SACRAMENTO — Thousands of schools across
the nation are responding to the reading and math testing
requirements laid out in No Child Left Behind, President
Bush's signature education law, by reducing class time spent
on other subjects and, for some low-proficiency students,
eliminating it.Schools from
Vermont to California are increasing — in some cases
tripling — the class time that low-proficiency students
spend on reading and math, mainly because the federal law,
signed in 2002, requires annual exams only in those subjects
and punishes schools that fall short of rising benchmarks.
The changes appear to principally
affect schools and students who test below grade level.
The intense focus on the two basic
skills is a sea change in American instructional practice,
with many schools that once offered rich curriculums now
systematically trimming courses like social studies, science
and art. A nationwide survey by a nonpartisan group that is
to be made public on March 28 indicates that the practice,
known as narrowing the curriculum, has become standard
procedure in many communities.
The survey, by the Center on Education
Policy, found that since the passage of the federal law, 71
percent of the nation's 15,000 school districts had reduced
the hours of instructional time spent on history, music and
other subjects to open up more time for reading and math.
The center is an independent group that has made a thorough
study of the new act and has published a detailed yearly
report on the implementation of the law in dozens of
districts.
"Narrowing the curriculum has clearly
become a nationwide pattern," said Jack Jennings, the
president of the center, which is based in Washington.
At
Martin Luther King Jr. Junior High School in Sacramento,
about 150 of the school's 885 students spend five of their
six class periods on math, reading and gym, leaving only one
55-minute period for all other subjects.
About 125 of the school's
lowest-performing students are barred from taking anything
except math, reading and gym, a measure that Samuel Harris,
a former lieutenant colonel in the Army who is the school's
principal, said was draconian but necessary. "When you look
at a kid and you know he can't read, that's a tough call
you've got to make," Mr. Harris said.
The increasing focus on two basic
subjects has divided the nation's educational establishment.
Some authorities, including Secretary of Education Margaret
Spellings, say the federal law's focus on basic skills is
raising achievement in thousands of low-performing schools.
Other experts warn that by reducing the academic menu to
steak and potatoes, schools risk giving bored teenagers the
message that school means repetition and drilling.
"Only two subjects? What a sadness,"
said Thomas Sobol, an education professor at
Columbia Teachers College and a former New York State
education commissioner. "That's like a violin student who's
only permitted to play scales, nothing else, day after day,
scales, scales, scales. They'd lose their zest for music."
But officials in Cuero, Tex., have
adopted an intensive approach and said it was helping them
meet the federal requirements. They have doubled the time
that all sixth graders and some seventh and eighth graders
devote to reading and math, and have reduced it for other
subjects.
"When you only have so many hours per
day and you're behind in some area that's being hammered on,
you have to work on that," said Henry Lind, the schools
superintendent. "It's like basketball. If you can't make
layups, then you've got to work on layups."
Chad Colby, a spokesman for the
federal Department of Education, said the department neither
endorsed nor criticized schools that concentrated
instructional time on math and reading as they sought to
meet the test benchmarks laid out in the federal law's
accountability system, known as adequate yearly progress.
"We don't choose the curriculum," Mr.
Colby said. "That's a decision that local leaders have to
make. But for every school you point to, I can show you five
other schools across the country where students are still
taking a well-rounded curriculum and are still making
adequate yearly progress. I don't think it's unreasonable to
ask our schools to get kids proficient at grade level in
reading and math."
Since America's public schools began
taking shape in the early 1800's, shifting fashions have
repeatedly reworked the curriculum. Courses like woodworking
and sewing joined the three R's. After World War I,
vocational courses, languages and other subjects broadened
the instructional menu into a smorgasbord.
A federal law passed after the Russian
launching of Sputnik in 1957 spurred a renewed emphasis on
science and math, and a 1975 law that guaranteed educational
rights for the disabled also provoked sweeping change, said
William Reese, a professor at the University of Wisconsin
and author of "America's Public Schools: From the Common
School to No Child Left Behind." But the education law has
leveraged one of the most abrupt instructional shifts, he
said.
"Because of its emphasis on testing
and accountability in particular subjects, it apparently
forces some school districts down narrow intellectual
paths," Dr. Reese said. "If a subject is not tested, why
teach it?"
The shift has been felt in the labor
market, heightening demand for math teachers and forcing
educators in subjects like art and foreign languages to
search longer for work, leaders of teachers groups said.
The survey that is coming out this
week looks at 299 school districts in 50 states. It was
conducted as part of a four-year study of No Child Left
Behind and appears to be the most systematic effort to track
the law's footprints through the classroom, although other
authorities had warned of its effect on teaching practices.
The historian David McCullough told a
Senate Committee last June that because of the law, "history
is being put on the back burner or taken off the stove
altogether in many or most schools, in favor of math and
reading."
The report says that at districts in
Colorado, Texas, Vermont, California, Nebraska and
elsewhere, math and reading are squeezing other subjects. At
one district cited, the Bayonne City Schools in New Jersey,
low-performing ninth graders will be barred from taking
Spanish, music or any other elective next fall so they can
take extra periods of math and reading, said Ellen O'Connor,
an assistant superintendent.
"We're using that as a motivation,"
Dr. O'Connor said. "We're hoping they'll concentrate on
their math and reading so they can again participate in some
course they love."
At King Junior High, in a poor
neighborhood in Sacramento a few miles from a decommissioned
Air Force base, the intensive reading and math classes have
raised test scores for several years running. That has
helped Larry Buchanan, the superintendent of the Grant Joint
Union High School District, which oversees the school, to be
selected by an administrators' group as California's 2005
superintendent of the year.
But in spite of the progress, the
school's scores on California state exams, used for
compliance with the federal law, are increasing not nearly
fast enough to allow the school to keep up with the rising
test benchmarks. On the math exams administered last spring,
for instance, 17.4 percent of students scored at the
proficient level or above, and on the reading exams, only
14.9 percent.
With scores still so low, Mr. Harris,
the school's principal, and Mr. Buchanan said they had
little alternative but to continue remedial instruction for
the lower-achieving among the school's nearly 900 students.
The students are the sons and
daughters of mostly Hispanic, black and Laotian Hmong
parents, many of whom work as gardeners, welders and hotel
maids or are unemployed. The district administers frequent
diagnostic tests so that teachers can carefully calibrate
lessons to students' needs.
Rubén Jimenez, a seventh grader whose
father is a construction laborer, has a schedule typical of
many students at the school, with six class periods a day,
not counting lunch.
Rubén studies English for the first
three periods, and pre-algebra and math during the fourth
and fifth. His sixth period is gym. How does he enjoy taking
only reading and math, a recent visitor asked.
"I don't like history or science
anyway," Rubén said. But a moment later, perhaps recalling
something exciting he had heard about lab science, he
sounded ambivalent.
"It'd be fun to dissect something," he
said.
Martín Lara, Rubén's teacher, said the
intense focus on math was paying off because his math skills
were solidifying. Rubén said math has become his favorite
subject.
But other students, like Paris Smith,
an eighth grader, were less enthusiastic. Last semester,
Paris failed one of the two math classes he takes, back to
back, each morning.
"I hate having two math classes in a
row," Paris said. "Two hours of math is too much. I can't
concentrate that long."
Donna Simmons, his mother, said Mr.
Lara seemed to be working hard to help Paris understand
math.
"The school cares," Ms. Simmons said.
"The faculty cares. I want him to keep trying."
Sydney Smith, a vice principal who
oversees instruction at the school, said she had heard only
minimal grumbling from students excluded from electives.
"I've only had about two students come
to my office and say: 'What in the world? I'm just taking
two courses?' " Ms. Smith said. "So most students are not
complaining about being miserable."
But Lorie Turner, who teaches English
to some pupils for three consecutive periods and to others
for two periods each day, said she used some students'
frustration to persuade them to try for higher scores on the
annual exams administered under California's Standardized
Testing and Reporting program, known as Star.
"I have some little girls who are
dying to get out of this class and get into a mainstream
class," Ms. Turner said. "But I tell them the only way out
is to do better on that Star test."