Rep. Hill defends vote to teachers

U.S. Rep. Baron Hill, D-Ind., visited the School of Education Tuesday to discuss literacy and language education in primary and secondary schools with IU faculty and local educators.\nAt the forefront of the discussion was the controversial No Child Left Behind Act, which Hill voted for in 2001. Most in the audience attacked the act, which set standards for teacher accountability through standardized tests.\n"Where do we go after labels are placed on schools?" asked Pat Baily, English teacher at Bloomington South High School. "When you work with at-risk students they're not going to make the same progress as other students down the hall. Teachers are being forced to give students tests they know they won't pass. How are we supposed to stay positive through that?"\nHill explained that he supported the act at the time because legislation he introduced to support smaller schools was attached to the bill.\n"Learning is a human idiosyncrasy," Hill said. "It varies from one child to the next. We need tools to deal with that. It can't be a formula."\nOther educators complained about discipline problems in the classroom and the institution of zero tolerance policies.\n"In the wake of Columbine, we realized that we've got to keep schools safe and in the past 10 to 15 years there's been this move toward zero tolerance," said Russ Skiba, director of the Institute for Child Studies, referring to the school shootings in Littleton, Colorado. "But as we've been studying this, we've found it doesn't work. It's been correlated with lower achievement and increased drop-out rates."\nKate Seidl, an adjunct faculty member with the School of Education teaching special education classes, explained how standardized tests also take away from time that could be spent on discipline.\n"When teachers could be in staff meetings talking about how to support each other, that time is instead spent on tests," Seidl said. "The pressure of high stakes tests take away from many of these initiatives."\nHowever, Hill pointed out that it is the minority of students who are garnering all this negative attention.\n"Seventy-five percent of kids are doing well in the classroom," Hill said. "It's that 25 percent we're focusing all this attention on. When I go out in the real world to businesses I hear, 'Schools are not doing their jobs. You need to do something about it politically.' The political pressure is coming from the business types focusing on the 25 percent coming into their plants without the necessary skills. They're going after politicians, and this is how politicians are responding."\nBut it's not the idea of teacher accountability that the crowd opposed, so much as the ways it's being enforced.\n"We're not resisting accountability," assistant professor of language education Peter Cowan said. "But it's very frustrating because we feel there are many impediments. I think what we really need are some allies in government."\n-- Contact staff writer Chris Freiberg at wfreiber@indiana.edu.