The drumbeat for national curriculum, standards and assessments gets a little bit louder today with a strongly worded New York Times editorial.
Congress has several concerns as it moves toward reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. Whatever else they do, lawmakers need to strengthen the requirement that states document student performance in yearly tests in exchange for federal aid. The states have made a mockery of that provision, using weak tests, setting passing scores low or rewriting tests from year to year, making it impossible to compare progress — or its absence — over time.
“The country will have difficulty moving ahead educationally until that changes,” opines the Times, noting that complete lack of a relationship between states that report strong performances on their own tests and performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The Times concludes:
Congress needs to take the testing issue head-on. It should instruct the NAEP board, an independent body created by the government, to create a rigorous test that would be given free to states that agreed to use NAEP scoring standards. Then the federal government could actually embarrass the laggard states by naming the ones that cling to weak tests. Without rigorous and consistent testing, there is no way to know whether our children are getting the education they deserve and need.
Sounds an awful lot like what Diane Ravitch was talking about last week.
If we just take the Times at the words they published, then that’s great. (and very consistent with Diane Ravitch’s wisdom)
The best approach for schools and children would be to close testing loopholes, as we remove the sanctions.
In fact, the ONLY WAY that we can get the type of testing recommended by the Times and Ravitch is to trust the disinfectant of sunlight. I don’t doubt the stories told by Accountability hawks about the resistance in the 1990s to their accountability proposals. But after six years of underwhelming results of NCLB-type accountability, do they expect resistance to weaken? By demanding the impossible over 12 years, and leaving the doors open for gaming the numbers, NCLB virtually invited the shenagins that resulted in higher State scores and stagnant NAEP. They expect administrative offices, when faced with the same impossible goals, to accept an accountability regime that can’t be manipulated?
We can fight for the next year or so about one aspect of NCLB II, creating even more bad blood and resistance, and then repeat the same conflict for NCLB III, and eventually we will have the infrastructure to implement accountability with sanctions, with a chance of helping kids. Or we can compromise. After all, getting a valid testing regime, even without sanctions, will not be easy. We need as many people as possible on board, and we need to lay the foundation for accountability systems that make sense.
If we could pull together, maybe the impossible would no longer be impossible. This is the United States of America. We can build schools that are worthy of our democracy. Churchill said you can always trust the US to do the right thing, after we’ve tried everything else.
Did Churchill really say that? Brilliant. I see national testing, John, as the starting line, not the finish line. If we had a dispassionate apples-to-apples comparison, it would allow states and localities to see where they really stand. If there are two great lessons of NCLB they are these: 1) if you put the tested in charge of administering the tests, mischief will occur, and 2)if you have high-stakes tests, you will inevitably have schools reorder what they do around them. National testing is an answer to the first problem, but it could make the second–the curriculum narrowing that I think is the worst feature of NCLB–worse yet. I like the idea of national assessments. But only if we develop national tests that are worth teaching to, because that’s precisely what will happen, like it or not.
Robert,
States and localities already know where they stand. They all know that they are trying hard, but it is impossible to improve because of (money, street culture, lack of family support, name your excuse, etc…). More data will not enable schools to improve.
So if we had national assessments: How would you 1) Enable teachers to change/improve their practice? 2) Convince publishers to develop quality, well-structured, well-written materials? 3) Who would decide on what the quality national assessment(s) should contain? 4) Who would be responsible for ensuring that the national assessments are actually valuable and support a quality education?
Data alone is not a path towards better student learning. Data can only tell you if the improvement path is working or not. But the path must be first.
Oklahoma is one of the most conservative states in the union, and for the first time we will have Republicans controlling both Houses and the Governor’s office. The Reps are controlled by the Far Right and many of their leaders don’t even believe in public schools. For a century we were dominated by our chief oligarch (think of the John Huston character in Chinatown) who said the concept of public schools was a Communist Plot (he also said that Russian subarines would sail up the Illinois River). Everything we’ve done in education – right and wrong – was based on protecting what little we had for schools.
There is no Golden Tablets in Heavan that say that urban education will always survive. Combine tough tests written to tough standards with sanctions, and I don’t see any way our urban schools survive. Had we not passed a bipartisan tax increase and started a collaborative reform, I have been told by several people in the power structure, the next step was to dismantle the district.
Who knows, under certain circumstances it might be best to break up our district, but the suburbs don’t want us, the State doesn’t want to run us, and we have a huge infrastructure of Choice schools for the remaining middle class urban kids and the most motivated poor kids.
So, I’m not willing to gamble the absolute survival of my city’s schools serving poor children of color. Noboby would replace our current system with anything that resembles community schools. I think we would just put a fig leaf on the collapse by claiming that our students are members of some virtual school district getting an online education.
All through the South there is a saying, “Thank God for Mississippi.” The only thing that separated us from being Mississippi has been an agile cadre of progressives using “smoke and mirrors” vs. the political incompetence of the far Right. They are no loner politically incompetent, even though they keep getting caught in sex scandals when Jesus is looking the other way. The backbone of our progressives was the unions. Five years after Right to Work, we have the highest rate of uninsured children and the highest death rate for children in the US. Even my AFT has ducked when the NEA proposed an amendment to bring our school funding to the regional average of $8300 per student. We’re right that everyone is just laughing at the NEA. But if it hadn’t been for the NEA and a small group of other unions, the idea of a public school sysyem would have been forgotten long ago. I think it would be the same in much of the South. After all, what percentage of Whites attend public schools in the Deep South? I don’t recall, but it used to be a shockingly low number.
Unfortunately the NYT editorial does not mention curriculum. You need a curriculum before you can have a test. A test without a curriculum either has an implicit curriculum behind it or else leaves everyone guessing. So, why not establish a curriculum, then standards, then a test, all of them rigorous and worth teaching to?
The curriculum would not dominate the schools. At present, guesswork dominates the schools. Test prep takes priority because no one really knows what will be tested. If the curriculum is clear, there’s much more room for a range of subjects.
Standards alone won’t do the trick. Standards need curriculum in order to make sense. Here is an example of a NYC math standard at the intermediate level:
“Use inductive reasoning to construct, evaluate, and validate conjectures and arguments, recognizing that patterns and relationships can assist in explaining and extending mathematical phenomena.”
Compare this sort of language with a sample from the Massachusetts math standards:
“Demonstrate facility in symbolic manipulation of polynomial and rational expressions by rearranging and collecting terms, factoring (e.g., a2 – b2 = (a + b)(a – b), x2 + 10x + 21 = (x + 3)(x + 7), 5×4 + 10×3 – 5×2 = 5×2 (x2 + 2x – 1)), identifying and canceling common factors in rational expressions, and applying the properties of positive integer exponents.”
The Massachusetts standards appear to be driven by curriculum and specific subject matter. The NYS curriculum–I can’t even get behind the minds of the people who wrote it, but they probably wanted to promote “higher-order thinking” and encourage a variety of “learning experiences.”
It’s not simply a matter of low versus high standards, but rather of vagueness versus specificity. The “high” standards seem, curiously, to be the more specific ones. Vague standards related exclusively to “higher-order thinking” keep the actual learning levels down (and keep the test prep companies in business, as they thrive on guesswork).
Many balk at the idea of a national curriculum–but how about a limited one, for the sake of specificity and rigor? Even if it took only a fraction of the school day and year, it would bring clarity, which in turn would allow schools to improve.
Many balk at the idea of a national curriculum–but how about a limited one, for the sake of specificity and rigor?
The challenge there would be having a limited nation curriculum, without it becoming all that is actually taught.
The challenge there would be having a limited nation curriculum, without it becoming all that is actually taught.
Perhaps if the test had neither high stakes nor sanctions, the schools would not fall into this trap.
In this I see a slight difference between the NYT editorial and Diane Ravitch’s proposal. The NYT editorial recommends that the federal government make the test optional but also use it to embarrass the laggard states. Diane Ravitch says that the government should provide the test and the results, but the states and districts should devise their own reforms and sanctions.
The distinction is subtle, because the test results could be inherently “embarrassing” to certain states. So, through providing the information, the government could shame certain entities willy-nilly.
But there’s a difference between intentional shaming (from the outside) and inevitable shame (from the inside). I believe the federal government should steer clear of the former; it only leads to cheating, cynicism, curriculum narrowing, and other problems we’ve seen under NCLB. Genuine shame, on the other hand, comes from conscience and information. With those two in hand, the schools can come up with intelligent and effective reforms (and steer clear of phony ones).
With conscience, information, and a desire to improve, schools and the public would ideally be looking out for the students’ education, not for their own image and status, nor for the quick fix. Of course, this would not be true across the board; there would still be corruption, manipulation, confusion of goals, and so forth. And some problems will continue to trouble even the best-informed and best-intentioned schools. But at least there would be less fodder for cynicism, and less pressure to sweep up the latest fad.
Devil’s Advocate: It wouldn’t work. The manipulation would just be pushed down a level. Teachers would still have to please administrators, who would still have to please districts, who would still have to please the state. There would still be checklists, silly mandates, sanctions, fads. Nothing would be different except that there would be an external measure common to all states.
Response: But that external measure would still be an improvement. It would give the public a clear sense of how their schools are doing in relation to the rest of the country. We would know what the students are supposed to be learning. And it would be much harder to fabricate success and progress.
It is also possible that humanity is hopeless on the whole–that any improvement brings problems. But if that’s the case, one can either throw up one’s hands or plunge into the complexity. Which one is more rewarding?
A standing ovation, Diana, for that tour de force. You’re absolutely right about the potential for embarrassment built into any accountability measure that is publicy disseminated — high-stakes or no stakes. But this is my own personal line in the sand: as educators, we draw our livelihood from the public purse, and are therefore obligated to be publicly accountable. It simply comes with the territory. But by putting the stakes (the shame, as you say) closer to the school, I think there’s at least a chance that you can build consensus for long-term reform, and avoid the inevitable frenetic chase of the quick fix, which certainly does the greatest harm in the long run.
The more I think about this formula, the more sense it makes: let the feds be in charge of setting standards (content standards, not meaningless performance standards), establishing clear curricular guidelines, and assessments. Let the states and localities administer the tests, live with the results, and chart a course that makes sense and keeps their customers happy.
Diana,
For school to be effective over the course of 13 years of education, there must be some continuity and progression within the curricula. And for a really quality education, the curricula must embody and make obvious how to develop the depth and quality of the content and integrate that with critical thought and analysis. Certainly, our schools do not have that now.
But standards alone are not enough. Even good standards. Developing the specific materials that a teacher is to use with his/her students that truly embodies the spirit and intent of the standards is by no means obvious nor easy. It is not enough to say that students should learn how to factor a quadratic equation. The materials need to make concrete the best approaches to encourage conceptual understanding as well as providing enough practice to make the procedures automatic. And that is only one topic. How do we integrate that quadratic equation with chemistry or physics or economics, and when? These are not easy answers but for our students to have a quality education, they must be answered.
So say we did as you suggest and have more sunshine on what students really are not learning, what then? How will our schools improve student learning? What happens if the fed standards and/or tests are wrong, misleading and not conducive to a quality education? Who is supposed to fix that?
And even worse, you are asking the feds to set standards without being responsible at all for improving student learning. Authority without responsiblity has always failed to improve anything.
For our schools to improve, the authority and responsiblity must coincide. That is the specfic authority that is reponsible for schooling must set the goals, develop materials to embody those goals, measure whether those goals were met and develop feedback mechanisms to improve. This can be done at the school, district, state or fed level. But distributing the authority to the feds and blaming schools or teachers for not succeeding will fail to improve student learning because then schools and teachers will fall back into the “compliance mode.” That is schools/teachers will say: “We did exactly as we were told. It did not work. It is not our fault.” This is not a way to improve teaching, curricula, the assessments nor ultimately student learning.
I don’t think that our schools are hopeless. Quite the contrary. I think that we have tremendous untapped potential in our teachers and students. But setting up a quality system to enable students to learn well is quite difficult. Only a few school systems around the world have managed to do this well.
Those few school systems are designed to *improve* student learning. That is every aspect of school is designed to ask the question: Did this improve student learning? Are our tests capturing what we would like students to learn? What order of material presentation works best for which students? etc….
The biggest problem that I see with your proposal is opportunity cost. That is if we spend all our time developing federal standards and tests, we are not spending time on reforms that could actually improve our students’ learning. There is nothing inherently wrong with federal standards or tests, but they will fail to impact anything in the classroom. (Schools are really quite adept at claiming what they are currently doing completely satisfies any and all “new” standards.)
It would seem consistent with our tradition and culture that the feds fill the monitoring role. But a monitoring role will never be able to enact improvements within a classroom. Should we not be advocating improvements that actually will impact the quality of our children’s education?
Robert, it is “charting the course” that our schools desparately need, not more sunshine.