Dear Mr. President,
I am a part-time University of New Mexico student and columnist for the student newspaper, but in my other life, I am a middle school teacher. Because I have firsthand experience of some of the challenges teachers and students face, I thought I'd offer some advice on education policy.
First of all, I want to offer my belated congratulations on the 2002 passage of the No Child Left Behind Act. This was truly historic legislation. Some people don't realize how literal the title of this legislation is: It calls for 100 percent of students to be proficient in reading and math by the 2013-2014 school year.
To put it another way, if a single child is not proficient in these two areas, the child's school will have failed to meet the requirements of the law.
Some people complain about this aspect of the act, arguing that because so many factors contribute to a child's performance on a single standardized test - from family background to the student's health on the day of the assessment - it is unreasonable to expect every single child in the United States of America to test well every year.
I'm not going to argue with that part of the law. I think its ambition is admirable, and I'm not one to complain about high expectations. I would rather figure out how one can meet them.
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And that's what I wanted to write to you about. You see, I've noticed that some features of your policies are working at cross-purposes to the law. You may not know it, but even while you promote 100 percent proficiency for our children, you make that proficiency more difficult for some students to attain.
Let's start with Alicia. She's been absent on Wednesday for two weeks. It's very difficult, you can imagine, for a student to make significant progress with that kind of attendance.
Alicia's mom came to me to explain that her husband had been apprehended at the border for a minor green card violation. Deportation hearings happen each Wednesday in El Paso, Texas, and their attorney advised them to bring the children to court to try to convince the judge not to send Alicia's dad back to Mexico.
Alicia's mother is not optimistic, because she's heard there has been simply no mercy for these kinds of things since Sept. 11, 2001, but she has some small hope and will continue to take Alicia to El Paso the next few weeks.
These eight-hour round trips to the deportation hearings and back have been enough to distract Alicia from her schoolwork. Imagine her father is deported, as expected. Her mother, who works full time, is afraid Alicia won't succeed in school without her father around to help raise her.
President Bush, I know you believe in family values. Maybe you could add some legislation to the No Child Left Behind Act that will prevent families from being torn apart at the border.
I also wanted to tell you about Robert. On Tuesday, he came wheezing to my room with a withdrawal form. His asthma has become so bad he has to move to Denver to be closer to a special asthma clinic. You can imagine how a mid-year move disrupts a child's success in school.
The link between air pollution and childhood asthma is so thoroughly proven that maybe you can add some legislation to your education program that will improve the Clean Air Act instead of weakening it, so our children aren't further distracted from academic progress by not being able to breathe.
And speaking of air pollution, a month ago your Environmental Protection Agency came out with new rules on mercury pollution that were far weaker than what most experts think wise.
According to a recent study, 10 percent to 15 percent of children born in America suffer from IQ losses attributable to high mercury levels in their mothers during pregnancy. Obviously, the new mercury regulations won't make No Child Left Behind's 100 percent success any easier.
The bar for academic expectations keeps getting higher and higher. Under your environmental and immigration rules, American kids keep getting dumber, sicker and more distracted.
I don't doubt your commitment to improve education, but maybe you hadn't realized the importance of these real-world obstacles to meeting the mandates of No Child Left Behind. I'm willing to do my part to meet the goals of your legislation. Are you?
Sincerely,
Dane Roberts
Daily Lobo columnist
