Each year, ASCD educators from across the United States create a legislative agenda to outline the association's policy priorities and guide our national advocacy efforts. But the true power of the agenda lies in its use by you, ASCD members who have firsthand knowledge of what needs to be done to address the rapidly changing education needs of our country and its students.
ASCD's 2011 Legislative Agenda calls on Congress to not just tweak the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) this year but to completely rewrite it to support your efforts to provide a world-class education to every student. The agenda affirms the current national priority of closing the achievement gap between different student populations, and it proposes that we simultaneously pursue a new federal goal of closing the achievement gap between students in the United States and their international peers.
The agenda emphasizes the need for
- College- and career-readiness standards that encompass not only reading and math, but also other critical core academic subjects like social science, the arts, foreign languages, and physical education.
- A whole child approach to education that involves parents, educators, and community members in meeting each child's comprehensive needs and promotes collaboration among school systems and the social, health, and safety services that support children.
- Improved testing for accountability purposes that encompasses multiple measures of student achievement and tracks the academic growth of each child in every state over the course of the school year.
- Comprehensive support for underperforming schools that enriches the curriculum and fosters high-quality teaching, instead of our current reliance on punitive, prescriptive, and unproven sanctions.
- Rewards for schools that are doing well, such as flexibility in how they use their federal education dollars.
- Resources for secondary schools to address our nation's high school graduation and dropout rates.
- Support for educators in gaining and sustaining the professional knowledge and skills to address students' evolving needs so that every child in every classroom has a highly effective teacher.
We encourage you to use this agenda to guide discussions and decision making in your own states and communities. Together, we need to educate our lawmakers on the urgency of rewriting NCLB so that we can stop operating under the constraints of an outdated law and start meeting our students' varied needs, preparing them to succeed in our new and challenging global economy.
To read the full ASCD Legislative Agenda, go to www.ascd.org/legislativeagenda.
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