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Belchertown Public School Students Will Benefit From Presidential Waivers, Belchertown School Superintendent Says
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Wednesday,
February 10, 2010
Massachusetts was one of 10 states that received a waiver from certain requirements from the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). NCLB was passed by President George Bush in 2001, which measures student performance through standardized tests. In the commonwealth, that test is the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS).
Belchertown Superintendent of Schools Dr. Judith Houle said that the waiver will allow the district to focus on student growth.
“It changes in pretty profound ways how we are accountable for student achievement,” Houle said, adding that the NCLB previously required that schools reach 100% proficiency in English, language arts, reading, writing and math by 2014. “What this waiver allows us to do is not to necessarily look at some artificial number for all students, but to look at closing performance achieving gaps between white students and minority students.”
It has been reported that 82% of school systems across the nation are likely to fail the student assessment portion of NCLB. In Belchertown, Houle said that only the elementary schools needed improvement.
“At the elementary school level, we were seeing gaps between white students and low income and special education students,” she said. “It’s not anything that would cause us to have to declare a school wholly underperforming, but certainly caused us to sit up and pay attention, which we had already begun to do anyway.”
As Houle stated in her initial interview with the School Committee before she was hired as the new school superintendent a few years ago, she said that she had a “love/hate relationship” with NCLB.
“I think that it (NCLB) has forced us to have some conversations in education that are necessary to have,“ she said, adding, “However, the waiver allows us to demonstrate that we are helping students grow rather than helping students reach some sort of number that may or may not be realistic for them.”
Houle expanded on why she thinks that the waivers to NCLB will be beneficial to students. She said that the waiver will allow the district to look at how students are growing as teachers and administrators seek to do more with Belchertown’s students instructionally and use assessment data to inform that instruction.
“I think that to put an arbitrary number that all students have to reach regardless of their learning disability, their socio-economic background, their proficiency of the English language is probably unrealistic,” Houle said. “So the flexibility allows us to look at student growth over time, because that is what we are about. It’s not necessarily reaching an arbitrary number, but [asks] are we helping students to grow and become stronger readers, writers, and mathematicians as they get through school and, by extension, stronger learners across the board.”
As President Barack Obama stated in his announcement of the waivers, schools must meet more rigorous accountability standards in exchange. According to the transcript of his remarks, the president said that he likes one of the goals that Massachusetts has set for school districts.
“So Massachusetts, for example, has set a goal to cut the number of underperforming students in half over the next six years,” said President Obama. “I like that goal.”
To accomplish this goal, Houle said that Massachusetts passed a standard into law in 2010 and released a rigorous new educator evaluation model. An Act Relative to the Achievement Gap was passed in January 2010. Houle said that the new model holds educators from the classroom teacher to the superintendent accountable in the areas of curriculum and instruction, teaching learning, engaging families in the community, professional culture, and administration management and operations of the school district.
In his announcement granting the waivers, President Obama said that the NCLB waivers are in response to lack of action on the matter from Congress.
“After waiting far too long for Congress to reform No Child Left Behind, my Administration is giving states the opportunity to set higher, more honest standards in exchange for more flexibility,” said President Obama. “Today, we’re giving 10 states the green light to continue making reforms that are best for them. Because if we’re serious about helping our children reach their potential, the best ideas aren’t going to come from Washington alone. Our job is to harness those ideas, and to hold states and schools accountable for making them work.”
While many have applauded President Obama’s initiative, others were less than excited about the waivers. The New York Times, for example, reported that Congressional Republicans perceived it, “as an effort to politicize education policy rather than work with Congress.”
The other nine states granted waivers by the president are: Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Tennessee
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