If one thing was clear at the community meeting hosted
Tuesday night by the Lagunitas School District, it was that parents,
teachers, and school board trustees are still far from agreeing with
one another on whether the district should opt out of the federal No
Child Left Behind Act, thus forgoing an annual $44,000 in school funding.
The meeting was planned to gauge opinions in the San
Geronimo Valley on how best to meet the challenges posed by No Child
Left Behind. For the past two years, the district has failed to meet
the act’s requirements because of inadequate student participation
in standardized tests.
As a result, it has been branded a failing school
district. Now in its first year of noncompliance with federal standards,
the district must set aside money for teacher training and offer to
bus students to better-performing schools. In the fifth year of noncompliance,
after progressively harsher punishments, it could face takeover by the
state.
To avoid that fate, a faction of school board trustees
began arguing last fall, the district should opt out of No Child Left
Behind by refusing to accept the government funding attached to the
legislation. Their cause was given prominent coverage in local news
media – in print and on television – which tended to portray
the district’s families as a united group, prepared to stand on
principle against interference from Washington.
A different picture emerged Tuesday night. Among the
60 parents, board trustees, teachers, and school administrators who
turned out at the Lagunitas School, views still vary widely on just
what the district’s relationship to federal education standards
should be. Only two of the district’s five trustees are at present
willing to opt out of No Child Left Behind.
"This is causing divisiveness at every level
– in people’s own families, within the school, within the
community," said San Geronimo Valley Community Center director
Dave Cort, summarizing a group discussion he moderated at one point
during the evening.
‘We risk being homogenized’
On one side are those – led by school board trustees
Stephanie O’Brien and Richard Sloan – who believe that the
district should exempt itself from the requirements of No Child Left
Behind by giving up Title 1 funding, which the federal government now
grants only on condition that schools comply with the legislation. That
would amount to about $44,000, or less than two percent of the district’s
annual budget, they say.
O’Brien said that the legislation’s one-size-fits-all
method of measuring student performance through standardized tests is
ill-suited to the progressive school district, which has three alternative
schooling tracks – Open Classroom, Montessori, and Waldorf-inspired
– but no mainstream program.
"This is a radically diverse community, and we
stand to risk being homogenized," O’Brien said.
A more practical consideration, O’Brien said,
is the low probability of the district’s complying with the act,
even if it seeks to do so. Families cannot be forced to submit to the
state’s weeklong Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) exams,
although failure to do so leads to sanctions under No Child Left Behind.
The act requires that 95 percent of the district’s students take
the tests; last year, only 70 percent did so.
"No matter what we do, we’re not going to
be able to comply," O’Brien said. To avoid sanctions, the
argument goes, best to opt out of the legislation entirely by dropping
Title 1 funding.
‘Strings we can live with’
It remains unclear whether escaping the requirements
of No Child Left Behind will be that simple. The law was passed in 2002,
and school districts across the country have only begun to deal with
its more severe provisions. The consequences for a small school district
of dropping government funding and not participating in the legislation
have not been demonstrated. The Lagunitas School District, like many
other noncompliant school districts across the state and country, is
in unknown territory.
But for some in the Valley, the immediate consequences
of opting out of No Child Left Behind pose a more concrete threat than
the prospect, still years away, of government intervention.
"I don’t think, once we look at all the
information, that opting out of the money is going to be the best thing
to do," said trustee Denise Bohman. "It has strings attached,
but they’re strings we can live with."
Bohman noted that other sources of district funding
are calculated annually using Title 1 funds. Giving up the money, she
said, could cause a ripple effect that risks decreasing funding for
an already cash-strapped district (Lagunitas School District has for
years ranked as one of Marin’s poorest school districts, and its
teachers are the lowest-paid in the county).
The Title 1 funds, though a small percentage of the
annual district budget, are in themselves important, Bohman said. The
funds are used to hire a reading specialist who works one-on-one with
students, pay teachers’ aides, and buy extra books. A former district
trustee said that Title 1 money most helps those students whose academic
performance is lagging but who do not qualify for special education.
Trustee Kelly O’Connor said that he would like
to find a "middle path" between rejecting the funding outright
and submitting totally to the standardized-testing regime that No Child
Left Behind imposes. Along with Bohman and trustee Susi Giacomini, O’Connor
said he isn’t ready to opt out of the legislation yet.
Test dogma
"I think that what has happened, particularly
in our district, is that people have accepted the dogma that all testing
is terrible," said Woodacre resident Karen Koenig, whose daughter
attended the Lagunitas School’s Montessori program until the 5th
grade and is now at White Hill Middle School in Fairfax. Koenig, an
English professor at College of Marin, said that she hadn’t observed
undue stress in her own children when they have taken STAR tests.
Fears of superficial "teaching to the test"
occupying larger parts of the curriculum are unfounded, she added. "Teaching
to a standard while also inspiring your students is exactly the challenge
and the joy of teaching," she said. During her first teaching job
preparing adults and teenage high-school dropouts for the GED High School
Equivalency Diploma Test, she said, her students were inspired to read
entire plays by Shakespeare after studying for critical-reading passages
on the exam.
Independent minds
Community Center director Cort sees things differently.
Cort’s own children were both special ed students in the Lagunitas
School District; his son could not read easily until the 5th grade.
The latitude this school district grants its students in pursuing an
education tailored to their needs turned both his children into successful
and happy learners, he said.
"The fact that he was in this district that is
really an individual, special district allowed him to develop at his
own pace," Cort said. "And sure enough, it panned out."
Cort’s son is now studying to be a teacher at Dominican University
in San Rafael.
It is this tradition of individualized education,
Cort said, that is threatened by compulsory standardized testing. During
the STAR tests, he noted, classrooms where parents are usually encouraged
to come and go, sharing in their children’s education under the
rules of the Open Classroom program, are cordoned off for a full week
of standardized testing. During that time, he said, the campus feels
like another school.
"I believe in assessment," Cort said. "My
kids have had more assessment than anyone else in this district because
they’re special ed. But everything is geared to them. Gifted kids,
special ed kids, kids in the middle – they all deserve individualized
educations. The overriding thing this district is all about is choice."
Nationwide backlash
The Lagunitas School District is not alone in chafing
under No Child Left Behind. In fact, few pieces of federal legislation
in recent history have provoked a greater backlash at the state and
local level. Connecticut filed a lawsuit against the federal government
over the act last summer, and Utah passed a law giving its own education
standards precedence over the national standards, despite the government’s
threat to withhold $76 million in funding.
Bills critical of No Child Left Behind have been considered
by 21 states, according to The Civil Society Institute, a nonprofit
think tank, and 15 states have considered bills to opt out of the legislation.
To date, only three states have not taken measures to challenge the
law.
In California, some education officials expect No
Child Left Behind to falter in the next decade because of the enormous
number of schools that could fail to comply, making government intervention
impossible to carry out. Trustee O’Brien said that more than 90
percent of schools in the state are currently earmarked for reforms
because of noncompliance, quoting statistics from the California School
Boards Association.
Such is the backdrop against which parents and trustees
of the Lagunitas School District are struggling to come to terms with
Washington’s interference in their historically innovative and
independent school system. Another community meeting on No Child Left
Behind will be held a month from now. But divisions within the community
over the right course of action could be difficult to breach, O’Brien
said.
"Regardless of what decision we make, somebody’s
going to be upset," she said. "The federal government has
put us in a lose-lose position."