The Obama Transition Team is looking for feedback and stories as it attempts to craft the direction of its administration going forward. I urge everyone to post your ideas and stories at change.gov/page/s/yourstory. Here’s the story I just posted related to The No Child Left Behind Act and its impact on an alternative charter school my partner Sally was on staff for and my daughter Emma attended…

A friend of ours led a team of local people back in1999 that started an alternative charter school here in California based on the education philosophy of John Dewey along with a focus on teaching students conflict resolution skills rather than managing them with rewards and punishments. It was an ambitious effort and the school had some early struggles with hiring, developing and retaining teachers who could successfully teach in the Dewey model.

Since the school was philosophically opposed to teaching to the test, and the Dewey curriculum did not sync year by year with the voluminous state education content standards, and the school had a large proportion of at-risk families, it did not meet its targets for state standardized test scores as required by NCLB.

To avoid being closed and no longer being able to serve the families that still wanted their kids in the school, the school rechartered along a more traditional educational model that was significantly more like the conventional instructional school.

In my mind, an alternative educational path, that could serve a number of kids was squelched by NCLB, and California’s attempt to comply with the Act’s provisions. So I would be happy to see no reauthorization of the Act, and a completely new effort that was more focused on facilitating individual communities taking more control over their schools, while still ensuring human rights and equal educational access.