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No Child Left Behind in the News
What Arne Duncan Thinks of No Child Left BehindThe new education secretary talks about the controversial law and financial aid formsPosted February 5, 2009 Newly minted Education Secretary Arne Duncan has big plans for improving the nation's schools. His first order of business is drumming up support for a stimulus measure that includes an unprecedented $140 billion for education. The 44-year-old former leader of Chicago Public Schools says the money will modernize schools, help stave off teacher layoffs, and spur meaningful reforms. "The fact is that we are not just in an economic crisis; we are in an educational crisis," he says. "We have to educate ourselves to a better economy."  Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education People Who Read This Also Read The subsequent item on his agenda will be fixing the Bush Administration's No Child Left Behind law. His opinion of it: "I think we are lying to children and families when we tell children that they are meeting standards and, in fact, they are woefully unprepared to be successful in high school and have almost no chance of going to a good university and being successful." But Duncan is also interested in other people's opinions. He's meeting with the heads of the two national teachers unions and, if and when the stimulus passes, he plans to travel the country to gather input from school officials and families about ways to improve the federal testing law. Duncan also says he is in the market for ideas to rename the law. He discussed some of those plans in an interview with U.S. News. Below are highlights of that conversation. On a federal stimulus for schools:
Duncan says a large chunk of the $140 billion destined for education will help states maintain and create jobs. "My concern is that hundreds of thousands of good teachers, not just bad teachers, are going to go, and that would be devastating," he says. "It is to no one's advantage if class size skyrockets or librarians get eliminated or school counselors disappear." Duncan says the federal stimulus for schools would give him unprecedented leverage to innovate and improve schools. The stimulus provides for $15 billion in discretionary funds that he says he will give to states that agree to implement the following three pieces: expanding early childhood education, creating better student assessments, and improving teacher quality. "If we can bucket all these together and work with set of states with significant resources to make this happen, I think it's a game changer." On fixing No Child Left Behind:
As the former leader of Chicago Public Schools, Duncan lived through what he called the unintended consequences of President Bush's No Child Left Behind law. Duncan supports the focus on accountability for student achievement, but he wants to make the law less punitive. "I know there are schools that are beating the odds where students are getting better every year, and they are labeled failures, and that can be discouraging and demoralizing," he says. Duncan also wants states to adopt academic standards that are more rigorous and aligned with those of other leading nations. "The idea of 50 states doing their own thing doesn't make sense," Duncan says, referring to the current patchwork of standards and tests. "I worry about the pressure because of NCLB to dummy those standards down." Duncan says he is concerned about overtesting but he thinks states could solve the problem by developing better tests. He also wants to help them develop better data management systems that help teachers track individual student progress. "If you have great assessments and real-time data for teachers and parents that say these are [the student's] strengths and weaknesses, that's a real healthy thing," he says." Asked if he will push for passage of a new version of NCLB, Duncan says that he first wants to go on a cross-country listening tour and that he hopes that Congress will reauthorize a new version of the law late in the year. "Having lived with this, I have a good sense of what makes sense and what doesn't," he says. "But I want to be clear that I want to get out there and learn from people. And I think ultimately we should rebrand [the law]." Asked what he would call a new version of the law, Duncan answered, "Don't know yet. I'm open to ideas." On higher education:
Duncan did not offer too many concrete ideas on higher ed. He says community colleges will play a vital role for an extraordinary number of adults who need training for new jobs in the health, technology, and green sectors. That's why he wants to make sure that more students are prepared for college and leave college with a degree. He says he will offer colleges incentives to graduate more students on time. "We need to get dramatically more of our students not just into college but through college," he says. Duncan also wants to remove barriers to college by making it easier for students to complete financial aid forms. "You need a Ph.D. to figure [the FAFSA] out," he says. "I think we have to simplify information and get information to students and families earlier. U.S.News & World Report Return to Top of Page
O'Connell's Vision 20/20 -- Save for One Critical Oversight Speech Fails to Recognize Significance of CTE in Reversing State's Educational and Economic Downturn, Says GetREAL
updated 11:56 a.m. PT, Fri., Feb. 6, 2009
SACRAMENTO, CA - In a State of Education speech that hammered home the importance of investing in the future of education, Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell failed to mention the actual hammers and nails that hold both our economy, and many of our students' futures, together -- Career Technical Education (CTE).
"We appreciate the Superintendent's commitment to education funding, but how and where we invest this money is just as important as the funding itself," said GetREAL Co-Chair and California Manufacturers and Technology Association President Jack Stewart. "Unfortunately, the continuing emphasis on test scores over real-world skills is doing a real injustice to our students. We need both.
"We need to focus on the true mission of education -- which includes preparing young people for a successful career," said Stewart. "That's why CTE courses are so important -- because they provide the relevant, hands-on learning that prepare students to enter the workforce. Yet our education system is not making CTE a priority -- in fact, they're cutting it."
"In the midst of one of the worst economic downturns in California's history, we simply can't afford to neglect such a valuable economic resource," said GetREAL Co-Chair and President of the State Building and Construction Trades Council Bob Balgenorth. "The economy demands skilled workers, and we need to keep the economy strong -- now and for generations to come."
"California is spending $65 billion on our public education system -- yet about 33% of students are dropping out each year," said Stewart. "It's obvious that the status quo isn't working. We need to restore relevance in education and learning. We need to get real about our children's future."
GetREAL is a coalition of business, labor, agriculture, public safety, health care, child advocates and educators who believe California schools should provide a balanced education that includes challenging academic studies and career technical education for "hands-on" learning.
Members include the State Building & Construction Trades Council, California Manufacturers & Technology Association, California Farm Bureau, Western States Petroleum Association, Johnson & Johnson, California Agricultural Teachers Association, California Business Education Association, California Industrial and Technology Education Association, California Space Authority, Child Abuse Prevention Center, Richmond Children's Foundation, Chevron, California Association of Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors, and Minorities in Law Enforcement.
MSNBC.com
An uncertain future for 'No Child left Behind' 11 commentsby Emily Gersema - Jan. 25, 2009 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic
Former President George W. Bush finished his tenure without having won congressional renewal of his No Child Left Behind policy, which in a seven-year span has increased nationwide tracking of student achievement.
With President Barack Obama now at the helm, Bush's prized project is up for debate.
It's unclear what Obama and just-confirmed U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan will change in the policy; they'll need support from Congress. But the new president has been critical of it, echoing teachers' concerns about the costs of NCLB mandates for student improvement and the disparities in state standardized tests. Professional Athletes Discover the Secret to Peak Performance Build Muscle and Get Ripped without Steroids How to Destroy Acne Without Destroying Your Skin
Arizona school educators and parents have a host of suggestions for polishing the policy that aims to hold teachers and schools accountable for student achievement. Their thoughts are combined here as an informal memo to the president and his education administrators.
One size fits all
Most Arizona educators agree that the premise of No Child Left Behind - accountability - is a laudable goal.
Panfilo Contreras, the head of the Arizona School Boards Association, said the law has forced educators to more closely track the academic progress of children who historically have been at risk of struggling academically - kids for whom English is a second language, minorities and special-needs students.
Under NCLB, states and school districts must compile and monitor the test results of children in those subgroups. But if a school falls short in testing the children in any of these subgroups, it could face sanctions.
A school that serves a large number of students who are learning English, minority or in special-education programs could, if it fails to meet the federal standards for three consecutive years, lose its federal Title I money as a consequence - the very funding it needs to pay for staff or other resources that could bring those at-risk children up to speed.
"How smart is that? You lose the funding that is designated specifically for the kids of need," Contreras said.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne has been tangling with federal officials over the lack of accommodation for students who have special needs or who aren't fluent in English.
For example, some children with learning disabilities or dealing with a language barrier can do well on a test if a teacher reads aloud the question-and-answer choices. Others may perform well if allowed to use a calculator.
But those tools are considered special accommodations under No Child Left Behind. The students who need such aides are counted as not having taken the test - a mark against the school that leads to a rating of having failed to meet the federal measure of student improvement, adequate yearly progress.
"It's a frustrating experience for the students," said Barb VeNard, an assistant superintendent in charge of curriculum for Gilbert Public Schools.
VeNard agrees that academic standards are necessary to guide schools and students toward academic success, but said the objectives need to be flexible.
Right now, the law takes a one-size-fits-all approach. But children "are not all at the same level," VeNard said.
Out of reach?
No Child Left Behind set a high bar: By 2014, every student is expected to master grade-level reading and math. Schools must demonstrate through testing that students are improving each year. Schools that fulfill these requirements are labeled as having met adequate yearly progress, or AYP. A school or district that repeatedly falls short of testing and student-improvement goals may face sanctions.
The punitive aspect is a key reason a Higley Unified School District fifth-grade teacher, Terri Schilling, has misgivings about the federal policy. It forces teachers, administrators and schools to spend much of their time on preparing kids for a single test, the Arizona Instrument to Measure Standards (AIMS), usually taken in the spring.
Her school, Power Ranch Elementary, a K-8 school with 1,200 kids, was among 321 schools in the state that earned the state's highest rating, "excelling," on the annual AZ Learns report, but it wasn't easy.
Students get nervous for AIMS testing, and teachers worry about meeting state and federal benchmarks every year, she said.
"It just seems like we have got a lot of pressure," Schilling said. "Sometimes a few students can mean the difference between being an 'excelling school' and a 'highly performing' one (under AZ Learns) or making adequate yearly progress."
Schilling said it's important to have standards to make sure children are learning, but it hinges too much on the results of a single state exam. More testing tools and methods should be utilized to gauge student progress, she said.
"To me, the (AIMS) test is just a snapshot of that kid that testing day," Schilling said. "It might have been a bad day for that kid. They may not have been feeling well."
Unfunded mandate
States are gathering more data about student performance because of the reporting requirements of No Child Left Behind. The policy has driven state education boards and local district governing boards to change their own academic standards and reporting requirements.
AZ Learns, for example, is Arizona's school report-card system that rates schools on a scale of five labels - from best to worst: highly performing, performing plus, performing, underperforming and failing.
The extent of the data collection is vast. Under AZ Learns, for example, districts are judged on their AIMS results, the state's calculation for measuring academic progress, graduation and dropout rates, language test results for students learning English, and whether they have met the federal benchmark for student improvement, adequate yearly progress.
All of this must be tracked and compiled for a single report.
Virginia McElyea, superintendent of Deer Valley Unified School District, said the data collection has been costly.
Schools have had to hire information specialists or research professionals to glean the student information and train staff how to utilize the data-storing software to improve instruction. Plus, districts have had to buy special software to help them store all of the data electronically, and they've bought test-preparation materials.
Total costs can range from thousands of dollars to millions, depending on the size of the school district and its staff. Increased accountability, although laudable, has a hefty price tag, McElyea said.
"The intent of the law - nobody can argue it," she said. But "it's largely been an unfunded mandate."
She and other educators acknowledge that data collection on students has been beneficial. The information can help teachers identify areas on which students need to focus.
Deer Valley teachers are utilizing software to develop their own tests to routinely check on their students' development, rather than waiting months for AIMS results to be released.
McElyea said she believes it's time to start a statewide longitudinal data system that will track the performance of every individual child. This would help teachers tailor their instruction to the needs of each student. The Arizona Republic
January 4, 2009 Bush gets mixed grades on No Child Left Behind
Tier educators praise law's impact, but fault execution
By George Basler gbasler@gannett.com
Math teacher Kevin Pendergast is willing to give President George W. Bush a grade for his education policy. The Binghamton High School teacher gives him a C-minus.
While Bush's vision of raising academic achievement for all students rates high marks, his dependence on test scores and punitive measures to carry it out undercut that vision, Pendergast said. "It was a wonderful idea, but terrible application," he said.
Bush's educational legacy gets the same mixed reviews from other teachers and education officials. But, pro or con, many agree on one point: While education may have been overshadowed by other issues, the Bush administration had the largest impact on local schools of any administration since President Lyndon B. Johnson won approval in 1965 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the statute that funds primary and secondary education.
At the heart of Bush's legacy is No Child Left Behind, which passed with bipartisan support in 2001.
"Prior to NCLB, there was no comprehensive framework that analyzed academic achievement and student performance K-12 at all levels in all schools in America. Now, there is," Binghamton High School Principal Albert Penna said.
NCLB tied federal funds to requirements that states set academic standards, create assessments to measure student progress toward meeting those standards and hold schools accountable for improving student achievement based on these tests.
The impact has been profound:
* States must now test every public school student in reading and math every year from grade three to grade eight. High school students must also pass proficiency exams.
* States must now report test scores and graduation rates, broken down by students' race, socio- economic status and other factors, such as special education status.
* Failure to meet state-imposed targets for test scores, graduation rates and attendance puts schools on a list labeled "in need of improvement." A school must meet achievement standards for its student population as a whole and for each of several "subgroups," including racial minorities and students with disabilities.
Whether these steps have improved American education is the key question that will define Bush's legacy.
Answers vary widely.
Martin Klein, associate principal at Binghamton High School, calls the initiative "the most awesome thing to hit education" because it heightened awareness about the need to close the achievement gap between white students and other groups, including students of color and economically disadvantaged students.
Scores on state tests are climbing. In New York, test scores in reading and math have shown improvement and the graduation rate is up.
"There is evidence of some narrowing of the achievement gap, and that's to the good," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington, D.C.-based educational research organization.
But Jennings gives Bush's policies a mixed assessment and other education observers agree.
While NCLB led to "some modest improvement in the lowest- achieving students, there's not the widespread improvement we had hoped for," said Michael J. Petrilli, vice president of national programs and policy for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education policy organization.
Gains in reading achievement nationally have been marginal while math scores are trending upward, but no faster than they were before NCLB, results of national tests administered by the U.S. Department of Education show.
One of Petrilli's biggest criticisms is that NCLB allowed states to set their own standards for student proficiency. That meant drastic differences between states. Some, such as New York, set relatively high standards, and others set lower standards so more students reached so-called proficiency on state tests, Petrilli said.
For example, a 2006 study by the Fordham Institute gave New York's English standards a B grade for covering phonics instruction and fluency while giving Montana's standards an F for being unclear and showing no increase in difficulty from grade level to grade level.
Other officials are more scathing in their criticism of Bush, saying NCLB set unrealistic targets, was under-funded, used a punitive approach to beat up on schools, and focused too heavily on standardized tests that are too narrow a criteria to judge educational achievement.
The result has been a narrowing of the curriculum, and a school day has become more structured and crammed, even at the elementary school level, officials said. Schools in many districts have started 90-minute blocks each day focused on literacy instruction.
"I feel obligated at the ninth-grade level to focus on state exam preparation," said Pam Dayton, an English teacher at Binghamton High School. S.G. Grant, dean of the School of Education at Binghamton University, gives Bush a grade of D for his education policies and too much dependence on standardized testing.
"Education historians will say Bush asked the right question, but came up with the wrong answer and came up with that answer too quickly," Grant said.
Lasting impact
Chris Frederick is the type of student whom Bush administration officials say NCLB was designed to help.
The 14-year-old ninth-grader entered Binghamton High School behind academically. In hopes of getting him on track, the school placed him in Bridges, a program designed to give a select number of ninth-graders more personal attention and intense academic help.
"It's been good because it's helped me stay up on my work. My grades are up," Frederick said.
Bridges is one of several programs the region's largest high school has put in place as the school works to raise test scores for special education students and the graduation rate for black students. Associate Principal Roxie Oberg uses computer technology to track all students in the school through four years to help them stay on track to graduate.
"Before NCLB, we looked at one-year trends. Now, we're mandated to look at a cohort's performance through all four years," Principal Albert Penna said.
Still, despite the effort, Binghamton High School's four-year graduation rate of 69 percent remains the lowest in the region, and the school remains on the state's lists of those needing improvement.
And Bush's policies have left a bad taste in the mouths of some at the school, who argue they failed to consider complex issues like student poverty and mobility that affect performance in urban school systems.
"It makes a school responsible for every problem in society. All the good stuff it does gets washed away," said Dale Tomich, a professor at Binghamton University, whose daughter graduated from Binghamton High School two years ago.
Public opinion about NCLB has become divided. A 2007 survey by the Pew Center for The People & The Press found 34 percent said the law made schools better; 26 percent said it made schools worse; and 32 percent said it had no impact. At the same time, 45 percent of the public said the law overemphasized standardized testing.
"Bush became so unpopular for other reasons that his educational programs were swamped by negative views," said Maris A. Vinovskis, a professor at the University of Michigan and the author of a new book on national education reform.
Much of Bush's legacy will depend on what the new Congress and Obama administration do with No Child Left Behind, which is up for reauthorization. Obama has endorsed the law, but wants some improvements.
Regardless of what happens, Bush has had a major, long-lasting impact by pushing a major role for the federal government in improving schools, said Mark Capobianco, superintendent of the Vestal school district.
The idea that the government will hold schools accountable for student performance and use some form of accountability system to rate schools isn't going away, Capobianco said.
That's the Bush legacy, in a nutshell, he said. And it's "had a profound impact on what's going on in the classroom." Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin
The U.S. Secretary of Education defends No Child Left Behind and receives a pop quiz.
State setting pace in key education survey
Saturday, December 27, 2008 ALABAMIANS PROBABLY aren't jumping up and down with excitement over a report that says the state is a national leader "in building longitudinal education data systems." But state residents should be excited. Having good data matters — especially in education, where solid information on the performance of students and schools often has been sadly lacking. Alabama is one of just six states that have met all 10 goals in a national campaign to improve the collection and tracking of data on student achievement and other measures of quality in education. The Data Quality Campaign is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Diane Sherman, the head of institutional research for the Alabama Commission on Higher Education, said the state's "longitudinal data systems" allow school officials to track the academic performance of every student "from preschool through college." On a variety of important indicators, including dropout statistics, college readiness and the academic achievement of low-income students, Alabama collects information that can be used to improve the K-12 and higher education systems. Student data also can serve as an economic development tool. Gregory Fitch, executive director of the Alabama Commission on Higher Education, said the state can tell potential employers how many students are enrolled in college engineering programs. That information could be an important factor in persuading big industries and high-tech companies to locate in Alabama. The state obtains reliable data on individual students by assigning each student an ID number. This unique ID enables school officials to track a student throughout his or her academic career. Alabama could do a better job in one area of student tracking: transcripts. The state uses paper transcripts that must be transferred from school to school. Electronic transcripts are much more efficient, Dr. Fitch said. He's right. Education policymakers should push for the use of electronic transcripts that would make the state's data collection system even more reliable and efficient. The real challenge for state education officials is using the data to make needed changes in the system. Federal education Secretary Margaret Spellings said "information is a powerful motivator for change." That's a key tenet of President Bush's No Child Left Behind reform law. No Child Left Behind requires states to test students regularly and keep track of their performance. Fortunately, Alabama is way ahead of the national pack in this category of education reform. Now the state must turn the data into programs that lift Alabama from the bottom level of the national rankings in educational achievement. December 18, 2008 | Posted At: 01:16 PM | Author: Alexander Russo | Category: NCLB News
Blowing the Whistle on The Texas Miracle Fall 2004 An Interview with Robert Kimball by Catherine Capellaro Robert Kimball was the assistant principal at Sharpstown Senior High School in Houston, Texas, when Houston's schools were being lauded nationally as the forefront of education reform under then-Superintendent Rod Paige. In the 2001-02 school year, Houston schools were reporting dramatically reduced dropout rates. Overall, the district claimed a 1.5 percent rate; Sharpstown, which served many low-income students of color, reported a dropout rate of zero percent. Kimball knew something was amiss and wrote to his principal in November 2002, "We go from 1,000 freshmen to 300 seniors with no dropouts. Amazing!" When nothing happened, Kimball contacted a local television station. Because of Paige's prominence, the national media picked up on the story, and Kimball appeared on "60 Minutes II." As a result of the media scrutiny, the district investigated and confirmed that the miraculous dropout rates were faked. A state investigation showed that the district under-reported dropouts by 2,999 students. Kimball, a high-school dropout himself, recently spoke to Rethinking Schools' managing editor Catherine Capellaro. Rethinking Schools: In the past year, the media picked up on the story that you helped break, the story of how Sharpstown High School was "cooking the books" to hide an official dropout rate that was much higher. What made you risk your career to blow the whistle on the "Texas Miracle"? Kimball: I did it for the students. The District had canceled all of its GED programs because they felt that dropouts were not an issue since the dropout rate in Houston was only 1.5 percent. On almost a daily basis I observed school administrators telling students to withdraw because of their attendance or behavior problems. Almost all of the students that were being pushed out were at-risk students and minorities. I decided to go public when community activists told me that they had been trying unsuccessfully for 15 years to convince the district that it was in denial on the dropout problem. As a high school dropout myself, I understood the dropouts and was angry that the district denied a problem existed. I was also angry at the total lack of integrity among the school board members and senior administrators. After the media's attention to the issue, every board member and superintendent said that they never believed the district had a 1.5 percent dropout rate. However, each year they approved reports going to the Texas Education Agency that stated that the district only had a 1.5 percent dropout rate. RS: What were the personal and professional repercussions of your decision to go public about Houston's real dropout rate? Kimball: I was immediately removed from my duties as a high school assistant principal and placed in a windowless room for four months with no duties. When school began in the fall, I was assigned to a small primary school (PreK-2nd grade) that had never had two assistant principals. My pay grade was reduced. I was not given the duties normally assigned an assistant principal. I was given menial custodial and clerical duties. When I complained, I was moved again, to an even smaller primary school (100 students) located in a Buddhist Temple where all classes were taught in Spanish. I was placed in a closet with no computer, phone, or duties normally given an assistant principal. The district had hoped that by humiliating me, they would persuade me to resign. RS: In response to an episode of "60 Minutes II," Secretary of Education Rod Paige said the Houston case "shows the power of accountability that's the linchpin of the No Child Left Behind Act." What do you think of Bush and Paige's education legacy? Kimball: Secretary Paige bears responsibility for Houston Schools cooking the books when he was the superintendent and for the continuation of his policies after he departed the district. He wanted Houston's school district to look like it had performed a miracle in order to make the candidate George W. Bush look better during his run for the White House. As a reward for his deceptive practices, he was made the Secretary of Education. The Bush/Paige team has done more harm to public education than any other administration in the past 50 years. They have developed policies to cause public education to fail. The purpose of these polices is to privatize public education. RS: Presidential candidate John Kerry voted for the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Will things change significantly if Kerry is elected? Kimball: The Kerry administration would be open to the community's ideas on how to improve public education and what to change in the NCLB. RS: What do you see as the systemic reasons for the achievement gap between white students and students of color? What kind of policies promote educational equality and what policies increase stratification? Kimball: Institutional racism is the main factor in causing the achievement gap. Educators should be taught in colleges and in schools how to recognize racism and develop policies that result in an excellent education for all students, regardless of color or ethnicity. RS: What has changed for you? Kimball: After I filed a whistleblower lawsuit, the district offered an out-of-court settlement, which I accepted. I did not want to spend the next five years in court fighting a lawsuit. I have chosen to be an activist and am working with several organizations to bring about change in the Houston schools. I have also accepted a full-time teaching position with the University of Houston Clear Lake, where I will be teaching graduate students who are in a program that leads to a Master of Arts degree and certification to become a school administrator in Texas. RS: What is your educational background? Kimball: I dropped out of school in the fall semester of my 10th grade. I joined the U.S. Army a few days after my seventeenth birthday. As part of the battery of tests to all new recruits, I was given the GED tests and passed. After spending three years in the Army, I entered college full time and received a B.S. in social studies from the University of California San Luis Obispo, Calif., in 1971. In 1972, I received an M.A. degree from the University of Oklahoma. In 1991, I received a doctorate in education from the University of Houston. RS: You've talked of a "dual education system" in Texas, one for whites and another for students of color. What do you see as the root causes of that? What can be done to remedy it? Kimball: Again, it is institutional racism. However, there is another force that causes two systems of education in Texas. Schools in Texas are quickly becoming schools where only minorities attend. In Houston, only 9 percent of students are white and in Dallas, only 6 percent are white. A major goal of school districts in large urban areas in Texas is to bring whites back to the schools. Most whites have been persuaded to return to public schools because they are assured that their children will be placed in predominantly white classes and classified as gifted and talented. This policy demonstrates that institutional racism is alive and well in Texas. Fall 2004 Return to Top of Page
NCLB: Act II
The latest news on the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. David J. Hoff has been reporting on the biggest issues in K-12 education for more than 10 years for Education Week. He primarily reports now on the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. « Future of Rules, NEA Case to Be Decided Soon | Main Liberals, Conservatives Alike Don't Want to Leave Children Behind During last night's debate at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Gene Hickok dropped the phrase "leave no child behind" while arguing against the "Broader, Bolder" initiative. Peter Edelman took the podium next and said: "I'm tempted to say: I live in the household where the term 'Leave No Child Behind' was originated." The comment reminded me of one biggest ironies of NCLB: A conservative Republican (George Bush) co-opted the slogan of a stalwart liberal organization (the Children's Defense Fund led by Marian Wright Edelman). Bush put the new phrase as the top of his "compassionate conservative" agenda—a message that many pundits credit as a key reason for his narrow victory over Al Gore in 2000. Now that Bush is leaving office eight years later, the phrase "No Child Left Behind" is probably going to fade from the political discourse. But it's child-centered approach to accountability and broader school policy may live on. edweek.org Return to Top of Page
baltimoresun.comEducators don't want law left behindReform of 'No Child' sought in Obama administration By Liz Bowie December 7, 2008 Many educators are looking to President-elect Barack Obama to revise a much-maligned federal initiative requiring annual tests to chart the progress of every school in the country.
But with a faltering economy and two foreign wars dominating the attention of the administration-in-waiting, even the sharpest critics of the No Child Left Behind law are resigned to waiting their turn.
"I think it will take us a while to do this," said Joel Parker, director of education policy and practice at the National Education Association, a teachers union. "It is politically complicated."
With no consensus on how to change the law, a trademark of the Bush administration, representatives of mainstream education groups said that revisions would be unlikely before late next year or early 2010. Parker, for example, expects Obama to spend time listening to various viewpoints before the administration pushes one position. What is clear is that no one expects the law to disappear.
While principals, school boards and governors disagree over the details of President Bush's program, the foundation of the law - that schools be held accountable for teaching every child, even those who are poor, minority, disabled or learning English - is now ingrained in the way American schools operate.
Yet many aspects of the law have been criticized. Some say that its goal - to have all children reading on grade level by 2014 - is absurd. Others say that the federal government is micro-managing school curriculum, an issue usually left to state and local school officials.
Obama has called for reform of early childhood education and higher pay for teachers, also saying he would "demand higher standards" from schools. But during the transition, education has taken a back seat to the economy and jobs. Names of possible candidates for education secretary are receiving scant attention.
During the campaign, Obama said the annual testing that is perhaps the most visible feature of No Child Left Behind should be de-emphasized, but he gave few details about how to accomplish that, said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy.
Among the issues being debated are whether national standards are needed for schools, whether states themselves can decide what happens to failing schools and whether a school's progress should be measured by how much students learn each year rather than by students passing the state test.
Another concern is ensuring that students have qualified teachers, an issue that many education policy experts do not believe has gained enough attention.
Those issues are so complicated that getting even the members of the same party to agree might take some time, education experts said.
The far right of the Republican Party and the left of the Democratic Party "hate" the law - but for different reasons, said Michael J. Petrilli, vice president for national programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a nonprofit education advocacy group.
Conservatives think that the federal government has assumed too large a role in education and liberals see No Child Left Behind as an unfunded mandate, he said. "The question is whether the middle will hold," Petrilli said.
Still, broad support exists for some form of accountability, particularly from some civil rights groups. They believe the law has drawn attention to the achievement gap between minority and white children, forcing schools to do something about it. The measure is also supported by mainstream education groups seeking public school system reform.
The next step is for those groups to reach consensus on changes.
"I do think there has been more and more agreement that the federal law should be transformed," said Claus von Zastrow, executive director of the Learning First Alliance, a partnership of 18 national education associations. "We think there has been too much micro-management and not enough building of capacity in schools."
The law requires states to test students in reading and math in select grades from elementary through high school. By 2014, every student is expected to pass the tests that are developed by each state education department, a goal widely acknowledged as impossible.
Schools are punished if not enough students pass the tests for several consecutive years. The entire faculty can be asked to reapply for their jobs, or school operations can be turned over to an independent operator or the state.
As each year passes and the passing standards increase, more schools are being put into the "failing" category. According to data collected by the National Education Association, at least 15 percent of schools in most states did not meet standards last year, and in some states the percentages rose in recent years to 50 percent.
Pressure is building to find a more precise way of focusing on the worst schools.
Some argue that states should be able to take into account the improvement a school's students make on the tests. Instead of only measuring whether today's fifth-graders have passed a test, schools might also be evaluated on how much those fifth graders knew at the end of fourth grade and whether they moved ahead by at least a year. That could help urban schools whose students may come to school years behind their counterparts in the suburbs.
There is growing evidence that some states have made their tests easier, creating a disparity between standards among states. That disparity has led to a call for a national test and national standards.
Education experts say states would resist a move by the federal government to dictate what is taught. National standards are more likely to develop as groups of states work to agree on what should be taught and tested.
Nancy Welburn, executive director of the National Association of State Boards of Education, said some states have already begun to build a coalition for a common standards movement. "Algebra in Maine is no different than algebra in New Mexico," she said.
Lacking signs that the No Child Left Behind law will be revamped soon, some education groups are discussing whether to ask the Obama administration for regulatory changes to relieve problems in the original legislation. Those groups could raise the idea with key Obama advisers before he takes office, Jennings said.
Obama may have more support for other education priorities, such as increasing funding for early childhood education, than for attacking the tangled problems of the law first, he said.
One thing that everyone said is likely to disappear is the No Child Left Behind name itself. "It is so toxic," Jennings said. Copyright © 2008, The Baltimore Sun Return to Top of Page
Longtime schools leader rips testing as he steps down
Michelle Mitchell
The Desert Sun After spending nearly a decade leading his district family, Coachella Valley Unified School District Superintendent Foch “Tut” Pensis is looking forward to relaxing and spending more time with his relatives.He served as superintendent for eight years and was with the district 30 years. He will officially begin retirement today.Pensis sat down with The Desert Sun to reflect on his time at the district and on the changing education system.On the federal and state accountability methods:Accountability has gone out of control. It's all about testing. Children are not about testing. Children are about experiencing.What would you change about the system?We have to have a growth model, but that needs to be based on a number of different assessments, not just a standardized test.Teachers need to take control of education, as opposed to someone in Sacramento or someone in Washington, D.C. They can't have their finger on the pulse of all children everywhere, and I think that's what they're trying to do. And I think its setting some districts up for failure.If we set up standards that no one can possibly meet, then there's something wrong.What's a better way to assess student performance?You cannot give a standardized test that's the end-all.If the kid has a bad day, the school has a bad day.You use periodic assessments. You can use school assessments, teacher assessments, you can use portfolios where you can show students' work.We need to take the pressure off of some of these kids.I'm not opposed to accountability, but it's not being used as a learning tool for kids and for parents. It's being used as a measuring stick, and not all kids fit on that same measuring stick.A student can be successful as a student without doing real well on a test. It's our job as educators to find what that child is successful at, and we're taking that opportunity away from educators.What is the biggest challenge to student achievement?The biggest challenge for the largest majority of our kids is the acquisition of academic English.Vocabulary goes up very quickly on our testing.Even when they become proficient in English, oftentimes their vocabulary falls behind an English-only student because they haven't had the experience or the opportunity to use that higher-level vocabulary.Once they master the language they are as capable as any other students.What is your proudest accomplishment?Seeing the growth that's happening with our children.Seeing the great teaching that is going on and seeing our kids succeed.I think I've been involved in about nine new schools in this district. Seeing that growth, seeing new facilities be put on line and seeing them blossom is one of the things I'm very proud of. None of this is due to me, but it's being a part of it that I'm very proud of.What goal do you wish you could have accomplished?The one goal that I had set is that there is a better understanding within the state department of the education of second-language learners.Part of what caused us to have the lawsuit against the state is to get them to acknowledge that. It's starting to happen. They're starting to say, English-language learners, they're different. But they don't treat them differently.In hindsight, what would you do differently?Can I say “nothing” without sounding arrogant?Nothing. I have no regrets. It's been an absolutely wonderful experience, particularly with the children.What was the deciding factor in your choice to retire?Two things that I went through last year. One of them was the budget issues. The other one was dealing with the state board and the trustee and all that. At that point in time I felt it was best for me and the district to have new a leader step up.It took a physical and emotional toll on me, last year did. There's no question. And that's difficult to deal with year after year.You have nothing else to give. And I felt that way at that point.What advice would you give the new superintendent?Realize how great this community and these kids are and the people that work here. Take the time to learn that.What do you want the board to look for in your replacement?Experience. I'm hopeful that the next superintendent will be someone who has been a superintendent and ... (can) step forward into a leadership position right away.Bring a set of eyes in that can look for things that need to be improved. I'm not naïve enough to think that there's nothing out there that can be done in a different or a better manner.That's one of the reasons I decided to step down. It's all about children.Are you ready to retire?Yep.It was the most difficult decision I had to make because of the relationships I have with people, but once I made that decision, it has been peace.I understand that it is time for change to happen.What's next for you?I'm just going to take time, spend some time with my family.Do a little bit of traveling. Just kind of let things settle a little bit, get my head clear. Then I'll make a decision.MyDesert.comReturn to Top of Page
Teachers Say NCLB Has Changed Classroom Practice
By Debra Viadero
Washington
A new study tracking the classroom impact of the No Child Left Behind Act in California, Georgia, and Pennsylvania suggests that teachers are adjusting their teaching practices in response to the law—but not always in ways that educators and policymakers might want.
According to the three-year study, which is being conducted by the Santa Monica, Calif.-based RAND Corp., majorities of elementary and middle school science and math teachers in all three states report in surveys that they are making positive changes in the classroom by focusing on their states’ academic standards or searching for better teaching methods.
At the same time, though, sizable percentages of educators are also spending more time teaching test-taking strategies, focusing more narrowly on the topics covered on state tests, and tailoring teaching to the “bubble kids”—the students who fall just below the proficiency cutoffs on state tests.
“This is telling us we’re seeing both positive responses as well as responses that raise some concerns,” said Laura S. Hamilton, the study’s lead author and a senior behavioral scientist at RAND. Her study was among five reports spotlighted here this week at a conference organized by the prominent think tank.
With financing from the National Science Foundation, Ms. Hamilton and her research partners have been surveying teachers, principals, and superintendents in the three study states since 2002, the year the NCLB legislation became law, as well as conducting more in-depth studies in 18 districts spread across those states.
Learning and Morale
This week, she presented findings from surveys conducted over the 2005-06 school year, the third and final year of the study. A written report detailing results from the first two years of the study was also posted on RAND’s Web site for the first time this week.
The findings suggest that educators on the ground are viewing and responding to the federal law in complicated ways. For instance, across all three states, two-thirds or more of superintendents and principals and 40 percent to 60 percent of teachers said that staff focus on student learning had improved as a result of the new accountability pressures, but many also agreed that staff morale had declined.
Effects of Assessments
Elementary school teachers reported that their instruction differed as a result of math and science assessments.
Note: Response options included not at all, a small amount, a moderate amount, and a great deal. Shown are percentages reporting that they engage in each practice a moderate amount or a great deal as a result of the state tests. The questions were not presented to Pennsylvania science teachers because Pennsylvania did not have a statewide science test.
SOURCE: RAND Corp.
Teachers were more likely than the administrators, though, to pick up on problems or negative consequences with the testing-and-accountability systems in their states, such as a concern that state tests were misaligned with the curriculum. In middle school science, for example, the percentages of teachers reporting that kind of mismatch in the 2004-05 survey ranged from 63 percent in Georgia to 74 percent in California.
Also, while most teachers and administrators agreed that learning opportunities for struggling students had improved as a result of the law, half or more of teachers across the three states and all levels of schooling worried that high-achieving students were not receiving “appropriately challenging curriculum or instruction.”
“These are just teachers’ opinions, but we need to take them seriously because teachers’ support is important in making successful policy changes,” Ms. Hamilton said.
Demographic Diversity
While California, Georgia, and Pennsylvania were chosen for the study because they represented different demographic makeups and were at different stages in developing what the report calls “standards-based accountability systems,” the patterns of classroom effects were similar in all three states, according to the study author.
The other reports highlighted at RAND’s June 12 forum found that states and districts across the country were using similar strategies to respond to the federal law.
Three reports, for instance, noted that use of data-driven efforts to improve schools was becoming widespread. Two-thirds of schools, for example, have implemented periodic “progress” tests to monitor student achievement throughout the year and identify instructional gaps, said Brian M. Stecher, a senior social scientist at RAND. He is one of the researchers taking part in a federally funded national evaluation of the NCLB law, which has not yet been released.
Studies also converged in finding widespread sentiment among educators for using accountability measures that gauge progress by the academic growth that students make, rather than by counting the percentages of students that reach state proficiency targets. Ms. Hamilton said teachers suggested such growth-model systems, besides giving them more credit for their hard work, might take the undue focus off the “bubble kids” in their classrooms.
Vol. 26, Issue 42, Pages 6,22
Education Week
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U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings Announces States Approved to Use Differentiated Accountability Under NCLB at ECS
July 1, 2008 Contact: Jo Ann Webb
(202) 401-1576
U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings today addressed the Education Commission of the States (ECS) National Forum on Education Policy and announced the approval of six states—Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland and Ohio—to use the Differentiated Accountability Pilot aimed at helping states differentiate between underperforming schools in need of dramatic interventions and those that are closer to meeting the goals of No Child Left Behind.
Differentiated Accountability will allow states to vary the intensity and type of interventions to match the academic reasons that lead to a school's identification for improvement. In addition, some states and districts have a large percentage of their schools identified for improvement, thus impacting their capacity to provide meaningful, intensive reforms. Differentiated Accountability will assist those states by targeting resources and interventions to those schools most in need of intensive interventions and significant reform.
When choosing the six states, the Department used a rigorous peer review to ensure that the selection process was fair and transparent for all participating states. Recommendations were given to Secretary Spellings, who made the final approvals. In return for this flexibility, states participating in the pilot must commit to build their capacity for school reform; take the most significant actions for the lowest-performing schools, including addressing the issue of teacher effectiveness; and use data to determine the method of differentiation and categories of intervention.
The Department intends to invite states to submit additional Differentiated Accountability proposals in fall 2008. Further details about this next round of review will be forthcoming.
Overview:
17 states submitted a Differentiated Accountability proposal: Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.
The Department submitted the proposals of all 17 states to a peer review panel of nationally recognized experts.
The peer review panel was comprised of nationally recognized experts in accountability who represented a wide range of perspectives from academia to the private sector to state and local organizations.
In June 2008, the peer teams began reviews of state proposals and held conference calls with state representatives. June 13-14, 2008, the peer panel met in Washington, D.C., to review each state's Differentiated Accountability proposal using the Department's Peer Review Guidance, which can be found at www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/guid/daguidance.doc.
After considering the peers' comments, the Secretary approved six states to participate in the Differentiated Accountability Pilot program—Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland and Ohio.
As a condition of participation, the states must share data, participate in an evaluation and provide timely information to the Department regarding how the Differentiated Accountability model is implemented and its effects on student achievement. To learn more about the pilot program, visit: www.ed.gov/admins/lead/account/differentiatedaccountability/.
Following are the Secretary's prepared remarks:
Thank you, Governor Sebelius, for your kind introduction and, Roger Sampson, for inviting me to join this year's forum. Thank you both for your efforts on the pressing education issues facing our nation. I also want to thank Gene Wilhoit of CCSSO for joining us.
Back in the mid-1960s, the scholar and teacher James Bryant Conant helped inspire the creation of ECS with this thought: "We ought to have a way by which the states could rapidly exchange information and plans in all education matters from kindergarten to the university graduate schools."
Nearly 50 years later, because of states' efforts and the No Child Left Behind law, we have data—and lots of it. But we have yet to maximize its potential to improve education.
As you know, better information can be a powerful motivator for positive change. Without it, there's little impetus to do better. As I like to say, In God we trust; all others, bring data.
With No Child Left Behind, we know what's working in schools and what's not, and where students are falling behind. We've reached an important crossroads. Will we leverage the information we have to challenge the fundamental structures... customize instruction... and use time and people more effectively? Or will we go back to the ostrich approach—sticking our heads in the sand while problems multiply?
Instead of turning our backs on students and teachers, we must defend the core principles of accountability. And we must use data and research to create innovative solutions to our most pressing problems.
First, we must guard against any policies that relegate poor and minority children to the sidelines. If that happens, we all lose.
As Secretary, I've visited nearly every state in the union, including 22 just this year. I've been to 21 countries, and I've seen the competition we're up against. I've also witnessed the fact that there are many who would rather sweep our problems under the rug than solve them.
We can and must do better—and that starts with dramatically improving schools that fall short of targets year after year after year. Because of NCLB, more than 3.6 million low-income students in these schools are eligible for free tutoring. But only about a half million receive these services. That's why earlier this year, I proposed regulations to make sure that when kids are eligible for extra help, they get it.
I also announced a differentiated accountability pilot to help states develop better ways to target interventions according to how much schools are struggling. Today, I'm pleased to announce that I'm approving 6 to join the pilot: Florida, Indiana, Illinois, Georgia, Ohio, and Maryland.
The plans these states submitted speak to the fact that many were among the first to embrace data-based decision making and accountability. I'm hopeful that they will build on this progress by creating effective new strategies that we can share and take to scale.
However, I'm also discouraged that more states didn't take this as an opportunity to take more dramatic action to improve schools that have not met reasonable goals for multiple years running. We need more states to be pioneers in advancing positive change. Together, we can empower them to play that role.
As we look to the future and develop effective new strategies, it's critical that we preserve and defend the core principles behind accountability.
As the person who sees and approves state accountability plans under NCLB, I can tell you there is strong pressure to weaken, water down, find loopholes, and delay real accountability. Some of these efforts often have fancy names like "multiple measures" or "authentic assessments." Others efforts are not so fancy, like when opponents spend millions to tarnish NCLB.
Especially in an election year, we must demand straight answers instead of hedging and obfuscation.
When we hear people saying that it's unreasonable to expect every child to perform on grade level, we must ask: does that mean you don't expect your child to learn the fundamentals? The law already includes reasonable accommodations for kids who need extra help. But over all, if not yours, then exactly whose children are you comfortable writing off?
Personally, I'd be outraged if someone told me my daughter couldn't perform on grade level right now. When people say they don't think 2014 is a reasonable goal, we must ask, when is?
When we hear myths about NCLB, we must speak out to dispel them. For example, some say the law demands too much testing. The reality is, states are only required to assess students once a year in grades three through eight, and once in high school. Isn't it worth a few days out of the year to find out what students have learned, and where they need help?
We also hear that the law is "punitive" and "unfair." Which makes me wonder: what's punitive about providing free tutoring for low-income kids who need extra help? Truly "unfair" would be sending them into this competitive world without basic knowledge and skills.
We must not allow sympathy or circumstances to slip into the soft bigotry of lowered expectations. You know as well as I do that our global economy is demanding far more of students. In this environment, expecting less is inexcusable.
When people say they don't support NCLB, we must ask, what do you support? Expecting less from fewer students and taking longer to do it?
If spending more money per child than almost any other developed country is not enough funding, how much would it cost to teach every child to read and do math?
What's great about measuring progress is that we now have data that makes the case for us. For example, just last week, the non-partisan Center on Education Policy released a report showing that under NCLB, student scores are on the rise, and achievement gaps are narrowing. As one editorial noted, these findings "ought to ... give pause to even the law's harshest detractors."
That's a testament to hard-working educators and forward-thinking leaders like Alexa Posny, Alice Seagren, and Florence Shapiro.
The kind of progress you've facilitated—and the "can-do attitude" you bring to the effort—must be amplified nationwide. Especially when all too often, we hear so much about what can't be done.
Which brings me to my next point, using data to support innovation for greater student gains.
Customization has already improved every other aspect of our lives. We have computers built to order...eyeglasses in an hour...and most web sites know what I want before I do. Yet while other fields rocket ahead, our education system is trapped in the industrial age. If Rip Van Winkle woke up today, classrooms would be the only thing he'd recognize. The term "24/7" has no relevance in education because we're still clinging to an outdated notion of 6 hours a day, 180 days a year.
As a report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce put it, "Most schools preserve the routines, cultures, and operations of an obsolete 1930s manufacturing plant." That's unacceptable in today's global economy. We can and must help schools become more agile, more efficient, more responsive...and most importantly, more effective.
To that end, I'm pleased that ECS is working hard to share and amplify effective practices through the use of longitudinal data. Learning more about students' academic biographies will help us solve problems before they become chronic.
By raising the bar, we are demanding more of students and teachers than ever before. And as they strive to do better, faster, more, we must arm them with as many proven tools as possible.
Thanks to decades of research, we now have scientifically-based strategies to help teachers serve more students more effectively. So it's ironic that Congress has proposed to de-fund the Reading First program that is producing results for many of our neediest students. And now that experts have identified the most effective ways to teach math, why not deliver their expert insights to teachers by funding Math Now?
As teachers' work becomes more complex, why not support them with research-based tools to get the job done?
Now that we know postsecondary education is all but essential, why are we still debating whether it's reasonable to expect a 9-year-old to read? Or whether it's possible for every student to graduate from high school?
Instead of questioning our children's potential, let's use research, data, and technology to guide innovation—just as the ECS founders envisioned. With your leadership, we can empower more people to be catalysts of change and improvement.
Instead of turning back, let's together strengthen accountability to make sure no student is overlooked or cast aside.
And finally, let's lift up this movement that declares education to be the new civil right.
Thank you, and I'm happy to answer your questions.
ED.org Return to Top of Page
Rethinking a One-Size-Fits-All Education Policy
Standardizing Learning
By SETH SANDRONSKY
Daily in countless classrooms across the U.S., teachers are using standardized curriculum to prepare their students to take and score highly on high-stakes achievement tests. But forcing K-12 schools to follow a single standard of education is no cure-all. In fact, such an approach places students and teachers into a historic trend of capitalism to exert ever-greater control over the workplace.
I spoke with five classroom teachers in California’s capital city. Bob Priestly, who currently teaches 7th-grade science at Sam Brannan Middle School in the Sacramento City Unified District, has a critique of the standard curriculum and achievement tests. He has been a teacher for 16 years.
“We aren’t drones now, but before standardized tests there was more freedom for teachers to create their own approaches to the subject matter such as life science,” he said. “Such freedom is unwelcome now and teachers can be administratively disciplined for that.
“The traditional middle school before standardized tests was a place where kids explored new things inside and outside the classroom in an “exploratory wheel” of elective classes, such as art, drama, second languages and shop. That’s been wiped out a result of penalties for sub-par test scores. If they score under the proficient level on the tests, students can lose their elective classes and have to take up to two language arts and math classes each (per semester) to attain proficiency the next time.”
The test scores of Brian Laird’s students at West Campus High School in the Sacramento City Unified School District rank among the highest in the city and California. He currently teaches advanced placement and college prep economics and U.S. history. His students take the state tests May 1 – 14, the results of which he uses to find any instructional areas for possible improvement.
“Testing helps students only in as much as it helps me to teach the standardized curriculum,” said Laird, who began teaching in California’s Silicon Valley city of San Jose 12 years ago, arriving at West Campus in 2000. In his view, the state curriculum is generally “helpful to have” as a “map for instruction.”
Rose Penrose currently teaches 6th grade English at the Natomas Middle School in Sacramento’s Natomas Unified School District. In her sixth year of teaching, she instructs three 88-minute classes of English, with 30 students in each. Penrose and her fellow teachers, by department and grade level, create a “pacing guide” to help them to identify when and how to teach in conformity with state curriculum standards for achievement tests, which her sixth graders began in mid-April.
“Having accountability and standards is good,” Penrose said. “They give everybody a measure of where we want to be. I know that my kids know the material, but the test phrasing can stump them sometime.”
Sheryl Tolson currently teaches second grade at the Anna Kirchgater Elementary School in Sacramento’s Elk Grove Unified School District. The fourth-year teacher’ 20 students took the standardized tests in mid-April. Test scores will be ready in August to help third grade teachers pinpoint which instructional areas to focus on, she said.
“I will also get an idea for my next year’s class on how to teach students more effectively. If the students’ reading comprehension scores are low, for example, I can work harder on that.”
The federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, which Pres. Bush signed in 2002, mandates that American students score higher each year on the standardized tests. In California grades 2-11, 37 percent of students’ Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) program tests scores in math and language arts must reach the proficiency level, up from 24 percent originally, said Pam Slater, spokeswoman for the state Dept. of Ed.
“Every year the standards we teach are ratcheted up,” said Priestly, who teaches between 26 and 35 students in five classes for which he uses the state curriculum. The students in part learn about the processes of sex cell division and single cell division.
“We’re drowning in standards and tests, which are a vise squeezing students,” he added. “I’m driving students at a fast pace towards taking the tests and accomplishing so many standards.” The NCLB sanctions for STAR test scores weigh heavy on Priestly’s mind and those of his fellow administrators and teachers. “We’re all in this thing together,” he said, while lamenting the inadequate means which the NCLB law provides to schools to meet the federal mandates.
Slater of the state Ed. Dept. gave a nod to this aspect of the NCLB. “The federal funding issue has been a criticism,” she said.
Across town from Priestly, Debra Nordyke teaches kindergarten at the Del Paso Heights Elementary School in North Sacramento. Her five- and six-year-old students take tests on math (measurements and shapes) four times a year. Testing on language arts (reading and vocabulary) is three times per year.
“Testing has benefited the kids by improving their language arts and math skills,” she said. Her district and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company (a $2.5 billion firm which calls itself “the preeminent educational publisher in the United States”) create the curriculum and tests which Nordyke teaches to. She has been teaching K-4 students for 23 years in the Del Paso Heights School District, one of several others which will join the new Twin Rivers Unified School District on July 1.
According to Nordyke, before the advent of the standardized curriculum and tests, teachers had to create their own. In that pre-testing era, this could be a stiff task for newer teachers. While acknowledging that standardized curriculum and tests have helped primary grade students to gain mastery of literacy and math, she noted that before then, students and teachers had more time for art, drama, movement, music and science. “That extra time improved students’ creativity and social skills,” Nordyke said.
California Senate Bill 376 created the Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) program in 1997. The California State Dept. of Education develops, reviews and revises STAR testing and the standard curriculum, Slater said.
STAR tests for grades two through 11 have four subject areas: language arts, math, science and social science. Student test scores are ranked from outstanding to proficient to basic to below basic to far-below basic.
Against this backdrop, a new peer-reviewed study in the journal "Educational Policy Analysis Archives" by scholars at the Rice University Center for Education raises crucial questions about state-federal policy relating to standardized tests and students who score sub-proficiently on them.
Rice’s multiple-year analysis of more than 270,000 Texas students criticized the use of a single standard to measure a student’s achievement. “The degradation of the curriculum into test drills, which have little relevance beyond the state test, distances students who otherwise wish to persist to graduation, exacerbating the likelihood they will leave school,” the study reported.
In other words, forcing schools, students and teachers into a box of escalating standards alienates youth and thereby increases the likelihood of their becoming dropouts versus graduates.
Where is this 11-year trend of state standards that marry school curriculum to STAR tests headed? In California and nationally, school districts and county education departments with tests scores below NCLB mandates face penalties pegged to the number of years in which annual progress falls below the measure of proficiency. The penalties for being out of compliance with this NCLB mandate put such under-performers into the “program improvement” category. The NCLB penalties range from replacing school staff in year three to a state takeover in year four. And that’s not all. “Once schools are in [public improvement] for five years they can be forced into privatization,” write Steven Miller and Jack Gerson in their article titled The Corporate Surge Against Public Schools.
California’s state education board approved a new approach to program improvement crafted by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell on March 13. As with students whose scores are sub-proficient, programs are ranked according to their need for improvement: intensive, moderate, light or other.
Del Paso is in the category of “other,” having narrowly missed federal accountability targets. The district has been placed in year three of program improvement status, said Fred Balcom, director of the accountability and improvement division at the California Education Dept.
Priestly is working with two Sacramento-area schools that are in multi-year program improvement. He declined to name either school.
Below-level STAR test scores are hardly the lot of Laird’s students at West Campus High School. There, 500 students apply for 200 open slots in the 800-member student body. That number is roughly a third of the enrollment at high schools such as Burbank, Hiram Johnson, Kennedy and McClatchy in the Sacramento City Unified School District.
In Laird’s view, the state curriculum is generally “helpful to have” as a “map for instruction.” However, Laird thinks that some of the textbooks he uses with his students are “incredibly simplistic.” Maybe that helps to explain this response to standardized education.
Students dislike the STAR tests, according to Laird. Such a stance put teachers in a dicey spot. “We ask students to please do their best on the tests. That helps to keep us in the good graces of administrators and politicians.”
There have been 11 years of momentum to unify California’s school standards to improve students’ test scores. This trend of standardizing education comes from the dawn of industrial capitalism, not always easy to see, given the misleading appearances of school accountability that can fog such history. In brief, the capitalist system spawned small, then large factories with work forces tied to the time clock to boost productivity, the amount of goods and services workers create per hour. A class of owners sought to remove labor creativity from their hired help and replace that with uniformity for reasons of control and profit.
To be sure, private profit is not a driving force in U.S. public schools. But forcing an industrial regimen of conformity upon the learning process can and does push youth and their teachers away from classroom time for creative discovery, thanks to the NCLB law.
What current learning standards backed up by the force of federal and state laws assume but fail to explain is the case for one way to best measure youth’s learning and teachers’ instructing. It should be no surprise that the satisfaction of students and teachers in the politically charged regimen of K-12 schools is a very mixed bag.
Seth Sandronsky lives and writes in Sacramento ssandronsky@yahoo.com.
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Teachers should be part of school reform process
Brad Olsen
Thursday, April 24, 2008
There's been a lot of squabbling on the education playground these days. New York City has begun experimenting with evaluating teachers via student achievement scores. Many states have renewed debates around merit pay for teachers. California school districts are preparing for budget cuts by considering teacher hiring freezes and layoffs.
On the political front, critics of the No Child Left Behind Act have cast education conservatives as inept, draconian bogeyman hell-bent on dismantling public education. Meanwhile, education conservatives pummel liberals for everything from lax teacher education to "soft" academic standards and instructional methods.
Remember former U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige infamously describing the National Education Association (one of our country's two teacher unions) as a "terrorist organization" to a group of governors in 2004? Or columnist George Will writing in 2006: "The surest, quickest way to add quality to primary and secondary education would be addition by subtraction: Close all the schools of education."
Of course, the issues and disagreements in education are not nearly this simplistic. But what interests me is what role teachers get to play in all this high-stakes hand-wringing and school reforming. We hear from politicians and school boards, professors and journalists, community advocates and district superintendents. We watch top-down accountability measures and student exit exams blanket our schools. We read self-righteous op-ed pieces by researchers like me. Yet we don't much hear from, or about, teachers' experiences in - and perspectives on - what's happening in schools these days.
We should.
We should understand that teachers are not passive, empty, interchangeable automatons in education but are instead active, unique individuals, often well prepared, with great influence over how student learning unfolds. Research demonstrates, for example, that teachers are always adjusting and altering school reforms as they implement them in practice.
Yet studies highlight troubling contradictions. New teachers prepared to design, enact and assess their own lessons are often required to deliver scripted, off-the-shelf curricula in lock-step fashion. Teacher effectiveness is increasingly measured by misaligned diagnostic student tests masquerading as whole-school performance indicators. There is also growing evidence that the current policy culture in education is pushing good teachers out of the classroom and leaving behind those primed for conformity, decreased decision making, and passive acceptance.
If the restrictive climate in schools doesn't sustain creative, iconoclastic teachers (whom I believe education should covet), many of the refugees are finding that they can make more of a difference in other roles in education. Leaving classroom teaching for jobs in administration, academia or community activism has become an increasingly attractive way for energetic, idealistic educators - especially in high poverty urban communities - to work to improve things for our nation's youth. Education, writ large, and other social service fields may be gaining committed professionals, but our classrooms are losing them.
Teachers matter. We know that. We therefore need to find better ways of inviting them into large-scale conversations about how to improve education. Soliciting teachers' active participation in reform benefits both the teachers and the school reform process.
I'd like to see more schools, districts and states establish official, authentic teacher committees to work with policy makers on school reform. I'd also like to see university schools of education partner more effectively with local teachers, on equal terms, to learn from each other - something my colleagues and I at UC Santa Cruz have been pursuing.
And, finally, I hope we can seriously re-evaluate how we as a society appreciate, learn from and treat the important work our 3.9 million teachers are doing. Our teachers educated us when we were young; we should allow them to educate us - and our children - still.
Brad Olsen, a former high school English teacher, is an assistant professor of education at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His new book is "Teaching What they Learn, Learning What They Live: How Teachers' Personal Histories Shape Their Professional Development."
This article appeared on page B - 9 of the San Francisco Chronicle Return to Top of Page
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings proposes revisions to No Child Left Behind Act
Among the changes is a uniform method of calculating high school graduation rates.
By Ben DuBose
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 23, 2008
WASHINGTON — States will be required to use a uniform method of calculating graduation rates by the 2012-13 school year, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said Tuesday in announcing proposed revisions to federal education regulations.
The push for adoption of a universal method comes three weeks after a study by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center revealed that only 52% of students graduated from high school in the principal public school districts of the country's 50 largest cities. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, just 45% of students received diplomas.
Both figures were well below numbers reported to Washington, and officials expect that a uniform method of determining graduation rates will aid in identifying problem schools.
The proposed changes to the No Child Left Behind Act, the Bush administration's signature domestic policy initiative, will be published in the Federal Register today. Congress has been wrestling for months over reauthorizing the law. If Congress does not act, the original law will remain as written, though some changes can be made administratively.
President Bush has been encouraging Spellings to consider those sorts of revisions.
"In January, I indicated that the secretary should move forward on reforms she can undertake administratively if Congress fails to act," he said Tuesday in a statement released by the White House. "Secretary Spellings' announced package of regulations and pilot programs will address the dropout crisis in America, strengthen accountability, improve our lowest-performing schools and ensure that more students get access to high-quality tutoring."
Spellings discussed the proposals in Detroit, where fewer than 25% of students in the principal school district received diplomas after four years -- the lowest graduation rate of the 50 largest U.S. cities.
"Information is a powerful catalyst for change," she said in a speech to the Detroit Economic Club. "The more information we have, the better able we are to demand improvement -- and to get it."
Under the proposed plan, only students who complete school on time with a regular degree will be counted as graduates. That would eliminate students who take additional time or who acquire an alternative to a diploma, such as a GED certificate.
"These new regulations are very encouraging," said Daria Hall, assistant director of the Education Trust, a Washington-based nonprofit that focuses on closing the achievement gap between minority and low-income students and their more affluent counterparts. "For far, far too long, states have used graduation-rate definitions that are inaccurate, inconsistent and did not provide communities, parents, educators or policymakers with the information they need."
Current policy allows states to set their own methods for calculating graduation rates. As a result, figures are frequently overestimated, because reporting lower rates to Washington could cause more schools to be labeled as "failing" -- triggering such drastic penalties as firing teachers and principals or giving control of a school to a private operation.
For example, New Mexico defines its graduation rate as the percentage of enrolled 12th-graders who receive diplomas, ignoring students who drop out before the 12th grade. In California, districts report their graduation rates to the state, leading to fluctuations among districts and making comparisons difficult.
But instead of creating a national requirement for improvement based on the rates compiled through the new method, the proposals will still allow states to set their own improvement goals.
In California, officials have previously suggested that an annual increase of 0.1% in the graduation rate is sufficient for "improvement." And in Nevada, state officials have set the threshold for improvement at a graduation rate of 50%.
Democrats argue that due to a lack of funding, some states have no choice but to set the bar low, since it's their only opportunity to be considered successful.
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who cosponsored the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, urged Bush "to reverse course in his tin-cup education budget and finally invest in the education of our children." In a statement released by Kennedy's office, he praised some of Spellings' proposals as "important improvements for implementing No Child Left Behind."
The proposed changes also call for schools to take greater initiative in informing parents of free tutoring programs available for low-income students in underperforming schools.
Public comments on the proposals will be accepted for 60 days, so none of the revisions will be finalized until fall, Spellings said.
ben.dubose@latimes.com
Times staff writer Nicole Gaouette contributed to this report. latimes.com Return to Top of Page
Accountability, Assessments and Transparency
How the proposed regulations for Title I and pilot programs support the No Child Left Behind Act
April 2008
The U.S. Department of Education is proposing new regulations for Title I of the ESEA with the intent of building on the advancements of state assessment and accountability systems, as well as strengthening the public school choice and supplemental educational services (SES) provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The regulations also incorporate key feedback from the field.
Earlier this year, the department announced a "differentiated accountability" pilot program under No Child Left Behind aimed at helping states differentiate between underperforming schools in need of dramatic interventions and those that are closer to meeting the goals of No Child Left Behind.
Proposed Regulations for Title I
Assessments and Multiple Measures
There is a misunderstanding among some in the field that accountability under Title I must be based on a single measure or form of assessment.
Proposed regulation: Clarify that measures of student academic achievement may include multiple question formats (e.g., multiple choice, extended response) that range in difficulty within a single assessment, as well as multiple assessments within a subject area (e.g., reading and writing assessments to measure reading/language arts).
Strengthening State Assessment and Accountability Systems
Regular access to a group of experts with knowledge in the fields of education standards, assessments, accountability systems, statistics and psychometrics would help ensure that state standards and assessments are of the highest technical quality.
Proposed regulation: Require the creation of a National Technical Advisory Council (National TAC) to advise the secretary on key technical issues related to state standards, assessments and accountability systems. The National TAC would focus on significant, complex issues that affect all states. The secretary would select the 10 to 15 members who would make up the National TAC from nominations from the public.
Minimum Subgroup Size and Inclusion of Students in Accountability
Currently, there are many students and subgroups of students whose achievement data are excluded from adequate yearly progress (AYP) determinations at the school level. Data are excluded when states establish large minimum subgroup sizes and add other components (e.g., confidence intervals; definitions of "full academic year") to their AYP definitions.
Proposed regulation: Require states to explain in their state accountability workbooks how the minimum subgroup size and other components of their AYP definitions (e.g., confidence intervals, indexes, definitions of "full academic year") combine to provide statistically reliable information. States also would be required to ensure that the maximum number of students and subgroups are included in AYP determinations. Additionally, states would be required to include the number and percentage of students and subgroups excluded from school-level accountability determinations in their accountability workbooks.
No later than six months after the effective date of the regulations, states would be required to submit their accountability workbooks to the Department for technical assistance and peer review. The Department plans to use the National TAC to help determine guidelines by which states' accountability workbooks will be reviewed.
Inclusion of NAEP Data on State and Local Report Cards
More information about how students in a state are performing on state assessments as compared to how those students are performing on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) would provide greater transparency about state standards and assessments. This information also would provide parents with another tool to assess the education systems in their states.
Proposed regulation: Require states and districts to report the most recent available results from the state NAEP reading and mathematics assessments on the same public report card that they use to report the results of state assessments.
Graduation Rates Within NCLB
Uniform Definition of "Graduation Rate"—Current regulations give states latitude in determining how public high school graduation rates are calculated. A uniform and accurate method of calculating graduation rates is needed to raise expectations and to hold schools, districts, and states accountable for increasing the number of students who graduate on time with a regular high school diploma.
Proposed regulation: Establish a uniform definition of the graduation rate that is consistent with the definition agreed to by the National Governors Association (NGA).
The graduation rate would be defined as the number of students who graduate in a given year within the standard number of years with a regular high school diploma divided by the number of students who entered high school four years earlier (adjusting for transfers in and out). The standard number of years to earn a high school diploma would be four years.
States would be able to propose, for approval by the secretary, an alternate definition of "standard number of years" for limited categories of students who, under certain conditions, may take longer to graduate than the standard four years.
A state that does not have a system to accurately track students who transfer to another educational program that culminates in the award of a regular high school diploma, which is needed to calculate the NGA graduation rate, would use the averaged freshman graduation rate (AFGR) on a transitional basis.
By 2012-13, all states would have to use the more rigorous NGA definition of graduation rate.
Graduation Rates and AYP—Under current regulations, in order to make AYP, most states require schools to make only a small amount of improvement from one year to the next or to meet very low graduation rate goals (e.g., 50 percent). Permitting schools and districts with extremely low graduation rates or minimal levels of improvement to make AYP does not provide sufficient accountability for ensuring that students graduate on time.
Proposed regulation: States would be required to:
Set a graduation rate goal (e.g., 90 percent) that represents the rate they expect all high schools to meet; and
Define how schools and districts may demonstrate continuous and substantial improvement from the prior year.
To make AYP, a school or district would have to meet the graduation rate goal or demonstrate continuous and substantial improvement from the prior year.
Disaggregation of Graduation Rates—Current regulations do not require disaggregated graduation rate data (i.e., data broken down by student subgroups) to be included in AYP determinations. Data show large disparities in the graduation rates of different subgroups. Simply requiring disaggregated data to be reported has not been sufficient to ensure that graduation rates improve for all students.
Proposed regulation: Require disaggregated graduation rates to be taken into account in AYP determinations. No later than the 2012-13 academic year (when all states must use the NGA rate), states would be required to disaggregate the data by subgroup at the school and district levels to determine and report AYP. Prior to the 2012-13 school year, states would have to disaggregate the data at the school, LEA, and state levels for reporting purposes, but only at the LEA and State levels for determining AYP.
Including Individual Student Growth in AYP
There is general consensus among teachers, administrators, researchers, and advocates that states should be permitted to include measures of individual student growth (i.e., growth models) when determining AYP. By allowing states to include measures of individual student progress in AYP calculations, schools will continue to be held accountable for the achievement of all students. At the same time, states will have the flexibility to use more sophisticated methods of determining AYP.
Proposed regulation: Set the criteria that states must meet in order to incorporate individual student academic progress into their definitions of AYP. The proposed regulations build on criteria that are part of the current "growth model" pilot program.
Same Subject-Same Subgroup Identification for Improvement
Limiting the identification of schools and districts that are "in need of improvement" to those that do not meet the annual measurable objective (AMO) in the same subject for the same subgroup over consecutive years is inconsistent with the law's accountability provisions. The law requires that every subgroup meet the state's AMO in each subject, each year.
Proposed regulation: Codify current Department policy that a district may base improvement status on whether a school missed AYP because it did not meet the AMO in the same subject (or meet the same academic indicator) for two consecutive years. A district may not, however, limit identification for improvement to those schools that missed AYP only because they did not meet the AMO in the same subject (or meet the same academic indicator) for the same subgroup for two consecutive years.
Restructuring
Based on available data, the Department is concerned that the restructuring requirements are not being implemented effectively, and in some cases, not at all.
Proposed regulation: Require the following:
Interventions implemented as part of a school's restructuring plan must be significantly more rigorous and comprehensive than the corrective action plan that the school implemented after it was identified as in need of improvement.
Districts must implement interventions that address the reasons why a school is in the restructuring phase.
In replacing all or most of the school staff, a district may include replacing the principal; however, replacing the principal alone would not be sufficient to constitute restructuring.
Differentiated Accountability Pilot Program (announced March 18, 2008)
Differentiated accountability means creating a more nuanced system of distinguishing between schools in need of dramatic intervention, and those that are closer to meeting goals.
This flexibility will help states do what is necessary to enable all students to read and do math at grade level or better by 2014 in a more effective and efficient manner.
Differentiated accountability is not about lessening the focus on all students reaching grade level in reading and mathematics or lessening the imperative to fix struggling schools.
In return, states must commit to: build their capacity for school reform; take the most significant actions for the lowest-performing schools, including addressing the issue of teacher effectiveness; and use data to determine the method of differentiation and categories of intervention.
ED.gov
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Differentiated Accountability: A More Nuanced System to Better Target Resources
March 2008
"The goal is to help educators act now to help schools in every stage of improvement. We must take dramatic action to improve our lowest-performing schools."
— U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings
In January 2007, Secretary Spellings announced Building On Results: A Blueprint for Strengthening the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), designed to provide additional resources and flexibility to our schools and educators to help achieve NCLB’s goal of every student reading and doing math at or above grade level by 2014. As part of this Blueprint, the Department called for differentiated accountability to allow states to distinguish between those schools in improvement that are just missing the mark and those that need significant reform.
After six years of NCLB implementation, we have data illustrating that the extent of the academic achievement problems leading to a school’s identification differ widely within states. Differentiated accountability will allow states to vary the intensity and type of interventions to match the academic reasons that lead to a school’s identification. In addition, some states and districts have a large percentage of their schools identified, impacting capacity to provide meaningful, intensive reforms. Differentiated accountability will assist those states by targeting resources and interventions to those schools most in need of intensive interventions and significant reform.
In return, states must commit to: build their capacity for school reform; take the most significant actions for the lowest-performing schools, including addressing the issue of teacher effectiveness; and use data to determine the method of differentiation and categories of intervention.
What is differentiated accountability?
Differentiated accountability means creating a more nuanced system of distinguishing between schools in need of dramatic intervention, and those that are closer to meeting goals.
This flexibility will help states do what is necessary to enable all students to read and do math at grade level or better by 2014 in a more effective and efficient manner.
Differentiated accountability is not about lessening the focus on all students reaching grade level in reading and mathematics or lessening the imperative to fix struggling schools.
Core Principles of Differentiated Accountability Models
A state's proposal must address the core principles of NCLB, which are organized around four key areas: accountability, differentiation, interventions for schools, and schools in restructuring.
Accountability: The state maintains its current practice for determining AYP and identifying schools as in need of improvement.
Differentiation: The state clearly defines its process for categorizing schools.
Interventions: The state clearly defines its system of interventions.
Restructuring (or alternate label): The state clearly defines the interventions for the lowest-performing schools.
Who is eligible to apply?
As part of the new pilot program, states that meet the four eligibility criteria may propose a differentiated accountability model. These eligibility criteria are based on the "bright line" principles of NCLB.
The state's standards and assessment system be fully approved as administered in the 2007-08 school year.
The state must have no significant monitoring findings related to provisions NCLB. We will also take into consideration significant monitoring findings related to Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
The state must have an approved highly qualified teacher plan.
The state must provide timely and transparent adequate yearly progress (AYP) information to the public. States that have more than one non-approved occurrence of late AYP in the past two years are not eligible.
Additionally, the Department will give priority to states that have relatively high percentages of their Title I schools (at least 20%) identified for improvement, proposals that combine innovation with a rigorous approach to reform, and states that propose to take the most significant and comprehensive interventions for the lowest-performing schools earlier in the improvement timeline.
Approval Process
Outside peer reviewers will evaluate state proposals against the core principles and priorities. Up to 10 states will be approved for differentiated accountability in the first year of the pilot.
States that wish to apply and meet the eligibility requirements should submit their proposals to the Department by May 2, 2008 to allow sufficient time for review.
State proposals will first be reviewed internally by U.S. Department of Education staff to ensure that the state meets the eligibility criteria.
For states determined to be eligible, outside peer reviewers with technical expertise in accountability and school improvement will evaluate the proposals and provide recommendations to the Secretary.
The Secretary will approve states to participate in the pilot before the start of the 2008-09 school year so that states may implement the model based on results from tests administered in 2007-08.
Evaluation
The Department will rigorously monitor and evaluate States that receive approval under this pilot.
A pilot project on differentiated accountability will provide the Department with an opportunity to rigorously evaluate how to design better models of customized and meaningful accountability, and ultimately inform NCLB reauthorization and school improvement in general.
States approved to use a differentiated accountability model must agree to provide data to the Department comparing its model to the existing accountability system, the interventions applied to schools, and the effects of differentiating accountability on student achievement and school reform.
US Department of Education (ED.gov) Return to Top of Page
Assembly Passes Bill to Allow 'No Child' Opt-Out
By Maria Glod and Anita Kumar
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, March 9, 2008; C04
RICHMOND, March 8 -- Virginia's Board of Education would be directed to recommend whether the state should pull out of a federal school accountability system under legislation that cleared the General Assembly Saturday. It now awaits consideration by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D).
Virginia is among several states in which officials have argued that the federal government has failed to provide enough funding and flexibility to carry out the No Child Left Behind law, which requires annual testing in math and reading for many children.
The measure that passed the House on Friday and the Senate on Saturday would not have an immediate impact. If the Board of Education recommends withdrawal from the federal accountability system, the bill would require the board to present a plan to the governor and legislature by June 30, 2009.
Congress is considering whether to amend the 6-year-old federal law. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) has said he plans to introduce a bill this spring.
The federal law requires annual testing in grades three through eight and once in high school. Schools and school systems must show annual progress, and the results must include scores for subgroups of students such as ethnic minorities, disabled students and those with limited English skills.
The law has been credited with revealing pockets of struggling students. But states and localities have complained they are stuck with too much of the cost. Some also argue that the law is too rigid.
In January, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit revived a lawsuit by the National Education Association and several school systems that challenged the law as an unfunded mandate. The U.S. Education Department is appealing.
Glod reported from Washington.
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Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and Governor Schwarzenegger Highlight No Child Left Behind in San Diego
Spellings Discusses Federal Support for California Students and Teachers
Casey Ruberg
(202) 401-1576
U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today visited Otay Elementary School in San Diego where they toured classrooms and hosted a roundtable with educators to discuss how No Child Left Behind holds schools accountable and helps raise student achievement. Secretary Spellings congratulated Otay Elementary School for their progress under the landmark education law and encouraged California to continue to press for improvement in student achievement to prepare students for success in today's global knowledge economy.
"Schools like Otay Elementary are helping to cultivate a culture of success and innovation that proves the goals of No Child Left Behind are within reach. Now is the time to build on the momentum," said Secretary Spellings. "Six years after No Child Left Behind changed the education game in this nation, we can be proud of where it has brought us. The law's core principles now guide our conversation on education. Now all 50 states and the District of Columbia have assessment systems, report disaggregated data and target federal resources to serve their neediest students."
"Otay Elementary is a perfect example of how No Child Left Behind can work and serve as a great tool to track student performance and increase accountability," said Governor Schwarzenegger. "There is no magic bullet for Otay's success. It's about hard work, dedication and changing the way money is spent, which means restructuring and changing priorities."
During the discussion, Secretary Spellings introduced a new tool recently released by the U.S. Department of Education, Mapping California's Educational Progress 2008, which provides a comparative look at the State's key No Child Left Behind indicators. California's collaboration between K-12 education, higher education and the business community translates into good alignment between graduation requirements and college admission requirements and puts students on a path to success. Secretary Spellings commended Governor Schwarzenegger for adhering to the core principles of No Child Left Behind and targeting resources on the most-troubled districts to turn around low-performing schools.
Secretary Spellings also emphasized the need to equip every child with a high quality education to prepare them for the demands of college and the workforce. In partnership with States, it is time to take more aggressive steps to address and improve high school graduation rates; ensure that more eligible students are taking advantage of free tutoring; create a more nuanced accountability system to better distinguish schools making progress toward performance goals; and do a better job of recruiting and preparing good teachers and getting them in to schools where they are needed most.
Last week, Secretary Spellings marked the sixth anniversary of No Child Left Behind with President Bush in Chicago, where he charged her with traveling the country to discuss how the Federal government can work together with States to help them move forward under No Child Left Behind. This week, Secretary Spellings continued the dialogue on No Child Left Behind and priorities for 2008 with visits to Olympia, Wash., Salem and Portland, Ore., and San Diego, Calif.
To view Mapping California's Educational Progress 2008, please visit http://www.ed.gov/nclb/accountability/results/progress/california.pdf.
For Mapping America's Educational Progress 2008, visit http://www.ed.gov/nclb/accountability/results/progress/nation.html. Return to Top of Page
State Schools Chief Jack O'Connell Issues Statement
Regarding Visit of U.S. Education Secretary Spellings and NCLB
SACRAMENTO — State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell issued the following statement in response to a visit to California by U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and her discussions on the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act.
"I appreciate efforts to keep the discussion on the re-authorization of NCLB alive, and I feel strongly that this issue remains in the public spotlight. I've said all along that I generally agree with the goals of NCLB, but we must amend the law to more fairly and sensibly address the needs of states with established accountability systems and high expectations for schools."
Last year, O'Connell sent to members of Congress his formal recommendations for the reauthorization of NCLB. O'Connell based his recommendations on a series of public hearings he held with education stakeholders throughout the state. Allowing states to use a growth or improvement model for school accountability, such as California's Academic Performance Index, is a key element in O'Connell's package of recommendations.
"NCLB has been a powerful tool for focusing public schools on the need to improve achievement by all student groups. However, one of its biggest weaknesses, in my view, is that it has been overly inflexible and, in some cases, has not allowed states, schools, or districts to pursue successful practices. I hope that mistake won't be made again when NCLB is reauthorized."
Among O'Connell's other recommendations are amendments that would:
Fully fund the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and make the investment commensurate to its expectations a priority throughout the federal appropriations cycle;
Extend and expand common-sense flexibility for meeting highly qualified teacher requirements;
Allow states and school districts more flexibility and provide more efficient funding for the provision of supplemental educational services and school choice; and
Recognize parental rights to exempt their children from state testing, and not penalize schools where more than 5 percent of parents exercise that right.
To read O'Connell's specific recommendations for NCLB, please visit ESEA Reauthorization Recommendations - Letters.
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Congress Is Urged to Enhance 'No Child' Law
Bush Promises to Veto Any Bill That Weakens 'Accountability' of Education System
By Maria Glod
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 8, 2008; A03
 CHICAGO, Jan. 7 -- President Bush urged the Democratic-led Congress on Monday to revive a stalled effort to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind law before he leaves office, but he pledged to veto any bill that "weakens the accountability" measures at the core of one of his signature domestic achievements.
To champion the law enacted six years ago, Bush spoke here at Horace Greeley Elementary, a school with a high percentage of Latino students, where reading and math test scores have jumped in recent years. Flanked by students in the school's small library, Bush said the law's requirement for measurable academic gains has led to improvement in schools nationwide.
"I know No Child Left Behind has worked," Bush said, as he urged Congress to revise the law to increase flexibility for state and local agencies without loosening the annual testing and enforcement provisions that give it teeth. "If Congress passes a bill that weakens the accountability system in the No Child Left Behind Act, I will strongly oppose it and veto it."
Bush's remarks came on the eve of the anniversary of his signing the bill, which was passed with broad bipartisan support and is considered one of his most significant domestic accomplishments. As attention shifts to the presidential election, chances for action in Congress are dimming. If the law is not reauthorized, it will remain in effect as is.
The three leading Democratic presidential candidates are calling for major changes or a complete overhaul. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), who voted for the bill in 2001, has since criticized its impact and vowed to "end the unfunded mandate known as No Child Left Behind." Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), who was not in Congress at the time, has called for changes and has said teachers focus too much on multiple-choice tests. Former senator John Edwards of North Carolina, who voted for the bill, also wants an overhaul, saying it has narrowed the curriculum and doesn't judge schools fairly.
The law calls on public schools to ensure that all children are proficient in reading and math by 2014, requiring testing annually in grades three through eight and once in high school. It has been praised for revealing pockets of struggling students, especially those who come from poor families, are minorities, have disabilities or are learning English. But the law has been criticized for its emphasis on testing and for what some say has been a lack of funding. A ruling released Monday from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit revived a lawsuit that is challenging the law as an unfunded mandate, the Associated Press reported.
Jack Jennings, president of the D.C.-based Center on Education Policy, said some presidential candidates, particularly Clinton and Obama, who are members of the Senate education committee, are unlikely to offer specific ideas for change for fear of alienating one constituency or another.
"I think the chances for reauthorization have slipped away," Jennings said.
But Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), the committee's chairman, who helped engineer the law's passage, plans to introduce a bill in spring to revise it. In November, he met with presidents of two major teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, in an effort to move toward consensus.
"We've learned a lot over the past five years about what works and what doesn't work with No Child Left Behind," Kennedy said in a statement. "Changes to the law are needed this year and we owe it to families, communities and the nation to give children the tools they need to succeed in school, in the workplace and in life."
Bush, in his remarks here, sought to rekindle the bipartisanship that fueled the law's enactment, pointing out Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), a leading Democratic strategist, to the audience. "As you know, we're from different political parties," Bush said, provoking laughter, "but we share a common concern, and that is doing what's right for America. Both of us understand that educational excellence is not a partisan issue."
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December 23, 2007
Democrats Make Bush School Act an Election Issue
By SAM DILLON The New York Times Company
WASHINGTON — Teachers cheered Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton when she stepped before them last month at an elementary school in Waterloo, Iowa, and said she would “end” the No Child Left Behind Act because it was “just not working.”
Mrs. Clinton is not the only presidential candidate who has found attacking the act, President Bush’s signature education law, to be a crowd pleaser — all the Democrats have taken pokes. Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico has said he wants to “scrap” the law. Senator Barack Obama has called for a “fundamental” overhaul. And John Edwards criticizes the law as emphasizing testing over teaching. “You don’t make a hog fatter by weighing it,” he said recently while campaigning in Iowa.
This was to be the year that Congress renewed the law that has reshaped the nation’s educational landscape by requiring public schools to bring every child to reading and math proficiency by 2014. But defections from both the right and the left killed the effort.
Now, as lawmakers say they will try again, the unceasing criticism of the law by Democratic presidential contenders and the teachers’ unions that are important to them promises to make the effort even more treacherous next year.
“No Child Left Behind may be the most negative brand in America,” said Representative George Miller of California, the Democratic chairman of the House education committee.
“And there’s no question about it,” Mr. Miller added. “It doesn’t help to have people putting themselves forward as leaders of the party expressing the same disenchantment they hear from the public, saying ‘Just scrap it.’ Congressmen read the morning papers just like everybody else.”
Democrats had long dominated the issue of education until Mr. Bush seized it in his first presidential campaign, making frequent stops at schools to condemn the “soft bigotry of low expectations” for minority children and to pledge that schools in poor areas would improve test results or face federal sanctions. The No Child law passed in his first year of office with the support of a strong centrist coalition.
Seven years later, policy makers debate whether the law has raised student achievement, but polls show that it is unpopular — especially among teachers, who vote in disproportionate numbers in Democratic primary elections, and their unions, which provide Democrats with critical campaign support.
“There’s a grass-roots backlash against this law,” said Tad Devine, a strategist who worked for the past two Democratic presidential nominees. “And attacking it is a convenient way to communicate that you’re attacking President Bush.”
These political realities are making it extremely difficult to rebuild the bipartisan majorities that first approved the law during Mr. Bush’s first year in office, when he worked on the legislation with Mr. Miller and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat who is now the chairman of the education committee. Mr. Miller, a passionate advocate of school accountability, took the lead this year in trying to draw up a bill that would change troublesome provisions but preserve its core goals.
He faced obstacles from the start, including opposition from many Republican lawmakers, who say the law intrudes on states’ rights, and from Democrats, who say it labels schools as failing but does too little to help them improve. And by all accounts Mr. Miller worked doggedly to build consensus.
But virtually every proposed change in the law ignited fierce battles, and when Mr. Miller released a draft bill for comment in late August, it pleased no one.
“His bill got creamed,” said Amy Wilkins, a vice president of Education Trust, a group that advocates for disadvantaged children, who has worked closely with Mr. Miller’s staff.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings also threw herself into the effort, meeting with scores of congressmen and barnstorming through Ohio and Indiana in a school bus, seeking Republican support.
“I killed myself,” Ms. Spellings said. But she acknowledged that the effort now faces tremendous obstacles. “It’s a minefield. If I were George Miller, I’d be saying, ‘How can I put Humpty Dumpty together again?’”
Mr. Kennedy now plans to take the lead with the bill early next year. “We have to convince people that the bill we introduce, that this will not be a rubber stamp of the current law,” he said in an interview.
Mr. Kennedy tried to clear the air last month by quietly inviting Mr. Miller and the presidents of the two largest teachers’ unions to a meeting on Capitol Hill. All four pledged to strive for agreement, but both union presidents said later that it remained unclear whether Congress could produce a bill acceptable to union members.
“I don’t think you recognize the magnitude of the anger that’s out there,” said Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association. “My members are driving me, and if they think I’m not doing everything I can to change this law, they’ll take me to the woodshed.”
What is not acceptable to union members is unlikely to be acceptable to Democratic presidential candidates. The teachers’ unions have little influence with Republicans, and several Republican presidential candidates, including Mitt Romney, Rudolph W. Giuliani and John McCain, have voiced support for the law. But the Democratic candidates can hardly ignore unionized teachers in Iowa and New Hampshire, who are calling for sweeping change.
Alan Young, president of the National Education Association affiliate in Des Moines, got some television exposure about a year ago when he addressed Mrs. Clinton during a town-hall-style meeting. Pointing out that she was on the Senate education committee, Mr. Young urged her “not to be too quick to reauthorize the law as is,” but rather to rework its basic assumptions.
In the months since, Mr. Young said he has spoken about the law personally at campaign events with Mr. Richardson, John Edwards and Senators Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“We want them to start over with a whole new law,” Mr. Young said.
Three of the Democratic presidential candidates, Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama and Senator Christopher J. Dodd, are on the education committee. Mr. Kennedy acknowledges that campaign criticism of the law could complicate his effort, but pointed out that even though the candidates have criticized the law, most have also expressed support for its core goals.
Mr. Obama, for instance, in a speech last month in New Hampshire denounced the law as “demoralizing our teachers.” But he also said it was right to hold all children to high standards. “The goals of this law were the right ones,” he said.
When Mr. Edwards released an education plan earlier this year, he said the No Child law needed a “total overhaul.” But he said he would continue the law’s emphasis on accountability.
And at the elementary school in Waterloo, Mrs. Clinton said she would “do everything I can as senator, but if we don’t get it done, then as president, to end the unfunded mandate known as No Child Left Behind.”
But she, too, added: “We do need accountability.”
Even though the candidates hedge their criticism of the law with statements supporting accountability, it is hard to imagine their accepting revisions that fall short of a thorough overhaul — and that could be difficult for Mr. Bush to stomach, said Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. Even Mr. Bush’s catchy name for the law is likely to disappear in any rewrite, he said.
“I can’t imagine that Democrats could write a bill that would satisfy their caucus but not be vetoed by President Bush, at least in the current environment,” Mr. Petrilli said.
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Teaching Past the Test
Governing Magazine
Schools are leveraging data collected for No Child Left Behind to improve individual student performance.
By ALAN GREENBLATT
Anyone who shops online knows how one purchase can quickly lead to another. It’s not just the ease of clicking on an item and having it appear instantly in your virtual shopping cart. It’s also the fact that Internet retailers, who have spent millions studying shopping proclivities, unfailingly send messages suggesting that if you bought the new Harry Potter book, you’ll surely also want to read several other fantasy titles and maybe buy a “Pirates of the Caribbean” DVD as well.
This concept of using data to figure out how a person will act based on patterns of earlier behavior is just starting to come into vogue in American education. As a result of the federal No Child Left Behind law and other standardized-testing efforts, schools, districts and states collect massive amounts of information about students. They are only just now figuring out what to do with it.
”With all this data districts and states have,” says Brian Williams of SAS, a North Carolina business software company that is helping schools construct analytical tools, “they begin to have the ability to identify through patterns what kind of learner an individual student is and begin to make some very smart decisions about what kind of lessons we should be using with them.”
In the accountability age, parsing data has become a huge educational concern. No Child Left Behind mandates annual testing in reading, math and other subjects in grades 3 to 8. But the types of tests required under the law are too basic to do much good in terms of actually improving classroom instruction. They show whether a student has passed or failed, but offer little or no guidance about how to build on her knowledge or help a struggling student improve. That’s why states and districts from California to Pennsylvania are turning to new and improved methods of both testing and utilizing data.
Educators frequently refer to the end-of-term NCLB tests as “autopsies” that can’t help students who have passed into the next grade by the time test results come back. Many districts now are requiring additional tests throughout the year in order to get results they can use immediately to alter curriculum and tailor instruction for students who demonstrate a specific need. “We give our tests three times a year, sometimes four. We want to know during the school year how kids are doing,” says Ray Wilson, director of assessment for the Poway Unified School District in San Diego County.
All this is leading to a quiet but significant shift in educational focus. When states started getting into standardized testing in a big way during the 1970s and ’80s, they stopped looking at students as individuals and instead measured progress in terms of groups, such as classrooms or schools. Now, with low test scores from just one or two kids capable of putting an entire school’s standing at risk, districts are turning their gaze back toward individual performance.
In this sense, educators are starting to live up to the promise implicit in the federal law. Even No Child Left Behind’s many critics will concede that the law’s emphasis on disaggregating data — meaning each student’s results have to be accounted for, not masked as in the past by averages of overall classroom or school performance — has proven to be a silver lining. Not all schools are jumping on board the data-management bandwagon — and many states game the system by lowering their standards so more students score as proficient — but everyone concerned with education is now paying more attention to the performance of individual students.
NCLB continues to generate enough opposition from both conservatives and progressives that there appears little chance Congress will reauthorize it this year, as scheduled. Instead, the issue probably will be punted into the hands of the next president and Congress in 2009.
The law won’t fade away, though. Without emendation, it will continue to require all schools to test students regularly and face penalties if too few make the grade. In order for all this testing to be helpful, though, states and districts are learning they can’t simply collect yet more of the kind of data required by the feds. Instead, they have to make better sense of better numbers in order to improve instruction. “We’re following the letter of the law,” says Kory Holdaway, a teacher and Utah state representative, “yet still using our own state accountability system, which we see as being richer and more robust than the requirements under No Child Left Behind.”
CLOSING THE GAP
For decades after World War II, educational policy was concerned largely with questions of equal access for racial minorities, females and the disabled. No Child Left Behind changed the rules of the game, demanding that all students perform at an adequate level. When they don’t, the law considers this the school’s fault, as opposed to the old “baggage” argument that many students come to school unable to learn because of personal circumstances or socioeconomic background. “We’ve had to shift on the run from providing access to making sure everybody is proficient, and that is a huge philosophical change,” says Doug Otto, superintendent of schools in Plano, Texas. “It really caused us to look at each and every student — that’s a powerful change that’s been brought about by the accountability system.”
Plano has been working with SAS to develop models to predict how kids are likely to do on their annual NCLB-mandated tests. The district runs its own tests early in the year and uses the results to inform the following months of instruction, seeking to arm teachers with specific analyses of each child’s strengths and weaknesses. “There’s a big push in our district for differentiation, how we can modify instruction for each student,” says Beth Hubbard, who teaches at Aldridge Elementary. “Each might be in third grade, but they may each be on a completely different level.”
The district helps with resources, whether it’s training teachers to work in teams to address common problems or sending in literacy specialists. The results have been impressive. The district has closed nearly all the gaps that existed in 2003 between Anglos and racial minorities and low-income students in reading, writing and social studies test scores, while making good headway in math and science. Poway has done even better with its program, showing test-score improvement in every grade of every school for five years running.
The main change that Poway made was to persuade teachers, students and parents not to concern themselves too much with the scores on the state-mandated No Child Left Behind benchmark test. Instead, emphasis has been placed on setting learning goals for each child. Tests and classroom exercises have proven to be a better gauge of what level and type of instruction individual students need than the fact that a kid may be 11 years old and therefore should be at a sixth-grade level. The whole idea is that if kids are given individualized help on the fundamentals, higher test scores will take care of themselves.
As Poway has achieved success, its methodology has spread. When it started doing its own tests to supplement the state and federal requirements, only a handful of other California districts were pursuing a similar course. Now, there are hundreds.
Districts vary greatly in terms of how aggressively they use data, whether they’re just keeping on top of the numbers they need for federal reporting requirements or whether they’re cross-referencing test scores with demographics, transportation and attendance numbers and teacher qualifications in order to gain a fuller picture of why two kids in the same classroom are performing at significantly different levels. As always, there are problems associated with funding for staff to provide individualized instruction or even to receive the training needed to interpret test data comprehensively. “Districts and states are all over the map in terms of the systems they have in place and how they’re trying to leverage data,” says SAS’s Williams. “But there’s not a district we go into that doesn’t want to do this.”
GOING LONG
The data revolution in education is just getting underway. Learning how to analyze data to head off problems rather than just reacting to problems that testing has revealed is in its infancy. Most states still can’t answer basic questions about their own students and schools. Only a handful can predict which students will succeed in college based on performance in high school, or how well students will do carrying a rigorous high school courseload based on achievement levels in junior high. “It’s amazing how little we know,” says George Wood, a high school principal in Ohio and director of the Forum for Education and Democracy.
But states are starting to concentrate on these types of issues. In North Carolina, for example, the state wants more teachers and nurses, so it’s asking what types of courses people who pursued those careers took at the primary or postsecondary levels — and then trying to track them after college to see whether they’ve stayed in those fields or in the state, and if not, why. Arizona is interested in doing the same thing with mathematicians and scientists.
Virtually all states are gearing up to collect longitudinal data — information about individual students that makes it possible to compare their histories throughout their time in public schools, from pre-K through college. Each student is assigned a number to make it possible to track his or her performance across districts and levels of education, while helping to protect individual privacy.
Florida has been a pioneer of this approach, with databases storing detailed information about students and staff throughout the state’s educational system going back more than a decade. Its data is now being used in myriad ways. A state program that retains third-grade students who are not proficient in reading, for example, was based on findings from the data that showed third-grade was a trigger point for what happened in later grades. More positively, the state allows students access to data so that middle-schoolers can map out their coursework to follow paths to specific college majors successfully trod by students in prior years. “We’re sitting on this gold mine of data,” says Jay Pfeiffer, Florida’s deputy commissioner of education.
Only a handful of other states have this type of longitudinal information, but nearly all aspire to have systems set up for its collection over the next few years. That will make it easier for states to push away from the snapshot results NCLB requires toward what is known as a “growth model.” Under NCLB, schools are rated on whether they are making “adequate yearly progress” toward the goal of all students testing as proficient, with the results shown by one year’s class of third graders being compared with the previous year’s. Under the growth model, the scores of last year’s third graders are compared with this year’s fourth graders — in other words, taking a look at how the same kids are doing after another year of instruction. The U.S. Department of Education is allowing 10 states to move forward with growth-model experiments.
TWO DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS
This interest in collecting more data and using it in more creative ways represents a significant change from the initial reaction many had to the federal accountability rules. At the same time, however, many states still resent the NCLB requirements and, in fact, have lowered proficiency measurements in order to help their schools show adequate yearly progress. Unless the law is altered significantly when it is finally reauthorized, more states will consider doing the same thing. And as states move closer to the law’s impossible goal of 100 percent proficiency by 2014, they will soon face a situation in which most, if not all, of their districts will be rated as failing.
That means No Child Left Behind will continue to move states and districts in two different directions. On the one hand, there will be some that try to fudge the numbers as best they can in order to make themselves look better. They will, in effect, be lying to students and parents about whether kids are actually proficient in basic subjects.
On the other hand, an increasing number of states and districts will be using data more confidently and aggressively in order to aid instruction. For them, the data requirements of No Child Left Behind have whetted an appetite for more and better data that does not merely show standardized results but can inform improvements in the classroom. “We’re right on the verge of having the tools where learning truly is an individualized venture,” says Pfeiffer. “I’d like to say we’ve exploited the heck out of the data that we have, but we really haven’t.”
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Ideally, vision of education bests politics
Clarence Page
September 19, 2007
WASHINGTON chicagotribune.com
I love idealists. They offer us a vision of how things might be if our lawmakers truly lived up to our dreams.
Yet, like overzealous soldiers in combat, they sometimes make you want to grab them by the collar and pull them out of the line of fire.
Those thoughts came to mind this week as Jonathan Kozol, 71, the award-winning author and activist, entered his 75th day on a "partial hunger strike." He's protesting the six-year-old No Child Left Behind Act for education reform that Congress is gearing up to reauthorize.
Even a partial hunger strike is impressive and alarming for those of us who care about Kozol's health. He's only drinking liquids, he said, but on doctor's orders he eats solid foods when the impact of hunger appears to be serious enough to cause permanent damage.
"If I sound a little weak, I apologize," he said at a news conference in Washington. "I am dreaming of delicious dinners."
Kozol is an iconic figure in education. He wrote a book titled "Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools." It was about his being fired from the Boston public schools for teaching about a poem written by Langston Hughes, a great African-American poet who was not on the school system's approved reading list.
Forty years later, No Child Left Behind is, in Kozol's view, repeating the same errors that shortchanged kids in the past, especially those in poor, minority neighborhoods.
Passed in 2001, the education-reform law seeks to get all students reading and doing math at grade level by 2014. Everyone agrees that's a great goal but disagrees on the best way to get there.
The No Child Left Behind law tries to get there by mandating annual math and reading tests and sanctions schools that don't show improvement. Kozol lambasted that approach for "turning thousands of inner-city schools into Dickensian test-preparation factories." It has effectively "dumbed down" school for poor, urban kids and created "a parallel curriculum that would be rejected out-of-hand" in the suburbs.
Yet, when I pressed him to disclose whether he found any benefit to No Child Left Behind, he observed, after thinking for a few moments, that while there was no dramatic benefit, he appreciated one thing. The program, backed by President Bush, had revived the notion that successful schools were in the national interest, not just state and local.
With that in mind, Kozol has called for a truly radical reform that hints of ideas promoted by the political left and right. Under No Child Left Behind, parents may transfer their children from a low-performing school after two years to a better school in the same school district. Kozol would extend that. He would require states to authorize and finance a student's right to transfer from a failing district into a successful school in a suburban district.
That radical idea would be permitted, he points out, under the Supreme Court's school segregation ruling in June, as long as it is carried out for reasons other than race.
The idea elegantly borrows from ideals of both right and the left, but, unfortunately, smacks up against the political realities of the right and left too. After all, conservatives applaud the idea of parents having more choices and in ways that encourage competition between schools. And liberals applaud the desegregation of schools and reduction of isolation by race and income.
But in the real world, I suspect most suburban parents moved to suburbs to get away from the problems they fear, rightly or wrongly, that urban students will bring with them to school. In many cases, black middle-class suburban parents are no less worried than their white counterparts.
And teachers unions and politicians fear a flight of tax dollars and other resources if they allow parents to remove their children from poor-performing schools in their urban areas. The result is a political stalemate.
Another Washington-based reform organization, The Education Trust, is calling for another remedy. It supports a draft House bill that would require state and local governments to include teachers' salaries in their calculation as they try to comply with federal requirements of equal funding to all schools. At present, "experienced teachers migrate as fast as they can away from high-poverty schools," said Amy Wilkins of The Education Trust. "And they take their big paychecks with them. So the kids are doubly shortchanged. They get less money and less-experienced teachers."
Closing that loophole would improve funding for older, low-income neighborhood schools and, I hope, provide more incentives for experienced teachers to stick around.
That's a vision of how things might be if our lawmakers truly lived up to our dreams. Hunger strikes can call attention to that vision, but it's going to take political leadership to make that dream come true.
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E-mail: cptime@aol.com
Chicago Tribune
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September 11, 2007
Teachers and Rights Groups Oppose Education Measure
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
WASHINGTON, Sept. 10 — The draft House bill to renew the federal No Child Left Behind law came under sharp attack on Monday from civil rights groups and the nation’s largest teachers unions, the latest sign of how difficult it may be for Congress to pass the law this fall.
At a marathon hearing of the House Education Committee, legislators heard from an array of civil rights groups, including the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, the National Urban League, the Center for American Progress and Achieve Inc., a group that works with states to raise academic standards.
All protested that a proposal in the bill for a pilot program that would allow districts to devise their own measures of student progress, rather than using statewide tests, would gut the law’s intent of demanding that schools teach all children, regardless of poverty, race or other factors, to the same standard.
Dianne M. Piché, executive director of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, said the bill had “the potential to set back accountability by years, if not decades,” and would lead to lower standards for children in urban and high poverty schools.
“It strikes me as not unlike allowing my teenage son and his friends to score their own driver’s license tests,” Ms. Piché said, adding, “We’ll have one set of standards for the Bronx and one for Westchester County, one for Baltimore and one for Bethesda.”
Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, who is chairman of the committee, countered that district tests would have to be approved by the federal Education Department, which he said would safeguard against any watering down of standards.
The law, a signature initiative of the Bush administration that passed in 2001 with bipartisan support, requires schools to test all students annually in reading and math in grades three to eight and to show all students progressing toward 100 percent proficiency regardless of background. Schools in high poverty areas that fail to show sufficient gains face potentially harsh penalties, including possible closing.
The proposals for changing the law, which has so far tagged 10,000 high poverty schools for state and district intervention, move away from relying solely on test scores in math and reading as a gauge of school progress. They would allow schools to include test results in other subjects, as well as indicators like attendance, promotion, performance in advanced placement courses and graduation rates to demonstrate academic strength.
The draft has also come under criticism from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and Congressional Republicans.
Mr. Miller said he was not discouraged by the opposition, and indeed, many witnesses praised the proposals as offering much-needed flexibility to the law.
“I think we’re doing well,” Mr. Miller said after the hearing. “It’s not easy, but that’s not a surprise.”
Leaders of the teachers’ unions — Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, and Toni Cortese, executive vice president of the American Federation of Teachers — told the committee that they would not support the bill in its current form and that they objected to a proposal to count student test scores in granting pay bonuses.
Mr. Weaver’s testimony produced the sharpest exchange of the day, when Mr. Miller accused the unions of reneging on an earlier agreement to support the measure when it was incorporated into a 2005 bill proposed by Democrats and that was never adopted by Congress, which was then controlled by Republicans.
But Mr. Weaver and Ms. Cortese disputed that account, saying that while they supported the 2005 bill over all, they had expressed concerns about any provisions that would mandate test scores be included in determining pay.
Children of color being left behind
State test results show persistent achievement gaps
Nanette Asimov, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, August 16, 2007
A frustrating and persistent achievement gap between black and Latino students and their white and Asian American peers shows no sign of abating in the latest state test results for nearly 5 million students across California.
Overall, students of all backgrounds made minimal progress in English during the past year and no progress in math.
State schools chief Jack O'Connell said he was not surprised by the leveling off of improvement across the state, noting similar trends across the country that have followed growth spurts, as California had.
But it was the difference in achievement among ethnic groups that O'Connell said was most evident - and most disturbing - about the new test results.
"We cannot afford to accept this, morally, economically or socially," O'Connell said.
The results of the 2007 California Standards Test - taken by 4.8 million students in grades 2 through 11 last spring - are not scores but are percentages of students in every school and district who scored at or above grade level in each subject. Results were released Wednesday.
In English, 43 percent of students scored at grade level, up from 42 percent in 2006.
In math, 41 percent of students scored at grade level in both 2006 and 2007.
In the Bay Area, students are improving more in English than in math.
Among more than 170 Bay Area districts, 95 increased the percentage of students proficient in English since last year, compared with 55 improving that rate in math.
Statewide, more black and Latino students have scored at grade level in the core subjects in recent years, but they still lag far behind other ethnic groups.
O'Connell said the skill gap can't be explained by differences in family income. He noted that black and Latino students who weren't enrolled in the federal free- and reduced-price lunch program - the poverty indicator used by the state Department of Education - scored only about as well as white students who are enrolled in the lunch program.
Slightly more than 40 percent of middle-income black and Latino students scored at grade level in English- about the same as low-income white students. About 67 percent of middle-income white students did as well.
In math, 30 percent of middle-income black students scored at grade level, as did 36 percent of middle-income Latinos. About 38 percent of low-income white students scored at grade level.
The disparity raises serious questions about who might be failing these students of color and what can be done about it.
"For decades, our education system has provided kids of color less of everything that research says makes a difference in public education - even to middle-income kids of color," said Russlynn Ali, executive director of Education Trust West, an Oakland think tank. "Whose fault is that? Everyone who makes up the system."
O'Connell said he will invite experts to Sacramento on Nov. 13 and 14 to figure out what to do about the problem.
"We'll focus on that like a heat-seeking missile," he said.
On the brighter side, progress over the past five years has been steady among all groups.
In English, the percent of students scoring at grade level is eight points higher than it was in 2003, from 35 to 43 percent. That translates to about 442,000 additional students doing well.
The percent of low-income students scoring at grade level in English improved even faster since 2003, rising by nine points, from 20 to 29 percent.
In math, the percent of students scoring at grade level rose six points since 2003- from 35 to 41 percent. In higher-level math, skills declined by two points each in geometry and algebra 2, remaining under 30 percent.
But that slide could be explained by an increase in the number of students enrolled in the tougher math courses, O'Connell said. Geometry enrollment rose by 99,560 students, and algebra 2 added 68,209 more students to its rolls last year.
California's top-scoring school in English was a tiny high school with just 34 students in Nevada County called Ghidotti High. Every one of them scored at grade level or above.
The state's best in elementary math was Faria Elementary in the Cupertino Union District, Santa Clara County, a perennial winner. All but a couple of students scored at grade level.
In the Bay Area, the top-scoring district in English was Hillsborough City Elementary in San Mateo County, which came in second in math. The Bay Area's first-place district in math was Lakeside Joint School District in Santa Clara County, which placed 20th in English.
No student in either district was enrolled in the federal lunch program, and most had parents who were college graduates.
But the results also revealed some Bay Area schools doing unexpectedly well, given their students' challenges.
At San Francisco's Bret Harte Elementary - where 71 percent of students were in the federal lunch program and nearly two-thirds of students were black or Latino - more than half of the pupils were proficient in English.
They had also progressed by a stellar 12 points, so 53 percent of students were at grade level in English, up from 41 percent last year.Bret Harte fared less well in math, with 48 percent proficient - about the same as last year.
Vidrale Antoinette Franklin, who became principal four years ago after years as a Bret Harte teacher, credits not only her school's attention to academic skills - kids take diagnostic tests every six weeks - but her staff's attention to individual children.
"Expectations are high for students," Franklin said. "Teachers have to believe that students can learn."
For example, it would be easy to impose a zero-tolerance policy for acting up in class. But Bret Harte teachers have learned that it's more effective to figure out what's bothering children than to punish them.
"Most of the time, we give them something to eat, and they're back in class," Franklin said.
In Oakland, Think College Now Elementary also belied state trends and strongly raised its scores, though three-quarters of students are Latino and poor.
In math, 60 percent of students scored at grade level, up from 52 percent last year. And 49 percent did as well in English, up from 31 percent.
Principal David Silver credited his school's unique culture with raising students' scores.
Consider "Data Night." While other urban schools have trouble drawing parents to school even with a grand pasta feed, Silver said all he has to do is to promise a rousing evening looking at test scores.
"There's a philosophy," he said. "We set a big goal, set high expectations, and work hard to get the strongest teachers, strongest support staff. And we do whatever we can to support them."
Silver said he isn't allowed to choose his own teachers. But he said he recruits heavily and then works with the district to let him to hire the staff his team wants.
In addition, Silver said the school does not teach students the curriculum favored by the Oakland district, which has not performed as well as Think College Now, overall. Instead, the school teaches the subjects endorsed by the state - which are tested on the California Standards Test.
"Oakland is going more in that direction, too," he said.
Given that Think College Now is apparently doing a good job closing the achievement gap, would Silver consider sharing his secrets with the experts who will attend state Superintendent O'Connell's achievement gap summit in November?
"Sure," Silver said. "If I'm invited."
E-mail Nanette Asimov at nasimov@sfchronicle.com.
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My Plan to Fix NCLB
Save a seat on the bus for me!
By Gary Stager
August 2007
MY LACK OF ENTHUSIASM for all things NCLB is well documented. I oppose the avalanche of standardized testing, punitive sanctions, and privatized remedies for "failure," the climate of fear pervasive in classrooms, homogenized curriculum and the mathematically impossible goal of all students being above the norm by 2014.
But this is no time for criticism. After all, this is the fifth anniversary of NCLB! (Nobody even sent me a card.) The president says that reauthorizing NCLB is one of his "top priorities," and both Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and Senator Edward Kennedy are putting aside their differences and the evidence of fraud in Reading First, one of NCLB's greatest achievements, to "fix" and reauthorize the law. The National Education Association is fine with NCLB as long as the White House writes bigger checks.
The peer pressure is getting too much to bear. If all the cool kids are doing NCLB, who am I to argue? It is in this spirit of bipartisanship that I humbly offer my proposal for mending, not ending, the No Child Left Behind law.
The Problem with Tutoring
Under NCLB, underperforming schools must provide after-school tutoring. This school year 500,000 students are expected to receive free tutoring, a small percentage of those actually eligible. The cost estimates range from $500 million to $2.5 billion annually. The Chicago Public Schools are locked in battle with the federal government over the provision of tutoring services. CPS wants to pay public school teachers to provide the tutoring, while the Feds argue that these are the same people who didn't teach the students in the first place. CPS makes the case that expert educators should be teaching kids, a belief shared by noted educator Jim Trelease.
NCLB requires that tutoring funds be spent using private companies that have no qualification requirements for tutors, despite stringent requirements that schools employ "qualified teachers." There is virtually no oversight over how tutoring contracts are awarded or how the public's money is spent.
We could offer access to a proven learning environment.
Senator Hillary Clinton is only one critic of the tutoring scheme. She recently said, "This is Halliburton all over again. "Why would we outsource helping our kids to unaccountable private sector providers?" she said. "They don't have to follow our civil rights laws, their employees don't even have to be qualified, they aren't required to coordinate with educators, and there's a grand total of zero evidence that they're doing any good."
Recent studies from Chicago and Los Angeles found virtually no achievement gains despite expenditures of more than $50 and $56 million, respectively, on tutoring last year.
As I see it, funding-even profiteering- is not the main problem with tutoring. There is a logical fallacy that should prompt us to ask, "Does tutoring have any value, regardless of the provider?" The embrace of tutoring as a sound educational intervention is based on an assumption that kids will learn what we want them to if we just make them do more of it.
My Proposal
Federal tutoring funds should be available to send children to summer camp. Most poor students eligible for NCLB tutoring are, well, poor. Since we can't buy them a new house or increase their family income we could offer access to a proven learning environment available to more affluent children for generations, namely, summer camp. Camp awakens the creative, artistic, and athletic potential in students. It allows them to be children, to commune with nature, to engage in a positive community and to develop sustained relationships with adults who love children enough to spend their summers working for peanuts.
Summer camp is research-based and has been scientifically proven over decades. Ask any member of the Business Roundtable or the president's Cabinet. I bet most of them and their children attended camp. Since many camps are for-profit businesses, my plan satisfies the administration's desire to engage the private sector.
Isn't it time to end the soft bigotry of low expectations and give every child a chance at summer camp?
Gary S. Stager, gary@stager.org, is senior editor of DISTRICT ADMINISTRATION and editor of The Pulse: Education's Place for Debate
Schools Cut Other Subjects to Teach Reading and Math
By Alex Kingsbury
Posted 7/25/07President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act pushed students into a regimen of high-stakes testing in two core areas: reading and math. The effects could hardly have been more predictable: Now, it seems, teachers and schools are dedicating more and more energy to math and reading instruction at the expense of other subjects.
Call it teaching to the test. According to findings from the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy, 62 percent of school districts reported increasing time for reading and/or math instruction in elementary schools since 2001-02 (Bush signed the NCLB law in January 2002), while middle schools reported a 20 percent rise. The study was based on survey results from nearly 350 school districts around the country. Those increases for math and science instruction have come with a price: Forty-four percent of those districts said they cut time from activities like recess and lunch or subjects like social studies and art. "The standards movement is having an impact on our classrooms," says CEP President Jack Jennings. "If higher test scores are the objective, we can show that teachers are concentrating more on getting better scores."
In elementary schools, for example, 36 percent of the schools surveyed decreased the amount of time spent on social studies, and 28 percent reduced time spent on science—despite the fact that boosting science education has been the goal of a variety of government-sponsored initiatives to spur competitiveness. Science testing does not yet have the emphasis that reading and math have received under NCLB.
Earlier this year, commenting on the results of nationwide history and civics testing (where test scores improved only slightly), Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said that the NCLB focus on reading and math was not narrowing the curriculum. "While critics may argue that NCLB leads educators to narrow their curriculum focus, the fact is, when students know how to read and comprehend, they apply these skills to other subjects like history and civics," she said.
The CEP study doesn't directly address the efficacy of the instruction time. But it does show that teachers are concentrating their efforts on the areas of the curriculum that are under the most scrutiny, while other subjects like science, art, and social studies are receiving less and less attention. 
As the Majority of School Districts Spend More Time on Reading and Math, Many Cut Time in Other Areas
Instructional Time for Subjects Not Tested Under No Child Left Behind Has Fallen by Nearly One-Third Since Law Was Passed
WASHINGTON – July 25, 2007 – A majority of the nation’s school districts report that they have increased time for reading and math in elementary schools since the No Child Left Behind Act became law in 2002, while time spent on other subjects has fallen by nearly one-third during thesame time, according to a report from the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Education Policy.
The report, based on a nationally representative survey of nearly 350 school districts, finds that to make room for additional curriculum and instructional time in reading and math – the two subjects tested for accountability under the No Child Left Behind Act – many districts are also spending less time in other subjects that are not the focus of federal accountability.
 About 62 percent of districts reported increasing time for English language arts and/or math in elementary schools since school year 2001-02, and more than 20 percent reported increasing time for these subjects in middle school during the same time. Among the districts reporting increased time for English and math, the average increase was substantial, amounting to a 46 percent increase in English, a 37 percent increase in math, and a 42 percent increase across the two subjects combined.
Meanwhile, 44 percent of districts reported cutting time from one or more other subjects or activities at the elementary level, including science, social studies, art and music, physical education, lunch and recess. On average, the cuts amounted to about 30 minutes a day.
The report, Choices, Changes, and Challenges: Curriculum and Instruction in the NCLB Era, also finds that overall, the decreases represent an average reduction of 31 percent in the total amount of instructional time devoted to these subjects since 2001-02. “What gets tested gets taught.” said Jack Jennings, CEP’s president and CEO. “Under No Child Left Behind, there is reading and math and then there is everything else. And because so much is riding on the reading and math included on state tests, many schools have cut back time on other important subject areas, which means that some students are not receiving a broad curriculum.” The report notes that the increases and decreases are more prevalent in districts that are home to struggling schools. School districts with at least one school identified for improvement under NCLB reported in greater proportions that they had increased time for English and/or math at the elementary and middle school levels and had cut back on time for other subjects since 2001-02 (78 percent) than did districts without schools identified (57 percent).
What is Tested is What is Taught
In addition to increasing time spent on English and math, many districts appear to be changing their curriculum to provide a greater emphasis on content and skills covered on high-stakes state tests used for No Child Left Behind purposes. In elementary reading, for example, 84 percent of districts reported that they have changed their curriculum “somewhat” or “to a great extent” to put greater emphasis on tested content. Seventynine percent of districts made a similar change in middle school English, while 76 percent did so at the high school level. Similarly, 81 percent of districts reported changing their math curriculum at the elementary and middle school levels to more closely match the content of state tests, while 78 percent of districts reported doing so at the high school level.
 The report is from CEP’s From the Capital to the Classroom series of reports tracking the implementation of the law in its fifth year. Based on five years of research on how the No Child Left Behind Act has affected instruction and curriculum in states, districts and schools, the report includes the following recommendations to ensure that students receive a well-balanced curriculum and adequate instructional time in all core subjects.
• Stagger testing requirements and include tests in other subjects. Students should be tested in English language arts and math in grades 3, 5, 7 and once in high school, and in social studies and science in grades 4, 6, 8 and once in high school.
• Encourage states to give adequate emphasis to art and music and to include measures of knowledge and skills in art and music as one of the multiple measures used for NCLB accountability.
• Require states to have an independent review of their standards and tests at least once every three years to ensure that they are of high quality and rigor.
• Provide federal funds for research to determine the best ways to incorporate and support the teaching of reading and math skills into social studies, science, and other subjects to ensure students will have access to a rich, well-rounded curriculum.
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Based in Washington, D.C. and founded in January 1995, by Jack Jennings, the Center on Education Policy is a national, independent advocate for public education and for more effective public schools. The Center works to help Americans better understand the role of public education in a democracy and the need to improve the academic quality of public schools. The Center does not represent any specia linterests. Instead the Center helps citizens make sense of the conflicting opinions and perceptions about public education and create conditions that will lead to better public schools. The Center on Education Policy is a national, independent advocate for public education and for more effective public schools. Return to Top of Page
Article published Aug 10, 2007
No Child Left Behind leaves a great deal to be desired in class
Murfreesboro, Tennessee Welcome to The Daily News Journal
The annual hand-wringing over academic progress and No Child Left Behind has commenced.
Four Rutherford County and two Murfreesboro City schools fell short of federal standards, forcing administrators to again scramble for a way to get off this blacklist.
While accountability is important, this yearly paranoia and the fallout leaves our schools so worried about test scores they seem to lose sight of their primary purpose: to teach children.
In its infinite wisdom, the federal government determined that high schools should reach 100 percent graduation rates by 2014, a worthy but unrealistic goal, and all schools should be hitting certain standards in reading and math.
If they don't, they're placed in time-out, and if they don't make enough progress within two years, they're given a real whipping. The state could take over, and some students could be allowed to attend other schools, as if either of those would improve education.
President Bush's No Child Left Behind law may have had good intentions when it passed, but we have serious reservations about how it's working. Even some conservative members of Congress believe the federal government should stay out of local schools.
The law's greatest impact, though unintended, puts teachers under such pressure to produce good student test scores that they spend an inordinate amount of time "teaching to the test," instead of teaching students how to think. A recent report found many states' tests are watered down.
That's not the only problem.
The goal of 100 percent graduation rates gives a black eye to schools where some students would drop out no matter how cajoling the teachers or how strong the academic programs.
Special education students are also required to meet standards just as regular students, and if they don't, schools can be considered "target" or "high priority." The range of needs and learning abilities for special education students is so high, though, it's impossible to judge them based on a standardized test.
The same is true with non-English speaking students. Consider how difficult it would be for a foreign child to enter an American school and be asked to take an achievement test in English.
Yet that's how we're judging our schools.
Granted, in some instances, these test results may give administrators some sense of where their students can improve.
But just as each student learns at a different pace, our schools have unique student bodies with varying needs and different degrees of parent involvement. Putting them into a cookie-cutter design based on the whims of the federal government isn't solving any problems. It's creating new problems instead and placing an unfair stigma on some of our schools.
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