ASPIRA supports the basic tenets of higher standards for all students, school accountability and assessments. ASPIRA’s main concerns are that:
- the serious under-funding for No Child Left Behind (NCLB), especially of Title I students and parents and low-income communities, imposes a higher bar for students and schools to reach without the means for students and schools to achieve at high levels;
- because of the lack of resources, such as highly prepared/experienced teachers and educational resources, schools that Latino children attend are often ranked as “failing” and hence will lose further funding;
- students will be penalized (sanctions on schools, such as loss of funding) for the low performance of their schools because of arbitrary and overly ambitious achievement targets;
- lack of research on the impact and consequences of NCLB measures results in high stakes decisions made without sufficient evidence;
- the class size in schools attended by Latino students may be too high and not conducive to high achievement levels;
- imposing NCLB on high schools is detrimental without adequate funding and without sufficient time to assess the impact on elementary and middle school students;
- standardized tests may not be properly and continuously monitored to ensure that they reflect the standards, that other measures of student performance should be considered (multiple indicators), and that assessment results should be used for improvement and not to penalize schools/students;
- care may not be taken in adequately assessing LEP students and that LEP students scores may be used improperly to determine student progress;
- parents and communities are not being adequately informed on progress of their children or of the school, and of their right to transfer their children to another school or their right to receive supplemental education services.
