By Neal Legler
Utah is not quite like other states, Utah educators and officials say, so adapting to one-size-fits-all education reform measures imposed by the federal No Child Left Behind Act has been problematic.
“This is such a hard legislation because parts of it are really good,” said Brenda Hales, executive director of curriculum and staff development for the Jordan School District.
Hales praised the intent of the federal act, but said it suffers from unintended consequences and erroneous assumptions that may harm rather than help Utah”s children.
“The majority of the legislation is based upon really bad experiences of things that have happened on the East Coast, the Southeast, Texas and to some extent the West Coast,” Hales said. “We have different circumstances here.”
The No Child Left Behind Act, which Hales said comprises thousands of pages between the initial legislation and subsequent guidance regulations, makes sweeping reforms to teacher licensure, student assessment, teaching methods and school accountability.
Assessing students” performance has not been a problem for Utah, said Rep. Kory Holdaway, R-Taylorsville. Utah was already meeting most NCLB requirements for student assessment when the act was signed in Jan. 2002.
Utah”s student tests have been well respected across the nation, said Patti Harrington, associate superintendent of Instructional Services at the Utah State Office of Education.
Most of the state”s troubles with NCLB have had to do with teacher licensure – an area that affects BYU students.
Part of the federal act requires states to make sure teachers are highly qualified in the subjects they teach, said Joan Patterson, coordinator of educator licensing at the Utah State Office of Education.
For teachers to be considered highly qualified by NCLB standards, Patterson said, they must have a bachelor”s degree, a teaching license and a major in a specific subject area.
“And that”s where we”re running into interpretation problems,” Patterson said.
For example, according to NCLB, teachers can only be considered highly qualified to teach a subject if they majored in that subject, Patterson said. Teachers who majored in elementary education are not considered highly qualified in any one discipline by NCLB standards because their major did not address a specific content area.
The same goes for teachers who graduated with a composite major in a subject such as social studies, Patterson said.
Composite major programs are valuable to employers because they give teachers a broad background in several different subjects taught in Utah schools, Patterson said. However, employers are less likely to hire teachers with composite majors if the teachers can”t be counted as highly qualified.
Teachers who minored in a subject are not highly qualified by NCLB to teach that subject, either, Patterson said.
At BYU, many students obtain teaching minors in languages they learned while serving missions for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
For those students to be considered highly qualified to teach the language, they have to take an alternative route to licensure, Patterson said.
Marie Tuttle, assistant dean of the McKay School of Education said one of the downsides of NCLB is it tends to favor alternative routes to licensure over traditional routes.
According to the Utah State Office of Education Web site, alternative routes to licensure allow teachers to obtain a Level 1 Utah Professional Educator License without going through a traditional university program.
According to the Web site, alternative routes can include taking a specific course of study supported by a school district or taking tests in content and pedagogy, the art of teaching.
People who have minored in a subject must take the same alternative route to certification as those without a minor, Tuttle said. They are not considered any differently.
However, she said, several school personnel directors have indicated they would consider job applicants with a teaching minor over those without.
“I”m encouraging BYU to have all of their language minors take the content test and take the oral speaking test,” Patterson said, “because I”ll hold them up against people who have been trained in any other state.”
Students graduating with elementary education or composite majors will also have to take tests to obtain a Level 1 license, Patterson said.
Utah has not yet begun offering the tests, Patterson said, although most of the tests will be ready to administer by late September.
“We are one of six states that did not test teachers using a specific, sit-down, either computer or paper and pencil test prior to the passage of No Child Left Behind,” Patterson said, “which means that we are one of six states that”s scrambling to catch up.”
Creating tests that determinate who is well prepared to teach and who is not takes a lot of time, people, and money, Patterson said.
“It”s a huge amount of work, and we don”t have any budget,” Patterson said. “The federal government assumed that 45 of the 50 states were testing, so they didn”t put any money aside for it.”
Hales said one of the erroneous assumptions of NCLB is an adequate level of funding exists to implement it.
That is not the case in Utah, she said. Utah”s funding challenges go back to the anti-polygamy Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887. When Utah became a state, most of its land remained under federal ownership. As a result, relatively little private property exists today for state taxing purposes.
Instead, Utah has to rely on income taxes to fund education, Hales said. But with one of the highest dependents-to-taxpayer ratios in the nation, income tax funds don”t help much either.
“The assumption that everybody has adequate funding hurts us,” Hales said, “because the rules and regulations are there whether you have the funding or not, and the suggestions for improvement are there whether you have the funding or not, and there simply isn”t enough money to do it. It”s not whining; it”s an absolute fact.”
Suzanne Kimball, principle of Springville Middle School, said NCLB makes scheduling teachers difficult.
Kimball said the difficulty comes when, for example, she has an art teacher on staff, but only two periods of art that need to be taught.
In those situations, she said, she often has classes in other subjects, like math, that need to be filled, and not enough teachers to fill them. But under NCLB, even if the art teacher had a college minor in math, that teacher would not be able to teach anything but art.
Patterson said most small schools struggle with similar situations. Sometimes schools don”t have enough teachers to fill every class, so some teachers have to teach multiple subjects.
“Teachers cannot possibly have a major in every subject that they teach, or even at the age of 40, they wouldn”t be out of school yet,” she said.
Under NCLB, if a student”s teacher were not highly qualified by federal standards, the school principal would be required to notify the students” parents, Patterson said.
She said the principal would send parents a letter reading something like this: “Although your child”s teacher meets all state requirements for licensure, according to federal definitions of highly qualified, Mrs. Smith is not highly qualified.”
Jennifer Vawdrey from American Fork, a mother of five, said she might find such a letter troubling.
“It probably would be a setback for me because I know that they have those regulations for a reason,” she said. “But I think I would probably want to just visit with the teacher and find out what her qualifications are and what her approach to teaching the children would be.”
Hales said educators on the district level and in higher education are working to help legislators see some of the flaws inherent in the NCLB legislation.
She said sitting down with someone and explaining some of the unintended consequences of the act has proven to be the best approach.
“Nobody wants to be quoted as being opposed to No Child Left Behind, because, again, the philosophy is sound,” Hales said. “It”s the unintended consequences of the legislation and the rules that are problematic, and I think as time goes by, there will be more and more people who will make comments about the legislation.”
