Democrat & Chronicle: Essays
Question #1: Mrs. Smith and Mr. Jones both teach fifth grade. In May, only 40 percent of Mrs. Smith’s students passed the state’s standardized reading test, while 97 percent of Mr. Jones’ students passed the same test. Who is the better teacher? A) Mrs. Smith. B) Mr. Jones. C) More information is necessary. If you picked “C,” you understand the inherent complexities of education.
Question #2: Mrs. Smith works in a high-needs district. In September, most of her pupils read at a second-grade level, but through brilliant pedagogical strategies and dogged determination, she brought all of her class to a fourth-grade reading level or higher. Some of her students managed to pass the state reading test; all of them showed tremendous growth. Mr. Jones works in a more affluent district. In September, all of his students read at a fifth-grade level and by May most of them read at the sixth-grade level. Who is the better teacher? 
According to the No Child Left Behind act, Jones is wildly successful as his students have demonstrated adequate yearly progress. Smith is not so fortunate. According to NCLB, she is an abysmal failure; her students have not shown AYP (adequate yearly progress) and her school will lose funding if this continues.
Both teachers are successful teachers, but only one is recognized because she lives in an affluent school district. It is important to have standards, but accomplishments for growth also need to be recognized as successful AYP.
Research has found a direct link between wealth/poverty and achievement test scores. The authors of NCLB just would rather have No Rich Child Left Behind, because they are the only ones that will accomplish the 100% of proficient students in the school. The standard of 100% reading on grade level (What is the cut-off score for grade level? How valid is the grade level score?) ignores the forces outside school that affect students in school.
Grading Schools on Poverty
The Bush Administration and the legislature, after months of lobbying, arguing, wrangling, dealing and agonizing, has given us the A-Plus Plan with its School Accountability Report Upon analysis, this Report turns out to be merely an elaborate and expensive way to grade schools on the poverty or affluence of their students.
The focus on high-stakes testing does the opposite of what is seeks to do. Rather than raising to free-reduced lunch sub-group closer to the average white middle-class students, NCLB labels as failing the schools with high numbers of free-reduced lunch students and then punishes them for having those students. It is a no-win situation for many schools.
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Technorati Tags: NCLB, high-stakes test, poverty, achievement gap
The kids were off for Martin Luther King. Jr.’s birthday, but the teachers had an all-day inservice. I was kind of look forward to it because our speakers were supposed to tell us about how Ruby Paine’s Framework for Understanding Children in Poverty would help our kids. Nearly half the kids in my class are on Free/Reduced lunch, so I was very interested in how I could help them to achieve better.
The people who showed up were 3 administrators from Hutchinson, KS USD 308 school district. The proceeded to tell us about the impressive gains their district had made on No Child Left Behind’s Adequate Yearly Progress. Over half their students live in poverty, but they pulled their students’ achievement above the ever-rising AYP proficiency bar. It’s impressive, and I wondered how they did it. They credited it to 5 things:
- Ruby Paine’s program $$$
- Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures program $$$
- Koality Kids / Quality Keys program $$$
- Data driven curriculum alignment and assessment analysis
- Technology integration
They spent some bucks on the first three training programs.
They spent the rest of the day telling us about what the Ruby Paine program, Koality Kids program, and data were, but very little about how we could use it in our classroom. I was excited to hear that they had successfully implemented Cooperative Learning and Technology integration into their district. That’s what I wanted to hear. Nada.
Instead we got cramped points full of lists and words too small to see. We got a birds-eye, administrator overview. Each presentation, Koality Kids, Ruby Payne, and data, was abstract. Each presentation had 5 minutes of sunshine that gave me an activity or graphic organizer I could use. I could have gone without the other 55 minutes from each. I guess it’s par for the course for full-day inservices. I guess I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.
I still would like to know more about Cooperative Learning structures, address the needs of students in poverty, and technology integration. I guess I will still have to search for it on my own. Do you have some good ideas for resources? I’ll include here ones I find useful in my classroom.
I posted this comment in an eSchool News Talkback discussion forum, Rethinking Accountability
The question was this:
What changes would you make to the law’s accountability system?
I would offer up instead of NCLB, my state’s rigorous Missouri School Improvement Program. 
Instead of looking exclusively at achievement, MSIP uses 3 overall areas.
First, Resource standards look at things like a well rounded curriculum with fine arts and electives, staffing, and class sizes. Second, Process standards look at the instructional design and practices, differentiation, and instructional support. Finally, Performance standards focus on student achievement and dropout rates.
Schools are complex institutions made of individuals. Simplistically focusing only on test scores in reading and math, while important, miss es the point. The test currently drives the curriculum. While inextricably linked, this is topsy-turvy. Curriculum should drive the test. The cart and the horse are closely linked, but NCLB has the cart pulling the horse.
The purpose of schools to teach students how to learn, not to teach them how to take an achievement test. Evaluate a school upon its purpose, learning. Evaluating it on something other than it’s purpose, derails it from it’s mission.
If you evaluate using achievement test scores, then the purpose of the school will become test scores. Rich schools will do well. Poor schools will not.
If you evaluate the teaching methods, support, climate, achievement, and resulting graduations, then these will again become the schools missions. Teaching students to learn is the mission of schools, not test scores.
There is more on my blog What is School 2.0?
The bible of school reform is “Nation at Risk.” It is where opponents of public education point when they claim that public education has failed. However, was not a scientifically, research-based report. Instead it was a cold-war era, politically biased harangue assembled with inflammatory language to promote President Reagan’s anti-education agenda. A news-hungry media swallowed it hook, line, and sinker, swarming around the sensational sound bytes in the report. Like most sound-byte oriented nightly news media, it was shallow and lacking facts and sources. The news frenzy ingrained the idea of failed schools into politics and the public psyche.
Education at Risk: Fallout from a Flawed Report | Edutopia
“A Nation at Risk” (1983)What the report claimed:
- American students are never first and frequently last academically compared to students in other industrialized nations.
- American student achievement declined dramatically after Russia launched Sputnik, and hit bottom in the early 1980s.
- SAT scores fell markedly between 1960 and 1980. Student achievement levels in science were declining steadily.
- Business and the military were spending millions on remedial education for new hires and recruits.
The Sandia report was commissioned to provide research data to support the hollow Nation at Risk. The report refuted rather than supported the Nation at Risk report.
The Sandia Report (1990) What was actually happening:
- Between 1975 and 1988, average SAT scores went up or held steady for every student subgroup.
- Between 1977 and 1988, math proficiency among seventeen-year-olds improved slightly for whites, notably for minorities.
- Between 1971 and 1988, reading skills among all student subgroups held steady or improved.
- Between 1977 and 1988, in science, the number of seventeen-year-olds at or above basic competency levels stayed the same or improved slightly.
- Between 1970 and 1988, the number of twenty-two-year-old Americans with bachelor degrees increased every year; the United States led all developed nations in 1988.
The government never released the Sandia report. It went into peer review and there died a quiet death. Hardly anyone else knew it even existed until, in 1993, the Journal of Educational Research, read by only a small group of specialists, printed the report.
Accidental Architects: The Regan Cabinet.
Top Row: (7th person from left to right). Edwin Meese III, counselor to the president. He urged Reagan to reject the “Nation at Risk” report. Middle Row: (1st person from left to right)Terrell H. Bell, secretary of education. He hoped to link the country’s economic woes to the state of our schools. Bottom Row: (2nd person from left to right) George H. W. Bush, vice president. In 1989, as president, Bush convened a national education summit — and no educators were invited. (3rd person from left to right) Ronald Reagan, president. He inaccurately linked the report to school prayer, vouchers, and the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education. (5th person from left to right) Caspar Weinberger, secretary of defense. During his tenure, the Department of Defense’s budget soared to $300 billion. Meanwhile, Republicans were trying to abolish the Department of Education. Credit: Corbis
The fallout from the “Nation at Risk” report resulted in the No Child Left Behind. “No Child Left Behind” will accomplish President Reagan’s goal of many years ago: The label all public schools as having failed. This label will culminate in 2013, when every student in public education will be expected to pass the test. Are there any students in a school that won’t pass? Every school fails that has a student that fails the test. Winners will be vouchers and private schools. Losers will be public schools and all those who stay in them. All hail “Nation at Risk,” it son - “No Child Left Behind,” and it’s future generation - vouchers.
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