Recently, President Bush signed into federal law the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, one of the most sweeping educational reform acts in decades. The legislation, which had bipartisan support, has a wonderful philosophy that nearly all public school educators would embrace. It states that the purpose of the act is, &uot;to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging state academic achievement standards and state academic assessments.&uot;

However, the implementation guidelines of this law have many educators raising many concerns. While Minnesota is known as the &uot;education state,&uot; it is interesting to note that when the vote was taken, Minnesota was the only state to register a non-partisan and nearly unanimous &uot;no&uot; vote on this legislation. It has also been reported that some of the major supporters and authors of this legislation are now very concerned with the negative impacts to public education due to the significant decreases in federal funding that was promised for the implementation of NCLB.

One of the cornerstones of the NCLB law deals with testing and accountability and the concept of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).

Other components include: school improvement, school choice, supplemental educational services and teacher quality. This article will deal primarily with the concept of AYP and the impact on public schools.

Each state is required to define the level of proficiency students must achieve in mathematics, reading/language arts and, starting in the 2005-2006 school year, science. Within the next 12 years all students, regardless of their circumstances, must attain this requisite level of proficiency and each school is required to demonstrate that it is making Adequate Yearly Progress toward achieving that goal. AYP must be:measured overall for each school broken out by grade level as well as be disaggregated for economically disadvantaged students, students from major ethnic and racial groups, students with disabilities and students with limited English proficiency assessment and accountability strategies are important for schools to develop when continuous improvement is the goal. We pride ourselves as being data driven in the decisions we make for the learners in District 241. So what is the concern with the assessment process of NCLB?

Presently, the Adequate Yearly Progress process laid out in the NCLB law creates a scenario that would make it nearly impossible for any school to avoid being labeled a failure. If the guidelines are not changed, many educators believe that eventually all schools will fail because 100 percent of students within one or more of the subgroups mentioned above will not be able to reach the state proficiency level. Another concern is that schools that do not make adequate yearly progress must develop an improvement plan, which over time becomes progressively more demanding and requires additional funding from the school district. Even more concerning is the regulation requiring that all students who attend a school that fails to make AYP for two consecutive years or more be given the option to transfer to another public school in the district. We would hope that if any of our families would have to receive such a notification they would still believe in their community school. It just seems unrealistic to question the quality of your school because on a single day, in one grade level, a student in one subgroup did not score high enough on one test.

We anticipate that the present guidelines for NCLB will eventually take more and more of our resources from other programming opportunities for all students. Some parents are already concerned that the middle- and top-level achieving students are not getting their fair share of the available resources and we see this legislation as exacerbating that concern. The staff of District 241 will continue to focus its work on increasing student achievement and improving our scores on statewide tests. However, we also believe that we should be educating the whole learner, in all areas of the curriculum. Students learn well and succeed in the excellent environment that we provide. We have an excellent school board, staff and administration that work daily with parents to make the best possible educational decisions for the children of our community. The present guidelines of the No Child Left Behind Act reduce the opportunity for making good local educational decisions.

Dave Prescott is superintendent of Albert Lea School District #241.