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Can we rewrite NCLB by August?

March 17, 2011 By

President Obama wants to rewrite No Child Left Behind before the start of the next school year. The “blueprint” for change includes easing the proficiency targets that his Education Department predicts 82 percent of schools will miss. On National Journal, Education Experts discuss whether a new education law can be passed by August and how it should be changed.

It’s no surprise that most schools won’t reach their goals, writes Steve Peha. Most educators aren’t really trying, knowing that nothing much is likely to happen if they fail.

One thing the anti-NCLB crowd doesn’t often talk about is that much of NCLB never got implemented because so many of the people it affected worked so hard to weasel out of it.

To make matters worse, states lowered their cut scores and made their tests easier to pass, schools and districts cheated on their testing, and much of the money that went to schools in trouble was wasted by people who seemed to prefer their troubles to positive change.

In his work as a consultant, Peha talked to many educators who hoped NCLB  would go away eventually. “And now it is about to.”

The very people who did the least to implement the law have won—to a small extent at least. Because all they had to do to “prove” NCLB a failure was not implement good practice.

“Most of the ideas floated for potential implementation seem weaker and less coherent than what we have now,” Peha writes. “I think the reason we haven’t reauthorized NCLB is that, for all its unpopularity, no one has come up with anything better.”

Despite the president’s call for action, House Education Chair John Kline won’t “rush” reauthorization, notes Rick Hess on Straight Up. “I’m not going to rush this and do it wrong,” Kline told The Hill on Tuesday.

NEA-friendly Democrats and small-government Republicans could block action in the Senate, predicts Hess, while “House Republicans who promised to dramatically shrink the federal footprint” aren’t “eager to pass an education bill that retains any federal role when it comes to school improvement or teacher effectiveness.”

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Gist drops three-tier diploma plan

February 5, 2011 By

Rhode Island should stick with a single diploma, says Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist, who’d proposed creating standard, “regents” and honors diplomas. Instead, she said districts should be able to add “endorsements” to the diploma to indicate higher levels of proficiency and honors.

In addition, Gist proposes delaying more rigorous high school graduation requirements for two years, till 2014, to give schools and students more time to prepare.

The tougher standards aren’t all that tough: Juniors who score at the lowest level on state math and English tests –”substantially below proficient” — will have to retake the tests senior year and show improvement. They will not have to show proficiency.

Currently, students who score poorly on the 11th-grade state exam can show samples of their work or use other test scores to qualify for graduation.  Up to half the class has been using that option:  45 percent of Rhode Island’s 11th-graders score “substantially below proficient” in math; 9 percent score at the lowest level in English.

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What parts of NCLB should be left behind?

December 21, 2010 By

No Child Left Behind should be rewritten in pieces, not in a comprehensive overhaul, says Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., who will chair the House Education and Labor Committee in January.  National Journal asks:

Which “pieces” of the No Child Left Behind puzzle can be worked out on their own? What changes can be widely agreed upon? Benchmark reform? Special education funding? Teacher assessments? School accountability? Does it make sense to rework the law in small bites? If lawmakers manage to take the pressure off schools by adjusting the 2014 proficiency benchmarks, does that destroy the momentum for other changes that are harder to implement?

Scrap NCLB and start over, writes Diane Ravitch.

We’ll never beat the Asian tigers on PISA if we give up on getting all our students over NCLB’s grade-level achievement bar, writes Sandy Kress.

Expect a NCLB patch to avoid labeling schools as failures, predicts Rick Hess.

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Wristbands for all?

December 3, 2010 By

Wristbands for students who scored “proficient” or “advanced” on the state exam, plus an invitation to a barbecue, spurred a parent protest at Thorner Elementary School in Bakersfield, California.

“It’s good to recognize kids, but they’re humiliating the kids who didn’t do well,” (parent Charlie) Pike said.

This, he said, was unfair to students who traditionally score lower on standardized tests and might not reach proficiency no matter how hard they try — mainstreamed special education students, for example.

After Pike complained, the school included all students in the barbecue, which featured hot dogs and chips. But the debate continues, reports the Bakersfield Californian.

. . .  parents, teachers, administrators and testing experts say schools must be careful when rewarding students on how they do on state tests. It’s more important to reward student gains, or the student body as a whole, than subgroups, they say.

Proficiency can be “an unfair target” for some students, said Morgan Polikoff, a University of Southern California professor.

About 60 percent of Thorner Elementary students scored proficient or better in English last school year, 67 percent in math, and 40 percent in science. That’s significantly higher than the local average in English and math.

Phillip Brown of the California Teachers Association, said it’s a mistake to reward students based on test scores.

“It’s a very positive thing to recognize kids for their achievements,” Brown said. “But you recognize them as a group for working together and working hard. Recognition needs to be where it enhances and brings everybody in at the same time.”

Students can be recognized for achievement only as a group? Just like teachers.

Recognizing students who make significant progress, along with those who’ve achieved proficiency, would make sense.  But the idea that it’s unfair to honor  achievers . . .

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Few black male students are proficient

November 10, 2010 By

Black male students are doing very poorly in school, concludes a report by the Council of the Great City Schools, an advocacy group for urban public schools. From the New York Times:

Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.

Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.

In addition to low test scores, black male students drop out of high school at nearly twice the rate of white males. SAT scores for black males who remain in school average 104 points lower than white males.

Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard, calls for “conversations about early childhood parenting practices,” such as “how much we talk to them, the ways we talk to them, the ways we enforce discipline, the ways we encourage them to think and develop a sense of autonomy.”

Black girls are much more likely to complete high school and go on to college than their brothers. The culture for girls is less toxic than the culture for boys, most of whom are growing up without their fathers.

The report urges convening a White House conference, encouraging Congress to appropriate more money for schools and establishing networks of black mentors.

What it does not discuss are policy responses identified with a robust school reform movement that emphasizes closing failing schools, offering charter schools as alternatives and raising the quality of teachers.

The report did not go down this road because “there’s not a lot of research to indicate that many of those strategies produce better results,” (Michael) Casserly said.

And what’s the evidence that spending money improves results? Or holding a White House conference for that matter.

In Baltimore, the dropout rate for African-American boys declined to 4.9 percent during the last academic year, down from 11.9 percent three years earlier, the Times reports.

Andres A. Alonso, the chief executive of the Baltimore City Public Schools, said the improvement had little to do with changes at the margins, like lengthening the school day or adding mentors. Rather, Mr. Alonso cited aggressively closing failing schools, knocking on the doors of dropouts’ homes to lure them back and creating real-time alerts — “almost like an electrical charge” — when a student misses several days of school.

Baltimore also opened alternative schools to help students complete a diploma.

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Now, fix the Regents exams

August 7, 2010 By

Now that New York has raised its definition of proficiency in exams for grades three through eight, it’s time to fix the high school Regents exams, writes Marc Epstein in City Journal. The Regents have been dumbed down, charges Epstein, a high school history teacher in New York City.

The Global History and Geography Regents requires no knowledge or geography, he writes.

One handout shows a man sitting in a pedicab while the driver tries to walk the bicycle pulling the passenger through about three or four feet of water. The question asks: “What was one problem that people in the Varanasi region of India faced once the 1983 summer monsoons arrived, based on this National Geographic photograph and its caption?” If you couldn’t figure it out just by looking at the picture, the caption informs you that there was flooding and sewage, along with floating animal carcasses.

. . . A second part of the test, known as the thematic essay, asks the student to write about change and ideas, selecting two famous people—from a list including Nelson Mandela, Karl Marx, Galileo, and Mikhail Gorbachev—and explaining a specific idea the individuals developed, the historical circumstances surrounding its development, and how it influenced a group, a nation, or a region. After two years of global history, it’s safe to say that even your marginal students can find something to say about Marx and Communism or Mandela and apartheid.

The U.S. History and Government exam asked students to “write about the positive and negative effects of technology on the American society and economy,” a “rehashed question” from an old test designed for special-needs students or those who couldn’t pass the Regents exam, Epstein writes.

The document-based questions on the History exam were just as risible. A cartoon from the National Temperance Almanac depicts a saloonkeeper laying bricks around the entrance to his saloon—with the bricks labeled “wrecked lives,” ruined fortunes,” “lost virtue,” and “ruined characters.” The question then asks the student to state two effects that alcohol had on American society.

Students can pass by answering only one of two essay questions if they do well enough on the multiple-choice and document-based questions.

Proficient should mean college ready, backed up by automatic admission to a state  university, writes Core Knowledge’s Robert Pondiscio on Answer Sheet.

For low-income families with high aspirations but little educational experience, all they know is what the state and public schools tell them. And they’ve been misled. Seeing their children through the K-12 pipeline with a clear picture of readiness and a guaranteed college acceptance would likely be the difference between success and failure.

“’Proficiency’ on our exams has to mean something real,” (New York Education Commissioner David) Steiner wrote recently. “No good purpose is served when we say that a child is proficient when that child simply is not.”

Sol Stern writes about the history of New York’s testing mess in National Review.

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Getting real about inflated test scores

May 5, 2010 By

New York is trying to clean up its testing mess, writes Sol Stern in City Journal.  Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the Board of Regents, and David Steiner, the state’s new education commissioner, have ordered an outside audit of the state’s scores.

To satisfy No Child Left Behind, New York (and many other states) made it easier and easier for students to score as “proficient.” Politicians claim credit for success based on inflated test scores. In New York City, principals and teachers collect bonuses for higher scores with little oversight to prevent cheating.

(In New York) the percentage of eighth-graders reaching proficiency on the state’s math test rose from 58.8 percent in 2007 to a stunning 80.2 percent in 2009, while over the same period, the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) math scores for the eighth-graders remained flat. On the state’s fourth-grade reading exams, the proficiency rate went up from 68 percent in 2007 to 76.9 percent in 2009, while the NAEP test again showed no gain. On the state’s eighth-grade reading test, the proficiency rate went from 57 percent to 68.5 percent, while the NAEP tests showed a 1 percentile-point gain.

New York elementary students who guess blindly at multiple-choice questions will do well enough to reach the “basic” level. The high school Regents exams also has been dumbed down, Stein writes. The passing score on the algebra exam is 35 percent.

Stein suggests making it a crime to alter students’ test sheets, banning teachers from grading their own students’ Regents exams and putting test-based bonus schemes on hold till the audit is completed.

If New York gets real about how students are performing, will other states follow suit?

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Ready but not proficient

February 3, 2010 By

No Child Left Behind’s call for all students to be proficient by 2014 was “utopian,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said. His revision of NCLB would replace that goal with higher standards “built around the goal of helping all students graduate high school college-and career-ready,” according to an Education Department statement.

“My real desire is to have a high bar for the country, a common definition for success,” Duncan told reporters. “What we’ve had is a race to the bottom, and students are not prepared for college. We want smart new standards to prepare our students and workforce.”

Eduwonk mocks:

Old NCLB meme: This law is forcing schools to dumb everything down and it’s all basic skills. But too many schools can’t clear its unrealistically high bars.

New NCLB meme: The standards in this law were unrealistically high.  So we’re going to replace it with more ambitious ones…

On National Journal’s Education Experts, Sandy Kress, a Bush education advisor, also spots the paradox.

You are said to want to abandon (not fix, change, extend, but rather abandon) the bipartisan goal set 9 years ago in NCLB of having students at the minimum bar of grade level proficiency by 2014. Apparently, this goal is “utopian,” in your mind.

Yet, you have separately said that the standards behind these goals for 2014 are “fraudulently low” and that they should be dramatically raised to “college/career ready.”

. . . This is akin to saying though we can’t high jump at 5 feet, let’s set the bar at 7 feet!

Setting a “much tougher and higher goal with no challenging annual markers and deadlines for its achievement is real fraud,” Kress says. He’s also dubious about promises to evaluate schools in a more “nuanced” way.

I predict that, whatever euphemism you give it and however many carrots you create with increased spending, if you weaken the accountability provisions of NCLB, we will see a serious falloff in achievement for students, particularly disadvantaged students.

Keep striving for universal proficiency, adds a Boston Globe editorial. The Obama administration’s new goal — a mandate for all students to leave high school “college or career ready’’ — is unclear. It could rely on faddish “21st century skills’’  such as “global awareness, media literacy, and critical thinking,” instead of academic criteria, warns the Globe.

The Christian Science Monitor also fears that “college or career ready” will prove to be a “just a sophisticated way of saying lower standards.”

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Proficiency promotion

December 29, 2008 By

Students will progress from one level to the next when they achieve proficiency — not when they get a year older — in a Colorado school district called Adams 50. From the Denver Post:

Students will be tested this spring to determine their proficiency in reading, writing and math, and will be grouped next year with peers who are learning at the same level.

Students may move to the next level at any time, not just the end of the year or the end of a semester.

Several schools are piloting the idea.  Kim Carver, a first-grade math teacher, says the new approach is working.

Six-year-old Dominic Herrera showed (a capacity matrix) on the subject of counting pennies. On the chart were four categories: “I need help,” “I think I can,” “I know I can” and, finally, “I can teach it.”

Dominic had reached the “I know I can” level and was onto the next category, telling time in five-minute intervals. He was at the “I think I can” level.

“It’s neat that they have ownership, and they know what proficiency means,” Carver said. “It’s not arbitrary anymore.”

Eventually, the district plans to use 10 levels for students from kindergarten through high school.

The plan requires specific learning goals and close tracking of students’ progress, which I suspect will be very helpful. But kids who progress slowly will need something extra, such as mandatory summer school, to complete school by 18 or 19.

Grade levels are a subtle form of child abuse, writes Paul B on Kitchen Table Math.

Imagine if someone made you wear the wrong size underwear every day for 13 years; not very comfortable and not likely to turn you into a clothes horse.

Grouping students by standards mastery is working in Chugach, Alaska, he adds.

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