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Klein, Alyson. November 16, 2010. NEA Asks Education Department for Regulatory Relief.  retrieved from Education Week. Http://blogs.eweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2010

This article primarily discusses how the NEA is asking for regulatory relief of the NCLB Act so schools do not have to wait for the newly appointed congress to renew the law and apply its changes to Elementary and Secondary Education.  The NEA contacted Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan concerning a lack of flexibility in major components of the NCLB Act.

The key areas that were of concern of the NEA were Highly Qualified Teachers, AYP, utilizing multiple measures to get credit for AYP, increased flexibility with for testing special education students, design individual growth models, and revamping graduation rate calculations to name a few.  How do all of these areas concern a principal?  Well, if you are a principal of a small, rural district, the provision of highly qualified teachers, especially special education teachers who may need more than 1 certification to meet the highly qualified benchmark may create an issue with meeting this standard.

One of the other major suggestions to Mr. Duncan pertains to providing more flexibility for school to test students in special education and ESL for 3 years instead of just the one year in the country already stated in the ACT. This will enable the AYP calculations to be a bit more consistent.

Overall, I thought that this was a very interesting article.  I agree with the NEA about presenting these changes to Arne Duncan if we want to get the most out of the NCLB Act in 2014.