Keeping all children part of the process: Officials explain No Child Left Behind Act
MetroWest Daily News
Kristen Bradley
January 28, 2003
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MassINC, the lead sponsor of yesterday's event held at the Best Western Royal Plaza Hotel and Trade Center, is a nonpartisan organization devoted to developing a public agenda for Massachusetts that promotes growth and vitality.
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"How does the architecture of federal education reform stand on our own agenda?" [S. Paul Reville, executive director of the Center for Education Research and Policy at MassINC] Reville asked, referring to the state's Education Reform Act of 1993. Discussion also focused on what the law implies, who it affects and what the overall act stands for.
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Jennings, who delivered the keynote address, discussed results from a national report his office conducted last year. The results of the report, "From the Capital to the Classroom: State and Federal Efforts to Implement the No Child Left Behind Act," were released earlier this month.
"The law itself, it's meant to affect every child, every school, every teacher in public education," Jennings said. "It has very high expectations."
Over the summer and fall of 2002, Jennings spent time talking with officials in every state about the new law and what was being done to implement it into school systems. Yesterday, Jennings talked about his months of research, saying that the report yielded much information including the overwhelming feeling that the goals behind the act are solid -- it's the implementation that's the problem.
It's the nature of the requirements and what's needed to carry them out that school officials across the country are having trouble with, Jennings said. States, including Massachusetts, are rapid on implementing aspects of the law such as more student testing, something that there is more widespread knowledge about among colleagues. But states, he said, are very slow at implementing new programs the act calls for like the establishment of non-profit and for-profit groups to be developed to support student tutoring.
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