Highly Qualified But Still Not Trusted

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 required schools to hire "highly qualified" teachers, which works out to mean that grade school ESL teachers need to have the same educational and experience qualifications as medical doctors. Doctors can diagnose, yet, for some reason, State and local level administrators can't allow teachers to be the judges of their students' progress. The only data acceptable to the State are from the State's standardized tests. Why not allow teachers to submit data from formative classroom assessments? I think the Home Language Questionnaire and initial exams to determine student language stages are important, especially when use in conjunction with oral examination and interviews by highly qualified ESL teachers. However, after that the judgment of an ELL's language performance becomes more subtle and subjective. How a student is progressing in learning language is best judged by the teacher's in-class observations (Tracy, 2009). There are sociocultural elements that can't be demonstrated on paper. There are strategic competencies that can't be demonstrated on paper. Yet these are skills that allow a person to communicate and survive in the workaday world. If the goal of education is to prepare students for college and career success, then there's more to it than passing a standardized test. The focus of learning should never be on the test, and in fact, that was not the original intent of the legislation (Baron, 2014). That just seems to be the way it has come to be interpreted.

References

Baron, K. (2014). NCLB co-author says he never anticipated federal law would force testing obsession. Retrieved March 21, 2018, from https://edsource.org/2014/rep-miller-says-he-never-anticipated-nclb-would-force-testing-obsession/56665

Tracy, A. M. (2009). Analysis of ESL teacher endorsement effects on English language learners' student achievement and English language acquisition (Order No. 3491679). Available from Education Database. (915645020). Retrieved from http://ezproxy.ace.edu/

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