What would you change about NCLB

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?

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Not teaching to the test is harming your children?

David Warlick in his 2¢ Worth blog quoted a recent speaker.

But the speaker said something that I, personally, do not agree with.

If your second grade teacher teaches a fantastic unit on dinosaurs, but dinosaurs are not on the test, then that teacher is doing harm to your children. Anything that’s taught that’s not on the test, is doing harm to your children.

Are the standards of instruction intended to be the extent of the instruction? The answer to that question may well be, “Yes.” But should the state define the limit of instruction? I don’t think so.

I agree with David. The state should deem the minimum of the curriculum, not the maximum. Testing in is an integral part of evaluation of the curriculum and the instructional process. However, the test should not BE the curriculum. The test comes at the end of the lesson, not before the lesson.

I taught dinosaurs in my 3rd grade class a few years ago even though it is not anywhere in my curriculum. I tied it into science with plant and animal relationships: plant eating brachiosaurus, meat eating Allosaurus, and the skeletal structure that tells us what they ate. We talked about climate change: the ice age, possible causes of extinction, and current global warming trends. We even touched on evolution and adaptation. I tied it into Communication Arts when we researched dinosaurs, wrote reports, and drew pictures of them. We looked at time-lines in Social Studies to see just how far back 400,000,000 years is compared to human history. In Math we measured and compared sizes of various dinosaurs.

Don’t tell me Dinosaurs is not part of my curriculum. It is merely the fun theme I used to trick my students into having so much fun learning about dinosaurs that they hardly realized how much of the curriculum that they were learning.

I have another problem with what the speaker said

2¢ Worth

Anything that’s taught that’s not on the test, is doing harm to your children

I contend that the opposite is true. The test is doing harm to our children. Since it only tests the minimum, the curriculum on goes into depth at a minimum. The test is leading the curriculum, instead of the opposite. The curriculum should be leading the test. This “bass-ackwards” approach to curriculum development has resulted in our curriculum being a mile wide the an inch deep. This is nothing new. My education professors were complaining about this problem years ago before I was even a teacher.

The curriculum should be taught deeply, with the student at the center of the learning instead of the test. There should only be a few topics (maybe one per quarter) taught in a subject with several cross-curricular objectives under that topic. We need to teach much deeper, or should I say higher (on Blooms Taxonomy), than the broad shallow treatment we’re giving it because of so much testing. I’ll save NCLB testing for another day.

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