"James L. Pughsley, one of 15 commissioners on a national bipartisan panel organized to examine the No Child Left Behind law, sat down with The Daily Progress recently to discuss the panel’s findings.

Pughsley is the director of consulting for the Darden/Curry Partnership for Leaders in Education at the University of Virginia. He has received many awards for his work as superintendent of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School Division in North Carolina, and he has also served as superintendent in schools in Virginia Beach, Louisiana and Nevada.

The panel held 12 public hearings in 2006 around the country, at which parents, teachers, principals and state department of education officials presented their concerns.

Although Congress has said it plans to revise the No Child law later this year, Pughsley said that realistically, the issue probably won’t be resolved until 2008 - an election year.

However, he hopes politics will not cloud the commission’s ultimate goal - equipping America’s students with skills to be among the world’s best.

“Unfortunately, sometimes we’re at our best in crisis,” Pughsley said. “I hope that we can get beyond that mindset. We shouldn’t wait until we lose our global leadership. We shouldn’t wait until the competition outpaces us. Is China going to have to kick our behinds, along with India, before we get the wake-up call?”

Q: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal in December: “Our education system looks a lot like the U.S. auto industry in the 1970s - stuck in a flabby, inefficient, outdated production model driven by the needs of employers rather than consumers.” How did the commission address the need to bring public schools into a new era?

Pughsley: I’d point out that it was pretty obvious that the rigor in some states is very soft, and in some states, it is very challenging, but we’re trying to educate all kids for the work force and to go onto college to be successful. If we don’t choose to, we will fall behind many of our counterparts in performance. I would agree with the mayor. We’re in a different world. We’re no longer in competition with one state against the other among ourselves. We’re in competition with the world in a global economy and from this comes our belief in a standardized curriculum so that we can compete. All of the nations that are out-performing us - the vast majority, if not all of them, have national curriculums and national standards.

Q: The commission recommended an additional measurement for teachers to evaluate them based on their students’ test scores over a three-year period. What impact did the group feel this would have?

Pughsley: It’s been well documented that the students with the greatest needs are not getting the quality teachers. And when I say quality, that is not only as it relates to the definition now and those paper exercises. Have you held a degree? Can you pass the exam? Can you be licensed? Those are paper exercises. It doesn’t speak to how effective you are in the classroom, and we’ve got to move to address that.

Q: Some teachers say that by identifying 75 percent of teachers with favorable test scores as “effective” and assigning the other 25 percent to professional development training, as the commission recommends, this may pit teachers against each other. Why did the group feel it necessary to identify teachers who need improvement by dividing them in this way?

Pughsley: The sole intent was to get effective teachers before those kids at schools with the greatest needs. We know from the research that effective teachers add greater value against the mediocre teachers, and that becomes even more significant for those students at low-performing schools who need that instruction the most. It wasn’t an attempt to separate teachers from those who are effective and those who are not effective. We wanted to provide a means of rising to that level and not penalize. It was not a punitive consequence, but for teachers that need it the most.

Q: Teachers say that No Child Left Behind has created a culture of high-stakes testing and teaching to a test that is making their jobs more difficult. How did the commission address this?

Pughsley: Talk about teaching to the test - that puts you in one frame of mind. Talk about teaching standards - that puts you in a different frame of mind.

Q: What’s the difference?

Pughsley: Teaching to curriculum. You should not be teaching to the test - that’s inappropriate. But you can still be teaching standards. In some schools teachers can go through a full year and maybe go through half of the curriculum. That’s not standardized testing. At the end of the year, you’re tested on the full year’s curriculum. I’ll bet you that any teacher that raises this question - they don’t understand that No Child Left Behind calls for one annual assessment over the course of the year. Anything more is an add-on by the district or the state. Now I am for informative, effective assessment, but you have to understand what that’s about. I will regrettably admit that we as administrators have not done a good job of providing staff reports for our teachers so they understand the difference between the two." (Matt Deegan, The Daily Progress, March 11, 2007)