A teacher I met via Facebook recently vented her frustration about the No Child Left Behind policy and how it is implemented via rules about FCAT in the state of Florida. The situation that really upset her involved a little boy that recently joined her elementary school class in Central Florida. She wrote:

“There is evidently a new or fairly new law that all children have to take the FCAT. I have a boy in my third grade class literally “off the boat” well, plane from Haiti. He started school in the U.S. last Monday. I was told he has to take the FCAT. I checked with other people at other schools to see if the ESOL assistant at my school was mistaken. It is true, he has to take the FCAT. This is beyond outrageous. I’d go to my local paper, but they twist everyone’s words. This is beyond stupid. I’d love to have the ignoramuses who made this ruling take the FCAT, even third grade FCAT in a language they don’t know.”

I began to help her do some research. We found that multiple states have varying levels of temporary exemptions from NCLB mandated testing for recent immigrants who are classified as ELL – English Language Learners.

In fact, the state of Florida amended its administrative code to address this issue in May 2009. However, the amended code only exempted students from taking the reading portion of the FCAT. Students would still be required to take the math portion. State rules encouraged the use of native language interpreters to assist students but did not mandate this provision. Hence, schools with no staff fluent in Haitian Creole, for instance, would not provide this assistance to a child.

With some additional research and assistance from helpful staffers in Tallahassee at the Florida Department of Education, we were provided the following document:

http://www.fldoe.org/haiti/pdf/haitimemo.pdf

This document is a Memorandum regarding “Assistance to Displaced Students from Haiti.” Basically, the Commissioner of Education exempted all displaced students from Haiti from FCAT testing and provided guidelines regarding how best to serve the educational needs of these students.

While this memorandum looks like the answer to the school teacher’s issue, it is not that simple. The school administration where she works has to acknowledge this document and understand how to implement it locally. Somehow, somewhere along the line, a breakdown in communication has occurred and this teacher has been told to administer the FCAT to a student who does not speak, understand, or read English and only knows the metric system in mathematics.

To address this issue, supporting documents such as the memorandum have been provided to the School Board and to the local teacher’s union for that county. Pressure is being exerted on the school administration to read, understand, and implement state policies appropriately. The outcome is still pending.

While this particular situation is obviously absurd and appears ridiculous to casual observers, the larger problem remains for any ELL student who is a recent arrival to the United States. Testing exemptions only excuse students from the reading tests. School districts do not always have the personnel to provide interpreter services for subjects like math. There are no exemption provisions for other subjects areas such as Science or History, which are also tested at different grade levels.

In general, language instruction for ELL students has been one of many budget casualties in these lean economic times.

No Child Left Behind is a misnomer. Many children are still being left behind in our nation’s schools due to this law’s one size fits all education policies.

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