Agenda - 03-16-2004-6a - Laserfiche WebLink

Browse Search

North Carolina Association of School Administrators' Recommendations Regarding the'No Child Left Behind' Act February 2004 Almost all education professionals, including the 6,000 who are members of the North Carolina Association of School Administrators (NCASA), agree with and wholeheartedly support the aims of the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. We believe in the philosophy of educating every child who comes through the schoolhouse door and doing so in an equitable and fair manner. This overlying theme is a mainstay of No Child Left Behind and is the same guiding principle that the members of NCASA have been striving to achieve throughout our careers in public education in the State of North Carolina. In addition, our members concur with and support many of the finer points of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). We agree that all educators should work to ensure that every child can learn and deserves to learn from highly qualified teachers and paraprofessionals. We agree that public schools must place more emphasis on closing the achievement gaps of minority and low-income students. We concur that testing is a necessary tool for measuring student achievement, although we believe testing cannot and should not be the sole barometer of student progress. And finally, we believe educators should strive to create an educational system in which schools are held accountable for their students' progress. While NCASA agrees that educators in this state and across the nation should work to achieve these goals, our membership has encountered some difficulties in our efforts to implement and comply with the mandates of No Child Left Behind. Our organization, which is the only professional organization in the state that serves the entire administrative team of North Carolina's school systems and individual schools, has facilitated panel discussions and several dialogue sessions among individual groups of school administrators about NCLB over the last two years. We have concluded through these discussions that the U.S. Department of Education needs to make modifications to the implementation guidelines of several facets of this massive, federal law. We also have concluded that action by our Congress may be necessary to fund NCLB at an appropriate level to allow our public schools to implement the law as intended, to ensure that no child is left behind in our public education system. The North Carolina Association of School Administrators and our entire membership respectfully request that the U. S. Department of Education and the U.S. Congress take immediate and appropriate actions to clarify and modify the implementation process for No Child Left Behind, based on the concerns and recommendations that we have summarized on the pages that follow. We believe the modifications we are recommending will strengthen the federal law and make it easier for all educators to implement. Most importantly, we believe addressing the concerns we have outlined will leave intact the goals and high