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What’s in a word?

January 24, 2012 By

What’s In A Word? asks Eduwonk.

. . .  if you were to substitute “needs improvement” for every instance where the word “failing” is used in the public conversation to describe school accountability efforts wouldn’t the dialogue sound a lot different?  Eg – “Under No Child Left Behind 48 percent of schools have been identified as failing” or “Under No Child Left Behind 48 percent of schools have been identified as needing improvement” are two very different things in practice and also sound different.

Federal law doesn’t refer to “failing schools,” Eduwonk points out. The official phrase is “needs improvement.”

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Chicago college leaders’ jobs are on the line

January 19, 2012 By

Very low completion rates at Chicago City Colleges — 13 percent after six years — will improve or college presidents will lose their jobs. Accountability is part of Chancellor Cheryl Hyman’s “reinvention” campaign.

A Massachusetts community college has received a $2 million donation to open a civic learning center to encourage community service.

I argue against requiring college students to perform community service on National Journal.

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Fooling the inspector

January 16, 2012 By

Britain’s school inspectors are easily deceived, writes Theodore Dalrymple  in City Journal, citing the Times Educational Supplement.

. . . once the principals know that an inspection is coming, many employ techniques such as paying disruptive pupils to stay home, sending bad pupils on day trips to amusement parks, pretending to take disciplinary action against bad teachers, drafting well-regarded teachers temporarily from other schools, borrowing displays of student work done in other schools, and so forth.

The inspectorate will begin making unannounced inspections.

Britain’s school inspectorate should be a model for the U.S., argues a recent Education Sector report.

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Massaging the Regents

January 15, 2012 By

Getting students to pass the Regents exam is “damn near everything,”, writes a Bronx high school teacher in New York Magazine‘s Workplace Confidential.

As teachers, we massage the tests to make sure if a kid is close to passing, he or she does. We don’t take a 30 and make it a 65, but we do our best to make that 62 a 65.

. . . This test is a requirement to pass high school and graduate. If the student doesn’t pass, the parent comes in screaming that he was a mere three points from passing. The principal hears it. Then we hear it. Then he ends up passing anyway. This is the norm. Seniors are the worst, because they feel so entitled that we have to cover our asses nineteen different ways to fail them. There have been stories of guidance counselors’ flat-out changing grades and passing ­seniors who should have failed but miraculously walked on graduation day.

Teachers are cogs in the system, the anonymous teacher writes.

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Bush on No Child Left Behind

January 13, 2012 By

Former President George W. Bush is “extremely proud” of No Child Left Behind’s effects he tells Andrew Rotherham on the law’s 10th anniversary.

For the first time, the federal government basically demanded results in return for money. It started by saying, We expect you to measure [student performance]. As a result, there has been a noticeable change in achievement, particularly among minority groups. And I’m proud of that accomplishment and proud of the fact we were able to work with people from both parties to get it done.

The 10th anniversary is “a time to fight off those who would weaken standards or accountability,” Bush adds in the Time interview. People in both parties are trying to weaken accountability, he says. (He seems to be more concerned about small-government Republicans than Democrats.)

Some on the right think there is no role for the federal government [in education]. Some on the left are saying it’s unfair to teachers — basically, union issues. People don’t like to be held to account.

Pouring federal dollars into schools, regardless of results, had to end, writes Rotherham in defense of NCLB.

The increased focus on accountability has produced some benefits. For starters, NCLB has changed educators from arguing about whether to hold schools accountable for performance to arguing about how to do it. That’s no small accomplishment in a field that is notoriously hostile to change and is particularly averse to the concept of consequential accountability. (It’s hard to overstate this; I’ve been in meetings where people have requested that words like “performance” not be used because they consider them offensive terms.) . . .  Elementary and secondary education is a $650 billion annual undertaking, but, until recently, even basic measures of — yes — performance were not routinely taken or analyzed.

The law highlighted achievement gaps and sparked achievement gains or low-income and minority kids, Rotherham writes.

On the flip side, NCLB left most of the major decisions to states and localities, letting “proficiency” be defined down. Many  schools have taken “ineffective or even counterproductive steps in an effort to boost test scores rather than actually teach kids.”

President Bush pumped up federal education spending, but “these dollars were sent through the same pipes and used in much the same way they had been for the previous three decades,” Rotherham concludes.

Ed Week rounds up commentary from the usual suspects.

 

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On Her Majesty’s School Inspection Service

January 10, 2012 By

Evaluating schools based on test scores satisfies few people. There’s another way, writes Ed Sector’s Craig Jerald in On Her Majesty’s School Inspection Service. In England, school inspectors visit each school.

The process is thorough and rigorous: “[I]nspectors observe classroom lessons, analyze student work, speak with students and staff members, examine school records, and scrutinize the results of surveys administered to parents and students,” he notes.

A school inspectorate could work in the U.S., Jerald argues.

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15% of charter schools close

December 22, 2011 By

Bad charter schools aren’t forever: Fifteen percent of charters opened since 1992 have closed, according to a Center for Education Reform report.

• Of the approximately 6,700 charter schools that have ever opened across the United States, 1,036 have closed since 1992. There are 500 additional charter schools that have been consolidated back into the district or received a charter but were unable to open.

• There are five primary reasons for charter closures – financial (41.7 percent), mismanagement (24 percent), academic (18.6 percent), district obstacles (6.3 percent) and facilities (4.6 percent).

Most charter schools that close do so within the first five years, though academic closures usually take longer.

Traditional public schools rarely close, said Jeanne Allen, president of the center.

The California Charter School Association has called for the closure of 10 low-performing charters in the state.

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Accountability shock is wearing off

December 17, 2011 By

Math scores rose dramatically in the “consequential accountability” era, but the accountability shock is wearing off, writes Mark Schneider, a former National Center for Education Statistics commissioner  now at American Institutes for Research. Texas, an early accountability adopter, saw an early rise in math scores and now a plateau, he writes. Progress is leveling off nationwide as well.

A graph of NAEP fourth-grade math scores show a “remarkable” growth in performance in Texas and the U.S.

Using the very rough rule of thumb that a 10-point change in NAEP scores equals about one year of learning, in 2011 our fourth graders are about two years ahead of where they were in 1992.

Texas improved first. The national average caught up when No Child Left Behind forced accountability on all states, Schneider writes.

Compared to the nation as a whole, Texas has more disadvantaged students. The state’s Hispanic, black and low-income students outperform the national average for similar students.

Reading scores did not improve in Texas or elsewhere in the accountability era, perhaps because reading “is far more dependent on what happens early in children’s lives,” Schneider writes.

What could provide the next shock? Schneider suggests the Common Core and the better measurement of teacher performance as possibilities.


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Education reform’s future

December 6, 2011 By

It’s not quite the lion lying down the lamb, but Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute and Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford ed professor who served on Obama’s transition team, have co-written a New York Times op-ed, How to Rescue Education Reform.  They disagree on some key issues, but agree that the federal government should stick to what it alone can do and avoid trying to micromanage schools.

The first federal role is transparency:  No Child Left Behind required states to measure and report achievement, so parents, voters and taxpayers could “hold schools and public officials accountable.” However, states were allowed to set their own, low standards.

Instead of the vague mandate of “adequate yearly progress,” federal financing should be conditioned on truth in advertising — on reliably describing achievement (or lack thereof) and spending. To track achievement, states should be required to link their assessments to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (or to adopt a similar multistate assessment). To shed light on equity and cost-effectiveness, states should be required to report school- and district-level spending; the resources students receive should be disclosed, not only their achievement.

The second federal role is “enforcing civil rights laws and ensuring that dollars intended for low-income students and students with disabilities are spent accordingly.”

Third is supporting basic research in fields such as “brain science, language acquisition or the impact of computer-assisted tutoring.”

Competitive federal grants can support innovation, they conclude. However, the “Obama administration’s $4.35 billion Race to the Top competition . . .  ended up demanding that winning states hire consultants to comply with a 19-point federal agenda, rather than truly innovate.”

The feds should stop trying to improve schools by order from above, write Hess and Darling-Hammond. “The federal government can make states, localities and schools do things — but not necessarily do them well.”

Schizophrenic, responds RiShawn Biddle.

The odd couple call adequate yearly progress a “vague mandate,” but elsewhere  complain it’s too prescriptive, writes Andrew Rotherham.  The left and right are uniting to kill education reform, he adds in Time.

 

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In defense of testing

November 26, 2011 By

Test-based accountability has done little to improve student performance and graduation exams have done harm by lowering graduation rates, concludes a National Research Council study. But the study distorted the evidence to confirm the panel’s anti-testing bias, writes Eric Hanushek in Grinding the Anti-Testing Ax on Education Next.

Test-based accountability hasn’t raised U.S. achievement to the same level as the highest-achieving countries worldwide, the report complains. That’s an “extraordinary” and unrealistic goal, writes Hanushek. The real question is whether it’s raised achievement significantly. He argues that it has, even by the report’s lowball estimate.

The report also claims graduation exams “decrease the rate of high school graduation without increasing achievement,” and urges states to repeal their requirements.

The best evidence suggests 2 percent of students drop out because they can’t pass a graduation exam, Hanushek writes.  People who can’t pass a 10th-grade exam by the end of 12th grade aren’t likely to be high earners if they’re handed a diploma. “The economic impact on these students will be much lower than the average difference between graduate and dropout.”

Perhaps the best argument against exit exams is simple: If a student shows up for school for 12-plus years and cannot pass a 10th-grade exam, it must be the school’s fault, and it would be unfair to hold the student responsible. This argument, interestingly enough, is the precise opposite of one of the primary arguments against the testing and accountability provisions of NCLB: We should not hold schools responsible for low achievement, because achievement is affected by student motivation and family background characteristics beyond the school’s control. Taken together, the arguments embedded in the committee’s two conclusions imply that nobody—not schools, not teachers, not even students themselves—bears responsibility for low student achievement.

If we really want to maximize high school graduation, we can eliminate teacher-given exams, lower course requirements and hand out diplomas after 10 or 11 years of schooling, Hanushek writes. Certainly, the NRC should tell states not to require more math or adopt college- and career-ready standards, since raising standards will lower graduation rates.

We didn’t advocate an end to testing, Boston University’s Kevin Lang, a member of the NRC panel, told the Huffington Post.

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