Delegates to NYSUT's Representative Assembly 2007 called on Congress to fix the No Child Left Behind Act, which educators say has changed classroom instruction and narrowed the curriculum because of its over-emphasis on standardized tests.

The NCLB resolution, as well as appearances by U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton and Gov. Eliot Spitzer, received widespread coverage by the state and national media.

Reporters for the Associated Press, Hearst News Service, Newsday, NBC, Fox News and others sent news of the delegates' enthusiastic response to Clinton's campaign appearance.

The closely read Education Week also weighed in with a lengthy story about the union's and Sen. Clinton's sharp criticism of NCLB, reporting that RA delegates "erupted into thunderous applause" at the senator's remarks about failures in the law.

Earlier in the week, newspapers around the state interviewed NYSUT President Dick Iannuzzi and Vice President Maria Neira on the union's efforts to improve NCLB.

"Funding alone will not fix the broken provisions in the law," Neira said. "We must reframe the issue as we call for a two-way accountability system designed for 'joint respponsibility.' Educators, SRPs, administrators, parents, students, school boards and federal and state policymakers must work together to improve teaching and learning."

When Neira introduced New York State Teacher of the Year Marguerite Izzo to the RA audience, she praised Izzo for her strong comments on NCLB. Izzo, a fifth-grade teacher in Malverne, received coverage in both Newsday and the Los Angeles Times for her criticism of the federal law.

"Top teacher pops a bubble," read the headline in the Times. "After being honored by Bush, she is cool to the testing requirements of his 'No Child' law."

Both newspapers noted that Izzo made her comments at the White House awards reception "as her union got ready to lobby Congress on changes to Bush's flagship education policy."

"I don't think we want a nation of 'bubble-fillers,'" Izzo said. "We want a nation of thinkers."

The NYSUT resolution calls on the federal government to adequately fund the testing and accountability mandates in the law.

New York received $911 million less in funding in 2006 than what Congress authorized when it enacted NCLB in 2002.

In addition to full funding, Neira said, New York teachers want changes that would make NCLB "more sensible and fair," especially in the law's Adequate Yearly Progress requirement. AYP sets artificial targets for school improvement and carries sanctions if a school, or any one of more than 50 subgroups of students, fails to make sufficient progress.

The resolution also calls for Congress to:

• Allow states to develop appropriate tests for measuring the language arts skills of English language learners and special education students, and develop a way to fairly count their progress. Currently, ELL students must take the same ELA tests as their grade-level peers, even though they may be new immigrants and don't yet have full command of the English language;
• Give credit for student progress and reward success. Permitting schools to use a growth model, which takes into account a child's progress toward higher standards, provides better information on individual student learning;
• Distinguish struggling schools from those that are successful but need limited assistance;
• Acknowledge different rates of student learning; and
• Stop punishing entire schools and districts based on test scores of a small fraction of students.

Neira said the resolution echoes sentiments expressed by NYSUT members in online surveys and recent results released by The Teachers' Network, a non-profit education group. The network, which conducted a nationwide survey of teachers' views of NCLB, provided NYSUT with data from 661 New York teachers. The data revealed:

• 95 percent say NCLB encourages teachers to "teach to the test."
• 79 percent say the emphasis on testing encourages them to eliminate curriculum material that is not tested. Eighty percent say they spend a lot of time teaching test-taking skills.
• 69 percent believe standardized testing is "necessary;" however, just 34 percent believe the law, as currently constructed, is "beneficial" to students and schools.
• Just 7 percent believe NCLB's Adequate Yearly Progress requirements for schools are helpful in closing the achievement gap.
• Nearly 90 percent of New York teachers reported feeling pressure - mostly from principals, administrators, school boards and the news media - to raise test scores.

• Download: Complete survey results. PDF file is 500K.

Meanwhile, an online survey of 695 English language arts teachers earlier this year by NYSUT's Research and Educational Services Department found educators are concerned their students, too, feel pressure to succeed, and many are "stressed out" by the testing experience.

For more on the surveys and NYSUT's view of NCLB, see www.nysut.org.