No Child Left Behind - Kansas Deaf News

The following newspaper article was printed in the Olathe News on Thursday, April 19th, 2007.

Leonard

No Child Left Behind Works Well
By Leonard Hall
Congressman Dennis Moore has been touring the area school districts and having town hall meetings on the No Child Left Behind law that took effect 5 years ago. Critics of the law were out in force claiming a number of things were wrong with the law.

Since 2002, the No Child Left Behind law has worked well and forced substantial changes in public education across the country, including Olathe schools and Kansas School for the Deaf (KSD).

In the 1980s, candidates running for Olathe School Board twice and for JCCC Board of Trustees campaigned on reports about academic and graduation level in Olathe schools. These reports were based upon tests given by the school district itself.

Private and Catholic schools were playing the public relation game showing how wonderful their students were doing academically. KSD had reports showing how well deaf graduates were doing in college.

Employers were claiming that many hearing and deaf graduates simply did not have the necessary English, math, reading, and writing skills to do well in employment.

At JCCC in the 1980s, the information about the academic skills of the average high school students was shocking. Nearly 20% to 40% of high school graduates from public and private schools had poor academic skills in certain areas and took remedial English, math, reading, or writing courses. There was a high dropout rate in college.

With the state standardized tests required by the No Child Left Behind law, the weakness in public education was exposed. The test results in 2002 revealed that generally 5% of deaf, disabled and minority students were proficient in reading and math. A high percentage of all students test scores were listed as being unsatisfactory in most areas.

The top half of students at the public and private schools did well in these state tests. It is the bottom half who had have major problems in education.

A major transformation in public education occurred over the past 5 years. KSD enacted a number of creative education programs to improve the academic skills of deaf students.
KSD has its accelerated reading program where all students read a total of 22,206,000 words last year! There were math improvement and intervention plans.

The most recent state test results show generally 60% of deaf students (up from 5% in 2002) are now proficient in reading, math, social science, and other areas. Test scores have soared for most students.

Olathe schools made major revisions in their education programs, including revamping their entire math program in elementary and junior high schools.

The No Child Left Behind law works brilliantly for public education and particularly for deaf education.

(Leonard Hall writes a weekly column. He can be reached at Legalnetwk@aol.com.)