Logan Daily - Brown Discusses Legislation Concerning Education

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By Katherine Hibbard

This week, the Senate is involved in debates over legislation to reform the No Child Left Behind law, and U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) spoke out about the importance of improving education in Ohio.

"We owe it to children and taxpayers to ensure that education provided in all of our classrooms is effective, no matter where those classrooms are," Brown said. "This bill is an opportunity to strengthen public education in Ohio, and I'm working on a number of provisions to ensure that all children have access to a quality education."

Brown discussed at length the Support Making Assessments Reliable and Timely (SMART) Act, which has been an issue for more than six months.

The Logan-Hocking School District weighed in on the SMART Act during their Feb. 23, meeting.

During that meeting, Brenda Lemon of the Southeastern Ohio Education Association spoke to the board regarding the Time to Teach/Time to Learn legislation, which touches on the overemphasis on standardized testing and the pressure that it puts on the students.

"What are we trying to teach our children?" asked board vice-president Dr. Scott Anzalone during that meeting. "I see it, kids are afraid to go to school, they're throwing up and I see them in my office; they're having anxiety -- young kids having panic attacks because they have a test today.

The SMART Act would assist states and local education agencies in aligning testing materials to college and career-ready standards. It also will provide funding so that the results of the tests that the students take are returned to students and parents in a timely manor so that the educators actually have time to act on the results. The SMART Act also seeks to eliminate unnecessary testing, and seeks to ensure that the tests that are administered are designed effectively.

"Annual testing can be a useful yardstick to measure student achievement," Brown said. "But too often our students are inundated with duplicative tests. Excessive testing discourages learning and impedes instruction. By aligning tests so that instruction is not interrupted, teachers will remain accountable and parents can rest assured that their children are not undergoing duplicative testing."

According to Christy Bosch, the school board is in support of the SMART Act, and any time that they can reduce the amount of testing is a very good thing.

She also stated that the delay in receiving the results of that testing has also been a great challenge to the schools.

"The intent of testing is to be able to use the data to be able to look at where areas of strengths and weaknesses are, and to be able to develop lessons and activities that would help support where kids are and take them to the next level," said Bosch.

"It used to be that we would have data books and we would go question by question from the data that we would get back, and we would look at [for example] there may have been 75 percent of the kids that got selected A, and that was the correct answer, but 25 percent of the kids answered D, why was that? So we had lots of curriculum discussions, and because, number one, they reduce what data they give you now, and number two, it comes back so late the data has really not been as effective as it could be."

Brown also talked at length about the Core Opportunity Resources for Equity and Excellence (CORE) Act, which would address differences in public education by establishing accountability requirements to allow different schools to give students equal access to core resources.

"Too many teachers and schools lack the resources to ensure students can grow and succeed," Brown said. "That's why this amendment is so important -- not just to close the achievement gap but also to raise the bar for all of America's students. The amendment would improve access to better trained teachers, to better curricula, and to the opportunity that all students deserve, regardless of their zip code."

"We would be 100 percent behind that," said Bosch. "I think we have done very well with what we have, we use every available resource. Trina Barrell [Director of Instruction] oversees all of our federal dollars, and there are lots of discussions where we take a look at what are our district needs and what are our priorities?"
Bosch said that with access to better resources, the school district would be able to implement initiatives like one-on-one technology at a faster rate, in clusters rather than as a phase in as they are doing now.

"It takes us sometimes longer to get where we want to be because of funding," said Bosch. "We have the plan, but it takes money."

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