Sandra Feldman, President of the AFT, also weighed in on NCLB in her speech to the 2003 Summer QuEST conference. Feldman, according to the AFT’s American Educator Magazine, believes that the new law is BOTH an “obstacle to improved education” AND “an opportunity to more tightly focus schools on the most important educational aims and strengthen the growing public confidence in public schools.”
Feldman strongly attacks the accountability portion of the law – especially its formula for Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP):
“This means that schools whose students are way behind from the start have to make far, far more annual progress – both on average and with each of their subgroups – than schools already at or beyond the state’s starting point. Indeed, the experts told us – and we and they tried to tell Congress – that this AYP formula is not only statistically stacked against diverse schools; it also calls on most high poverty schools – with their welldocumented lack of resources – to achieve a rate of academic progress that has never before been seen – not in our most advantaged schools and not even in so-called world-class systems.”