JOPLIN, Mo. — On the day before he and President Obama plan to announce an overhaul of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan visited Joplin to review tornado recovery.
In addition to lauding the school district its on-time start, Duncan, one of the more vocal members of the president’s cabinet, previewed some of the changes the Obama administration plans to announce to revamp federal education standards by letting states opt-out of the current law, which Missouri education officials have said they will pursue.
“We’ll have an application process, a time frame. This will be very public and transparent. This will be peer reviewed. There will be no competition between states,” Duncan said. “We think a number of states will want to move very quickly with the process, other states might want to take more time, and we just want to be a good partner.”
Duncan told reporters that while in a roundtable discussion with Joplin High School students, students expressed concern that school funding cuts could effect classes like music and art.
“They’re absolutely essential and the core to any great education,” Duncan said.
Revamping the 2001 law undoubtedly be popular with teachers, who have criticized the law for years regarding its requirement that all students test proficient.
Any more testing, however, would not be popular with some. Randy Turner, a Joplin middle school teacher, who has been a critic of evaluating schools in a nationwide standard, which Turner said Duncan “helped make possible.”
“If Duncan were to visit East Middle School, he would have a chance to see me sacrificing my English classes for a second straight day to give the first of seven Acuity tests,” wrote Turner in a criticalHuffington Post editorial ahead of the Secretary’s visit. “Ignoring this epidemic of testing would be a disservice to teachers and students alike.”
Duncan said Turner and other educators won’t have to worry about that.
“More testing is not something we’re pushing for. We think we’re going to provide a lot of relief to what’s been broken by No Child Left Behind,” Duncan told PoliticMo. “I think students should be assessed annually. Where folks are over testing, that’s not something we’re going to see.”
Duncan criticized the old law, saying he and Obama believe it is “fundamentally broken.”
“It’s far too punitive, too many ways to fail, the only reward for success is not failure, very narrow perspective, top-down from Washington, led to dumbing down of standards, narrowed curriculum,” he said.
Duncan, a former education official in Chicago, said students agreed with his call for higher education standards, saying they mean more student engagement, less dropouts, and more competitively globally.
“I feel more urgency to get better faster. We can’t have a law on the books that’s holding down progress and innovation,” he said.
Duncan was visiting Joplin with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and FEMA administrator Rich Serenio.
The trio visited the location of the devastated former high school, the location of the current 11th and 10th grade center at a local mall, and had a roundtable discussion with students and local officials.
“Joplin has something very special going for it,” said Napolitano, on her second visit to the city since the May 22 tornado.