Tag Archive for 'NCLB'

The End of Education Reform

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 21, 2009 in No category. 11 Comments

A remarkable speech by Chester Finn of the Fordham Institute is all the more remarkable for the lack of chatter it has generated in the edusphere.  Titled “Is It Time to Throw in the Towel on Education Reform?” the September 9 speech at Rice University notes a broad consensus on education reform that has existed for better than two decades is coming apart at the seams.  “The overriding goal of that consensus was to boost America’s academic achievement at the K-12 level,” Finn notes, and it gave rise to “a tsunami of standards-based reform.”

He cites several major developments contributing to the fraying of that consensus.  Among them: unhappiness with NCLB and a palpable backlash against testing that “goes to the heart of standards-based reform.”  On school choice, he points out, far too many charters and schools of choice have been “disappointingly mediocre.”  Then there are the results of the reform era:

Despite all the reforming, U.S. scores have remained essentially flat, graduation rates have remained essentially flat, and our international rankings have remained essentially flat. You can find some upward blips but you can also find downward blips. Big picture, over 25 years, is flat, flat, flat. In other words, all the reforming has yielded little or nothing by way of stronger outcomes.

Finn also cites “principled critiques by serious people” as another crack in the ed reform wall:

E.D. Hirsch’s new book may be its most cogent example, at least until Diane Ravitch’s next book emerges—of both standards-based reform and school choice on grounds that these structural changes neglect crucial issues of content and pedagogy—neglect what actually goes on in classrooms between teacher and learner—while narrowing the curriculum and weakening the common culture. 

 Has the reform consensus “outlived its usefulness?”  Finn compares American education to the situation the nation found itself in when the Articles of Confederation proved insufficient to the needs of the new nation.  “We may be at a similar stage with regard to our public-education system,” he notes. “Further tugging and kicking at it from the banks of the Potomac is not going to modernize it.”

I’m suggesting to you that American education today resembles America itself in 1785. The old arrangement isn’t working well enough and probably cannot be made to. A new constitution is needed. It’s in that sense that we should throw in the towel on education reform and think instead about reinvention.

 Checker briefly lists his ideas for “essential ingredients” of this new constitution including national standards and measures; portable statewide “weighted-student” financing; and the replacement of traditional school districts “with an array of virtual systems and regional or national operators (some of them technology-based).”

A Bouquet of Dandelions

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 18, 2009 in Assessment and Testing, Educational Policy and accountability. 5 Comments

A study by the Center on Education Policy casts doubt on the conventional wisdom that No Child Left Behind causes teachers to shortchange high and low-performers, given the law’s incentives to get students to the proficient level.  

“If accountability policies were indeed shortchanging high- and low-achieving students, we would expect to see stagnation or decline at the basic and advanced levels,” says Jack Jennings, CEP’s President. “Instead, the percentages of students scoring at the basic-and-above and advanced levels have increased much more often than they have decreased, especially in the lower grades.”

Hear, hear for higher test scores at all chievement levels.  But how does that show high achieving students aren’t suffering under NCLB?  Testing is a measure of where students are, not where they could or even should be.  If there’s anything I learned teaching at a struggling school, it’s that the stronger students are largely assumed to be doing fine despite being neglected–a point nailed precisely in the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation’s “Achievement Trap” report a few years back. 

Such children are dandelions.  They will find a way to grow even in the harshest conditions.  I can walk out onto the sidewalk and gather a bouquet of dandelions growing up through the pavement cracks.  That doesn’t prove I’m a good gardener.

NAEP, NCLB, CYA, SOP

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 4, 2009 in Assessment and Testing and accountability. 4 Comments

Former Ed Secy Margaret Spellings is the latest boldface name in the edusphere to say last week’s NAEP numbers show that NCLB is working.  Over at Common Core, Diane Ravitch takes a close look at the numbers and says, er…not so fast.  Her takeaway:

First, our students are making gains, though not among 17-year-olds. Second, the gains they have made since NCLB are smaller than the gains they made in the years preceding NCLB. Third, even when they are significant, the gains are small. Fourth, the Long Term Trend data are not a resounding endorsement of NCLB. If anything, the slowing of the rate of progress suggests that NCLB is not a powerful instrument to improve student performance.

The different takes on the NAEP tells Checker Finn that what we really need is an independent education-achievement audit agency “to sort out the claims and counterclaims about student performance and school achievement.” 

Advocates always do this sort of thing—reaching for whichever data they think make the most convincing case for their accomplishments, exertions and assertions (and, of course, making or implying causations that no reputable scientist would accept). This will continue. And usually the advocates get away with it because anybody who disputes their claims is also seen as having his/her own ax to grind. That’s why America would be so much better off with an independent education-performance audit bureau.

A fine idea, but like a newspaper ombudsman or “public editor,” there will always be some question about how one’s judgement is colored by the interest of whoever is signing the check.  Apropos of which, I keep running into this quote from David Simon, the creator of The Wire. 

 ”You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America – school test scores, crime stats, arrest stats – anything that a politician can run on [or] anything that somebody can get a promotion on, and as soon as you invent that statistical category 50 people in that institution will be at work trying to figure out a way to make it look as if progress is actually occurring when actually no progress is.”

Sounds cynical, I know.  But hard to argue.

African-American Students Report to the Gym

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 30, 2009 in accountability. 8 Comments

So now it’s come to this.

Students at a Sacramento-area high school attended standardized test pep rallies — er, sorry…Heritage Assemblies – organized by race to pump up each ethnic group to take state tests.  “Students could go to any rally they wanted,” the Sacramento Bee reports, ”but the gatherings were designated for specific races – African Americans in the gym, Pacific Islanders in the theater, Latinos in the multipurpose room.”

The paper describes a scene in the gym at Laguna Creek High School, where students gathered before a large outline of Africa on the wall. “Last year we scored the highest percentage increase of any group,” Vice Principal Hasan Abdulmalik hollered at the crowd.

Lovely.

Laguna Creek High School Principal Doug Craig said dividing the students by race allowed staff to talk about test scores without making any one ethnic group feel singled out in a negative manner. “Is it racist? I don’t believe it is,” Craig tells the paper, which reports the practice of holding race-specific test prep rallies has become more common in California.  

Gathering and reporting data based on ethnic groups is one of the few unambiguous wins of the NCLB era.  It’s pushed the achievement gap to the front of our education agenda.  But I’m not sure holding “heritage rallies” even rises to the level of well-intentioned but wrong-headed.  At best, it’s yet another example of how schools are putting their problems–and their desperation– on the backs of kids. And a particularly disturbing example at that.

Update:  I was remiss in not tipping my hat to Anthony Rebora, who brought this item to my attention via his forum at Teacher Magazine.

Location, Location, Location

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 19, 2009 in Research and Reports and accountability. 1 Comment

The real estate agent’s mantra — location, location, location — also works for schools.  Just as an identical home can fetch different prices in different places, an identical school can make AYP in some states, but not in others. 

That’s the upshot of a terrific new report by the Fordham Foundation, The Accountability Illusion, which looked at 36 actual schools (18 elementary, 18 middle schools) and determined whether each one would make AYP under the accountability rules of 28 different states.  No, they would not. 

In Massachusetts – a state that ensures students have to score high in order to be considered proficient and one with relatively challenging annual targets and AYP rules – only one of 18 elementary schools was projected to make AYP. In Wisconsin, with lower proficiency standards and more lenient annual targets and rules, 17 schools were projected to do so. Same kids, same schools – different states, different rules.

“In short,” the report concludes, ”how a school is labeled under NCLB depends largely on the state in which it’s located. This can demoralize educators in states with tough AYP rules while letting under-performing schools in lenient states slip under the accountability radar screen. It also creates the illusion of a national accountability system where there isn’t one.”

Here’s the executive summary of Fordham’s report, and here’s a video interview with Checker Finn about it.  And if you are one of those who prefers to laugh rather than weep in the face of outrage, Mathew Ladner of Jay Greene’s blog turns this whole miasma into a parody of the Budweiser “Real Men of Genius” ad campaign.  “Here’s to you, Mr. Wisconsin No Child Left Behind compliance guy!” Hilarious.

Can we now officially say that accountability as currently conceived and practiced is a joke?  A bad school in Massachusetts is a good school in Arizona. Failure in Nevada is magically redefined as success when it moves to Wisconsin.  Our crazy quilt of accountability systems only breeds cynicism about the whole enterprise (why improve schools when you can lower the bar?) and makes it baby simple to evade responsibility and all but impossible to reach informed conclusions about your child’s school. 

One standard, one yardstick, or else don’t bother.  Instead of location, location, location, let’s try transparency, transparency, transparency.

Heresy Watch

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 18, 2009 in No category. 6 Comments

Things We Dare Not Say Dept.:  A survey of principals across Minnesota shows 97% think it is not possible for the state’s schools to meet the goals of universal proficiency set out under No Child Left Behind. The survey was released Tuesday by the St. Paul-based think tank Minnesota 2020 and the state’s principal associations.

According to the survey, 97 percent of responding principals say that the law’s main goal, to have every student proficient on math and reading tests by 2014, is unattainable. More than 70 percent of the principals say their schools spend more time and resources on test preparation in the law’s wake, and 40 percent say they have taken away class time from arts and other subjects.

Remember the recent comments from Palo Alto schools Superintendent Kevin Skelly who said educators are “deluding themselves” if they think the achievement gap can be completely closed?  The scales have fallen from his eyes. “During the past week I have thought about my comments and had a chance to discuss them with staff and parents,” Skelly said last week. “Their comments have caused me to change my thinking on this.”

When Patty Fisher of the San Jose Mercury News asked him what exactly he had changed his thinking about, Skelly took a pass.  “I want to move beyond my comments in the newspaper,” he said. ”There was a sense that I was giving up on kids and saying kids couldn’t achieve, and I could see why they took it that way.”  So does he really believe that any child — let alone every child — has “limitless” potential, Fisher wanted to know.

“The less I say at this point, the better,” says Skelly.

Duncan Bangs the Drum for National Standards

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 12, 2009 in Education News and accountability. 3 Comments

“If we accomplish one thing in the coming years,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said this week, “it should be to eliminate the extreme variation in standards across America.”  Speaking at the American Council on Education’s annual meeting , Duncan said.

I know that talking about standards can make people nervous—but the notion that we have fifty different goalposts is absolutely ridiculous. A high school diploma needs to mean something—no matter where it’s from. We need standards that are college-ready and career-ready, and benchmarked against challenging international standards. We also need to break the culture of blame in which colleges blame high schools and high schools blame grade schools and grade schools blame parents for our failures.

Duncan was specifically speaking of ”high school standards” in his remarks, but EdWeek’s David Hof notes his comments suggest ”he’ll be pushing the issue in any reauthorization [of NCLB] that happens under his watch.”  Duncan also talked up national standards in an interview with EdWeek’s Alyson Klein last week.

“The Last Laugh Belongs to Bush”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 15, 2009 in Educational Policy and Opinion. 4 Comments

School accountability driven by disaggregated data is “not just George W. Bush’s education legacy; it’s the jewel of any domestic achievement,” writes Richard Whitmire on Politico.  The president of the National Education Writers Association says finding shortcomings in the law is not difficult, but he dismisses the idea that the new administration will eviscerate No Child Left Behind.

The notion that Obama would gut a law exposing the maleducation of millions of black children is a fantasy. That’s why Democrats won’t break NCLB. They’ll start by changing the name of the law, ridding its association with the much-despised Bush. But the last laugh belongs to Bush, because his Texas-style accountability will survive. And that’s what makes No Child Left Behind, regardless of any name change, Bush’s lasting legacy.

Advice for the Obama Administration

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 12, 2009 in Educational Policy and accountability. 10 Comments

Education’s oddest couple–Joel Klein and Al Sharpton–take to the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal to make a pitch for charters, choice and performance pay in an open letter to President-elect Obama.

Klein and Sharpton co-chair the Education Equality Project (EEP), whose signatories include future Ed Secretary Arne Duncan and a panoply of big city mayors and urban school superintendents.  Their policy pitch argues in support of NCLB’s “core concept that schools should be held accountable for boosting student performance.”  They also call for “expanding parental choice,” citing charter schools like KIPP (but no mention of vouchers). “Beyond expanding federal support for charter schools, as you have proposed,” say Klein and Sharpton, “we would urge you to press forward with two other, far-reaching policy reforms.”

First, the federal government, working with the governors, should develop national standards and assessments for student achievement. Our current state-by-state approach has spawned a race to the bottom, with many states dumbing down standards to make it easier for students to pass achievement tests. Even when students manage to graduate from today’s inner-city high schools, they all too frequently are still wholly unprepared for college or gainful employment.

Second, the federal government should take most of the more than $30 billion it now spends on K-12 education and reposition the funding to support the recruitment and retention of the best teachers in underserved urban schools. High-poverty urban schools have many teachers who make heroic efforts to educate their students. But there is no reward for excellence in inner-city schools when an outstanding science teacher earns the same salary as a mediocre phys-ed instructor.

Meanwhile the Washington Post runs advice for Arne Duncan today from Diane Ravitch, who writes that NCLB “has turned our schools into testing factories, narrowed the curriculum to the detriment of everything other than reading and math, and prompted states to claim phony test score gains. The law’s remedies don’t work. The law’s sanctions don’t work.”  Ravitch also flatly calls the goal of universal proficiency by 2014 “ludicrous.”  No nation or state has ever reached it,” sayseducations preeminent historian.

Mr. Secretary, use your bully pulpit to scrap this ineffective set of mandates. And when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is reauthorized, as it must be, insist that schools are accountable not only for educating their students in history, science, literature, civics, and the arts, but for safeguarding their health and development.

 

Restoring Bipartisan Support for NCLB

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 24, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and Educational Policy. 2 Comments

President-elect Barack Obama’s first and hardest task on education will be to “restore the broad bipartisan support it took to pass the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act,” says the Washington Post’s Maria Glod.  “That consensus has splintered, with people on both sides of the aisle souring on the law as it is overdue for reauthorization in Congress,” she writes

“Forget the details of No Child Left Behind. The big challenge there is having to rebuild that bipartisan coalition,” said Gary Huggins, director of the Commission on No Child Left Behind, an independent effort of the Aspen Institute. “On the Democratic side you have people walking away from it because of union pushback. On the GOP side you have people walking away because this is too large a federal footprint.”

I’m not sure I agree with Huggins’ broad-brush analysis.  Among educators, the consensus tends be “good goal/bad bill.”  In the main, teachers remain supportive of the laudable aims of NCLB, but live day-to-day with the law’s unintended consequences.  Contrary to popular opinion, teachers are not accountability-averse.  But the narrowing of curriculum that has occurred under NCLB has too often made school a content-free, joyless grind for teachers and students.  The key to restoring bipartisan support and getting teachers on board is getting accountability right.