development of effective and contributing citizens to an unending quest for higher scores on tests that cannot assess what we value most in a democratic society--things like critical and creative thinking, problem solving, effective and persuasive communication, cooperation, perseverance, caring, respect, and appreciation for diversity. These qualities empower citizens to thrive in a democratic society and in our complex, ever-changing world, and they cannot be measured on the easy-to-score, paper-and-pencil tests that are the centerpiece of NCLB's accountability policy. The good news, however, is that these important qualities can be demonstrated by means of 21st-century, real-world, authentic performance assessments and that our schools can be encouraged to foster them through rich, meaningful, empowering learning experiences in caring, high-participation learning environments. The bad news is that NCLB's focus on once-a-year, multiple-choice tests--until 2007 in just two subjects--actually works against such a learner-empowering approach. In other words, the aspirations of Sen. Kennedy and the other architects of NCLB that our public schools would guarantee every child in America, regardless of race, economic background, language or disability, the opportunity to get a world-class have deteriorated into the pursuit of a single reading score and a single math score per year on low-level, paper-and-pencil tests. NCLB's advocates call this achievement--as if there were no other indicators of student learning and performance. Why this profound reduction of aspirations? Because NCLB's accountability provisions mean that the test scores themselves have become the motivators and chief driving force of the system. Educators, students, and their schools face stiff consequences if these predetermined test-score standards are not met every year. Hence, in too many U.S. schools, education for life has been reduced to preparation for tests, and as a result the teachers in those schools are witnessing the serious discouragement of their students and colleagues. The more teachers are compelled to focus on producing scores, the less time they have to focus on the learning that they feel will most benefit their students in the long run. …

Under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law of 2001, professional learning activities and curricula, particularly in the area of literacy, were limited by the definition of reading put forth by the 2000 report of the National Reading Panel (see Duke & Carlisle, 2011). When NCLB was reauthorized as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), states and districts were allowed more freedom to redefine student achievement and school success, with hopes that a more “holistic approach” would allow for equitable learning opportunities for all children. Yet, today’s school leaders continue to grapple with how to bring research-based practices to life in schools and classrooms. Despite decades of research on effective schools, family demographics are still the most predictive measure of student achievement (Hill, 2017; Reardon, 2011). A great deal of research exists on what works in schools, yet much less is known about how successful schools enact practices that foster student achievement. This multiple case study uses qualitative methods to examine how educators and administrators in four effective Title 1 schools design learning environments that foster student success at the classroom and school level. Within-case and cross-case analytical frameworks aligned with five practices of effective schools based on the research of successful literacy reform (Taylor et al., 2011) and successful school reform (Bryk et al., 2010, Klugman et al., 2015), eight dimensions of school culture (Ritchhart, 2015) and three levels of efficacy (Bandura, 1993) revealed common and successful school-wide practices in all four schools. By using schools, which represent principals and teachers, as well as their interactions with students and families, as the unit of analysis, findings provide a window into the culture of each school to reveal particular indicators of school-wide practices designed to promote student achievement on state reading assessments. Further, this study puts forth a new hypothetical model to capture the complex nature of how self-efficacy can grow among students, teachers, and the collective group in each school community as Title 1 educators make decisions and interact with each other to promote a culture of student success. Implications for practitioners, school leaders, and policymakers are discussed.

This article discusses equity-based inclusive education and federal policy drivers that can be used to make positive sustainable change in state, district, and local practice to improve the academic, social, and behavioral outcomes for all students including students with extensive support needs and those with labels of intellectual and developmental disabilities. Educational policies addressed include the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Individuals with Disability Education Act (IDEA), Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), and civil rights legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The policy domain feature of the Schoolwide Integrated Framework for Transformation (SWIFT) model is examined regarding how it was implemented in districts and schools, working toward the goal of providing an equity-based inclusive education for all students. Translating federal education policy into state, district, and local practice requires leadership and political courage to align federal, state, and district policy with the vision and values of equity-based, inclusive education.

It has been several years since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was renamedthe No Child Left Behind Act. In this major expansion of the federal role in education, the No Child LeftBehind (NCLB) Act of 2001 required annual testing, specified a method for judging schooleffectiveness, set a timeline for progress, and established specific consequences in the case of failure(Wenning, 2003). The Washington Post referred to it as the "broadest rewriting of federal educationpolicy in decades"(Milbank, 2002). The effects of the overwhelming pressure to perform well on thePennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) tests on teachers, students, and parents hadbrought about "PSSA Panic and Paranoia." Although strides have been made in overcoming the stressand pressure created by these tests, teachers (veteran and new), parents, and students are stillshowing signs of panic and paranoia. Now, young professionals entering this challenging field ofteaching are also affected by the implementation of the NCLB legislation. The domino effect isprofoundly influencing the education profession. The government pressures the state, the statepressures the schools, the schools pressure the educators, the educators pressure the parents andstudents, parents pressure the students and teachers, and finally, the students pressure themselves.Panic as defined by Dictionary.com Unabridged is "a sudden overwhelming fear, with or without cause,which produces hysterical or irrational behavior, and that often spreads quickly through a group.Paranoia is defined as "a baseless or excessive suspicion of the motives of others characterized bysystematized delusions and the projection of personal conflicts" (Random House, 2006). Signs of this"PSSA panic and paranoia" are still present today. Dedicated educators had embraced the challengethat President Bush put before them. Just as Ronald Edmonds had lectured years ago, teachersbelieve that effective schools do have closely monitored student achievement and orderly environmentscharacterized by high expectations. Upon recognizing the positive aspects of the legislation, it isimportant to recognize what it is lacking. Two of these weaknesses attributing to the panic andparanoia are the amount of skills tested in a specified time frame and unrealistic, not high,expectations placed on teachers and students.

This study surveyed 104 school-based elementary literacy coaches to explore their perceptions of their roles as coaches. These perceptions were then examined relative to the Standards for Reading Professionals—Revised 2010, developed by the International Reading Association. Overall, coaches reported the majority of the tasks they carried out as coaches were tasks they believed should be part of the role of a coach. They most highly valued tasks that allowed them to interact with and support teachers, ultimately leading to improved student achievement. Coaches also indicated a lack of clarity about their role in supporting the standards related to diversity.

It is well documented that literacy coaches engage in a wide variety of tasks related and unrelated to their role. However, little is known about their efficacy beliefs related to performing these tasks. In this article we describe the development and initial testing of the Literacy Coaching Self-Efficacy Scale that was designed and created to assess K-12 literacy coaches' self-efficacy beliefs for coaching tasks. The items on the scale reflect our review of the International Literacy Association’s 2017 standards for literacy coaches. Evidence of test content was examined based on review from experts in the fields of literacy coaching and self-efficacy. Validity evidence was explored through correlations with other previously established instruments. Exploratory factor analysis yielded three distinct factors and results indicated a high level of internal consistency. A summary of participant efficacy beliefs regarding coaching tasks are discussed, n = 100. The results of this study will support school districts, teacher preparation programs, and individual coaches to monitor beliefs related to performing literacy coaching tasks and provide insights into the tasks that a coach may need additional support to perform.

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Business science and evidence-based decision making

In this issue of the journal we inaugurate a new manuscript form we are calling “Design & Analysis.” Like a Forum, it is composed of several short essays providing different perspectives on a single topic. But in this case, the focus is on describing and analyzing a specific learning design. Chad Bauman, Associate Professor of Religion at Butler University and a “graduate” of a Wabash Center pre-tenure workshop, approached me with a short text describing an assignment he had developed for his introduction to religion class. The manuscript described in some detail a semester-long assignment requiring students to “invent” a new religious system and then seek to attract converts by explaining its characteristics. This is a creative assignment, to be sure, engaging his students in a playful game that requires them to think about and apply the various theories of religion they are learning during the semester. But the text was too short for the journal. How could this be developed into a full-fledged article? We discussed the manuscript for a while, pointing out places where he could provide a bit more analysis, give us more details about his teaching context and students, say more about the learning goals he had for the assignment, and so forth. I realized that what we had was a very clear and compelling description of a learning design and an analysis of its strengths and weaknesses, why it works, and how it might be improved. It was rather like an extended Teaching Tactic – referring to our very popular 400-word (one page) manuscripts describing a particular teaching strategy through rigorous adherence to four specific prompts: the context, the purpose, description of the strategy, and why it is effective. (For more on writing and submitting Teaching Tactics, see: http://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/journal/article2.aspx?id=14417.) But a Teaching Tactic, however extended, does not constitute a true article. What is the argument or claim being made: “You should try this too,” I suppose. We then decided that the way to turn this into a fully developed essay for the journal was to solicit short responses – make it into a Forum of sorts, in which the authors together would pull out pedagogical insights from this learning design. The teaching context The pedagogical purpose A description of the strategy (or assignment) Assessment of how it worked and Reflection on what he would do differently next time. Five respondents contribute 500 to 1000 words each, analyzing the effectiveness of the assignment, and articulating larger questions about teaching religion and theology that are made visible in the submission. We are very pleased with the results. And just a few weeks after receiving the initial inquiries from Chad Bauman we received a similarly focused short essay on a creative teaching moment that developed rather spontaneously in a seminary classroom discussing the book of Genesis. You can look for it fleshed out into a Design & Analysis forum in the next issue (April, 19:2). This issue also includes two Teaching Tactics: one describes a method for engaging students' religious questions in an Islamic Studies course, and the other uses visual arts in the biblical studies classroom. This issue also includes a Forum that arose from a paper that Russell McCutcheon delivered to the University of Chicago Divinity School's “Craft of Teaching” workshop for doctoral students: “Crafting the Introductory Course in Religious Studies.” The four articles in this issue cover a wide spectrum. Nathan Loewen uses Derrida's arguments about hospitality to analyze learning in a classroom that he has connected with other classrooms around the globe via Skype. Molly Bassett explains how she teaches – and assesses – critical thinking skills through innovative multiple-choice exams in large introductory courses. Natalie Wigg-Stevenson's essay describes Emmanuel College's Contextual Education seminars that help MDiv students develop integrative learning while simultaneously providing doctoral students with a much-needed teaching practicum. And finally, Willa M. Johnson uses the social theory she teaches to her students to help them (and us) understand how they respond to her as an African-American teaching about European anti-Semitism in a large southern university with a horrific racist history of its own. And, since January 2015, our book reviews are now available for free download on the Wabash Center's website: http://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/resources/article.aspx?id=29111.

Understanding the challenges of inclusive education is essential for evaluating its effectiveness. By identifying these obstacles, stakeholders, policymakers, and educators can systematically address the issues. This study investigates the barriers to including children with Down syndrome in kindergartens in Kuwait, focusing on teachers’ perspectives. Using a descriptive survey method, the researcher designed a questionnaire with two sections: the first covered demographic variables, and the second consisted of 32 items addressing the study’s themes. The questionnaire was distributed to a sample of 90 kindergarten teachers in Kuwait. Data on the challenges hindering the inclusion of children with Down syndrome, as perceived by the teachers, were collected and analyzed using appropriate statistical methods.The findings revealed that administrative barriers were the most significant, with a mean score of 3.86 and a standard deviation of 0.70. The lack of clear policies supporting inclusion was identified as the primary barrier from the teachers’ perspective. Furthermore, concerns were raised about inadequate infrastructure, such as the absence of safe spaces and poor building design. Regarding family-related barriers, the results indicated that families also posed challenges to implementing inclusion for children with Down syndrome in kindergartens.The study recommended implementing awareness programs and workshops for teachers, parents, and non-disabled students to improve understanding of the needs of children with Down syndrome in inclusive kindergarten settings.

The purpose of the current research was to identify the obstacles of the development of critical thinking skills for the early stage child from the point of view of female teachers in Saudi Arabia. The sample of the research consisted of (120) teachers of early childhood, randomly selected in the cities of Dammam and Riyadh. The descriptive/qualitative method was used, and the questionnaire was used as a tool for collecting search data after verifying its suitability for application and consisted of (44) individuals in its final form for four basic domains. The research reached several results: The research sample approved the third domain: the obstacles of kindergarten management by a percentage of (75.40%), the sample of the research approved the second domain: the obstacles of the classroom environment and the curriculum, by a percentage of (73.60%), as well as the research sample approved the fourth domain: the obstacles of the kindergarten teacher by a percentage of (70.60%), and also approved the first domain: disabilities related to the characteristics and mental needs of the child by a percentage of (66.40%).The results also indicated that there were no statistically significant differences at the level (0.05) in the domains of the questionnaire about the obstacles of developing critical thinking skills for an early stage child from the point of view of the this stage teachers due to the change of the city (Dammam and Riyadh). The research recommended the need to put the child in a new educational experience in accordance with the characteristics of his/her development and needs, enrich the educational staff with innovative means and activities that address the higher thinking skills, appreciate the outstanding professional competencies, and increase the rewards and incentives for the teachers of the stage.

The 2011 uprising that led to the overthrow of Mubarak was perceived as an expression of the awakening of civil society in the face of authoritarian rule, leading to a re-examination of its role as an agent for democratic change. Nevertheless, the re-entrenchment of authoritarianism confirmed prior critical discussions regarding civil society limitations. This paper focuses on the role of the human rights movement during the revolution and its aftermath and reveals the activists’ reflections on its failure. The discussion refers to the limitations of human rights organizations but also exposes the possibilities created by the revolution and the impact of the ‘new civic activism’, which extricated human rights activism from the enclaves of the professional organizations. This analysis requires us to reconsider the definitions of civil society, which focus on formal organizations, and view it as a space in which various actors, including fluid and horizontal forms of activism, engage through contention and cooperation. Such an analysis drew our attention to the activists themselves and exposes the variety of actors working for reform, their various interpretations of the anti-democratic reality, and their potential to establish an anti-hegemonic narrative.