'No Child' target is called out of reach

From MSNBC:

"There is a zero percent chance that we will ever reach a 100 percent target," said Robert L. Linn, co-director of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing at UCLA. "But because the title of the law is so rhetorically brilliant, politicians are afraid to change this completely unrealistic standard. They don't want to be accused of leaving some children behind."
...
...critics face an uphill challenge because of the rhetorical power of the argument for a universal proficiency target and a deadline. Anything less, advocates say, will hurt children, especially society's most vulnerable: poor and minority students.

...

President Bush is pushing this year for reauthorization of one of his top domestic programs. In a joint House-Senate hearing yesterday, senior Democrats and Republicans said they would work toward renewal of the law. But in interviews in the days before the hearing, some key lawmakers said that universal proficiency is all but impossible to meet.

"The idea of 100 percent is, in any legislation, not achievable," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate education committee. "There isn't a member of Congress or a parent or a student that doesn't understand that."

Kennedy added that the law's universal proficiency standard served to inspire students and teachers. But "it's too early in the process to predict whether we'll consider changes" to the 2014 deadline, he said.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), a former U.S. education secretary and supporter of the law, said Americans don't want politicians to lower standards.

"Are we going to rewrite the Declaration of Independence and say only 85 percent of men are created equal?" Alexander asked. "Most of our politics in America is about the disappointment of not meeting the high goals we set for ourselves."

...

...testing experts say there are vast academic differences among children of the same racial or socioeconomic background. Countries with far less racial diversity than the United States still find wide variations in student performance. Even in relatively homogenous Singapore, for example, a world leader in science and math tests, a quarter of the students tested are not proficient in math, and 49 percent fall short in science.

"Most people are afraid that once you acknowledge this variation, then you have to tolerate major inequities between black and white students," said Daniel Koretz, a Harvard University education professor. "That's not necessarily true, but that's why the political world does not really address the issue."

Although no major school system is known to have reached 100 percent proficiency, Education Department officials pointed to individual schools across the country that have reached the standard as evidence that it is possible. In Virginia, schools have achieved universal proficiency on reading and math tests 45 times since 2002, officials said.

The only school they cited in the Washington region as having met that mark was the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, a regional school with selective admissions. Principal Evan M. Glazer said his school, which has an elite reputation, was hardly a representative example. On whether the nation can replicate that success, Glazer said: "I don't think it's very realistic."

Fairfax County School Superintendent Jack D. Dale said it was "absurd" to expect total proficiency, especially when federal officials require immigrant children who have been in U.S. schools for little more than a year to meet the standard. His 164,000-student system, the largest in the Washington region, is sparring with the Education Department over the immigrant testing rule.

Education at Risk

This is a long and important article from Edutopia. Please read the whole thing but here are my excerpts...

Nearly a quarter century ago, "A Nation at Risk" hit our schools like a brick dropped from a penthouse window. One problem: The landmark document that still shapes our national debate on education was misquoted, misinterpreted, and often dead wrong...
...

In short, it's never really a choice between supporting or rejecting school reform. It is, or should be, a choice between this reform and that reform. Yet today, a movement that stretches back several decades has narrowed us down to a single set of take- 'em-or-leave-'em initiatives. How did this happen?

Well, it didn't "just happen." What we now call school reform isn't the product of a gradual consensus emerging among educators about how kids learn; it's a political movement that grew out of one seed planted in 1983. I became aware of this fact some years ago, when I started writing about education issues and found that every reform initiative I read about -- standards, testing, whatever -- referred me back to a seminal text entitled "A Nation at Risk."

Naturally, I assumed this bible of school reform was a scientific research study full of charts and data that proved something. Yet when I finally looked it up, I found a thirtypage political document issued by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, a group convened by Ronald Reagan's secretary of education, Terrell Bell.

...

In this anxious context, Bell put together an eighteenmember commission to report on the quality of education in America. Through the U.S. Department of Education's

National Commission on Excellence in Education, he hoped to link the country's economic woes to the state of our schools. Bell got all he wanted and more.

When the report was released in April 1983, it claimed that American students were plummeting academically, that schools suffered from uneven standards, and that teachers were not prepared. The report noted that our economy and national security would crumble if something weren't done. But the sobering report received immediate publicity for an almost comically accidental reason. As commission member Gerald Holton recalls, Reagan thanked the commissioners at a White House ceremony for endorsing school prayer, vouchers, and the elimination of the Department of Education. In fact, the newly printed blue-cover report never mentioned these pet passions of the president. "The one important reader of the report had apparently not read it after all," Holton said. Reagan had pulled a fast one, for political gain.

Reporters fell on the report like a pack of hungry dogs. The next day, "A Nation at Risk" made the front pages.
...

In truth, "A Nation at Risk" could have been read as almost any sort of document. Basically, it just called for "More!" -- more science, more math, more art, more humanities, more social studies, more school days, more hours, more homework, more basics, more higher-order thinking, more lower-order thinking, more creativity, more everything.

The document had, however, been commissioned by the Reagan White House, so conservative Republicans controlled its interpretation and uses. What they zeroed in on was the notion of failing schools as a national-security crisis. Republican ideas for school reform became a charge against a shadowy enemy, a kind of war on mediocrity.

...

From the start, however, some doubts must have risen about the crisis rhetoric, because in 1990, Admiral James Watkins, the secretary of energy (yes, energy), commissioned the Sandia Laboratories in New Mexico to document the decline with some actual data.

Systems scientists there produced a study consisting almost entirely of charts, tables, and graphs, plus brief analyses of what the numbers signified, which amounted to a major "Oops!" As their puzzled preface put it, "To our surprise, on nearly every measure, we found steady or slightly improving trends."

One section, for example, analyzed SAT scores between the late 1970s and 1990, a period when those scores slipped markedly. ("A Nation at Risk" spotlighted the decline of scores from 1963 to 1980 as dead-bang evidence of failing schools.) The Sandia report, however, broke the scores down by various subgroups, and something astonishing emerged. Nearly every subgroup -- ethnic minorities, rich kids, poor kids, middle class kids, top students, average students, low-ranked students -- held steady or improved during those years. Yet overall scores dropped. How could that be?

Simple -- statisticians call it Simpson's paradox: The average can change in one direction while all the subgroups change in the opposite direction if proportions among the subgroups are changing. Early in the period studied, only top students took the test. But during those twenty years, the pool of test takers expanded to include many lower-ranked students. Because the proportion of top students to all students was shrinking, the scores inevitably dropped. That decline signified not failure but rather progress toward what had been a national goal: extending educational opportunities to a broader range of the population.

...

Which approach will actually improve education? Here, I think, language can lead us astray. In everyday life, we use reform and improve as synonyms (think: "reformed sinner"), so when we hear "school reform," we think "school improvement." Actually, reform means nothing more than "alter the form of." Whether a particular alteration is an improvement depends on what is altered and who's doing the judging. Different people will have different opinions. Every proposed change, therefore, calls for discussion.

The necessary discussion cannot be held unless the real alternatives are on the table. Today, essentially three currents of education reform compete with each other. One sees inspiration and motivation as the keys to better education. Reform in this direction starts by asking, "What will draw the best minds of our generation into teaching? What will spark great teachers to go beyond the minimum? What will motivate kids to learn and keep coming back to school?

In this direction lie proposals for building schools around learners, gearing instruction to individual goals and learning styles, pointing education toward developing an ever-broader range of human capacities, and phasing in assessment tools that get at ever-subtler nuances of achievement. Overall, this approach promotes creative diversity as a social good.

A second current, the dominant one, sees discipline and structure as the keys to school improvement. Reform in this direction starts by asking, "What does the country need, what must all kids know to serve those needs, and how can we enforce the necessary learning?" In this direction, the curriculum comes first, schools are built around the curriculum, and students are required to fit themselves into a given structure, controlled from above. As a social good, it promotes national unity and strength. This is the road we're on now with NCLB.

A third possible direction goes back to diversity and individualism -- through privatization, including such mechanisms as tuition tax credits, vouchers (enabling students to opt out of the public school system), and home schooling. Proponents include well-funded private groups such as the Cato Institute that frankly promote a freeenterprise model for schooling: Anyone who wants education should pay for it and should have the right to buy whatever educational product he or she desires.

What's Next?

Don't be shocked if NCLB ends up channeling American education into that third current, even though it seems like part of the mainstream get-tough approach. Educational researcher Gerald Bracey, author of Reading Educational Research: How to Avoid Getting Statistically Snookered, writes in Stanford magazine that "NCLB aims to shrink the public sector, transfer large sums of public money to the private sector, weaken or destroy two Democratic power bases -- the teachers' unions -- and provide vouchers to let students attend private schools at public expense."

Why? Because NCLB is set up to label most American public schools as failures in the next six or seven years. Once a school flunks, this legislation sets parents free to send their children to a school deemed successful. But herds of students moving from failed schools to (fewer) successful ones are likely to sink the latter. And then what? Then, says NCLB, the state takes over.

And there's the rub. Can "the state" -- that is, bureaucrats -- run schools better than professional educators? What if they fail, too? What's plan C?

NCLB does not specify plan C. Apparently, that decision will be made when the time comes. But with some $500 billion per year -- the sum total of all our K-12 education spending in this country -- at stake, and with politicians' hands on all the levers, you can be pretty certain the decision will not be made by those whose field of expertise is learning. It will be made by those whose field of expertise is power.

There's Always Money For War

Jared Bernstein makes nothing but sense...

Okay, this is going to sound really naïve. It’s the kind of question you’d expect from an earnest, if not slightly annoying, 12-year-old, not from a hard-boiled wonk like yours truly. But why is it that our representatives can easily raise endless amounts of money for war, but can’t adequately fund human needs?

Exhibit #1: The Washington Post recently ran an important article documenting the loss of child-care subsidies to low-income, working parents. One of the lessons from welfare reform is that such work supports are a critical component of a pro-work, anti-poverty agenda. But because the program is terribly underfunded—fewer than a fifth of eligible people receive help—there’s a huge waiting list, and families are left to give up on work or patch together less-than-desirable child-care situations.

Exhibit #2 : If the president gets his way on budget requests over the next few years, and he always has, the Congressional Budget Office tells us that spending on the Iraq war will soon top $500 billion—$746 billion if you throw in Afghanistan. According to OMBWatch, the Congress will soon begin evaluating the largest supplemental funding bill ever requested by an administration: just shy of $100 billion, mostly for the war on terror and its sundry components.

Exhibit #3 : We currently spend about $5 billion a year at the federal level on the block grant that funds child care. Last year, we added a $1 billion increase over five years. A bill to dedicate $6 billion more died in the Senate. Because these values are not adjusted for either inflation or population growth, the demand for child-care slots is outpacing capacity. According to the Bush administration’s own budget, if we fail to devote more resources to child care, by 2010, the families of 300,000 fewer children will get the help they need.

Exhibit #4 : I recently testified before the Senate Finance Committee on the question of whether there needed to be $8 billion worth of tax cuts to businesses to offset the impact of the federal minimum wage increase. I argued that the cuts were unnecessary, but in this context, consider this point: Because tax cuts must now be paid for, the committee was able to come up with $8 billion of offsets to pay for these cuts.

In other words, when they want to, Congress can allocate or raise money. The problem, as put by my colleague Lawrence Mishel, is “... the direct consequence of maintaining other priorities. Some [policy makers] are wedded to maintaining the recent tax cuts. Many more believe we have to spend whatever it takes for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ... [o]thers believe that moving toward a balanced budget is essential. Whatever one thinks of these positions it is clear that the result is that human capital investments get the leftover fiscal scraps.”

For those of us unhappy with this state of affairs, who believe that these are the wrong priorities, the big—giant, really—question is what has to change?

The answer, I think, comes from a meeting of top-down and bottom-up. Today’s priorities are the result of politicians’ perceptions that their constituents, at least the ones they care about, want government to wage war and cut taxes, not to provide child and health care. Thus, the first step in turning this around is to tap and nurture demand among the electorate for the best solutions to the problems we face. I’ve stressed child care for low-income workers because it’s so important to their ability to escape poverty, but think of national health care in this light, along with retirement security and the inequalities associated with globalization.

Progressive policy advocates need to shape and promote an agenda that reaches people on these issues and is at the scale of the challenges they face. If such an agenda is articulated by a 2008 candidate, it may well start to resonate and reverberate in precisely the way that’s needed to reshape the priorities of those who hold the purse strings. Then I can go back to being a hard-boiled wonk instead of a naïve ingénue who wants to trade guns for butter.

Tell Me This Isn't How NCLB Plays Out

God, I hope Tom Hoffman is not right on this ...

• now - 2008: no change.
• 2008: Democrats take the presidency and increase their majorities in the House and Senate.
• 2009: Democrats pass NCLB reform which increases funding but also vastly increases complexity and cost. Republicans vote against it for "watering down" parts of the law that were completely impossible and/or nonsensical from the beginning.
• 2010: Republicans hang the increasingly unpopular NCLB around the Democrats neck and run against it and teachers unions and in favor of Federalism and re-establishing local control (and charter schools & vouchers).

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND HAS FLUNKED

From the Chicago Defender comes this reasoned commentary...

The Commission on No Child Left Behind does not tell America what it really needs to know: Is the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) working? If it isn't working, will it succeed by the 2014 deadline? The answers to both of these questions, unfortunately, are no...

...Many people who care about improving American education want to save NCLB. It is rare for an administration to do more than merely talk about improving education, and never before has the country focused on the real problem of the "soft bigotry of low expectations." Many people probably believe that it would be a shame to loose this unique opportunity for national educational reform. But what is the point of saving legislation that is not working and that is fundamentally flawed?

The problem with NCLB is that out of the smorgasbord of educational reforms, the Bush Administration selected the ones which suit its conservative ideology best, not the ones that educational researchers have shown to be most likely to succeed and produce the biggest achievement gains.

NCLB's heart is an accountability-based reform, but this type of reform has a weak track record. A review of accountability reforms published in the American Journal of Education last year concluded that NCLB's chances were "neutral at best." Why is such a monumental educational initiative centered on one of the least promising policies?

An effective national educational reform program should begin by expanding pre-kindergarten programs like the successful one now operating in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This program has produced significant gains for Hispanic and black children. There is a large body of research showing the benefits of quality early childhood education.

The commissioners agree and state that "half of the white-African American achievement gap in 12th grade can be explained by the gaps in achievement in 1st grade." NCLB, however, does little in the area of early childhood education. Because the commissioners are trapped within the NCLB framework, they too marginalize the issue of early childhood education and relegate their discussion of it to one-third of the last chapter of their report.

Given that perhaps 50 percent of racial achievement gaps are due to differences in early childhood education, how can an educational reform dedicated to eliminating racial achievement gaps not make early childhood education one of its major components? A real assessment of NCLB would point out that the Act has ignored highly effective reforms like early childhood education, reducing class sizes, small schools and school integration in favor of something that is "neutral at best."

While there are some good recommendations in Beyond NCLB, the authors are mainly trapped by the flawed assumptions and biases of the Act. If we really want to leave no child behind, we have to get beyond NCLB and the Commission's report also.

Special to the Defender from BlackNews.com

The Missing Variable: What Bill Gates Didn't Tell The Senate

Gary Stanger knows that Bill Gate's main motivation is to create a large educated workforce that will compete for jobs, and therefore be payed less...

No one should ever question Bill Gates’ generosity or commitment to improving American schools. His analysis however, should be subject to debate...He used his invitation to testify as an opportunity to delineate the failings of American high schools. His testimony also implied a correlation between test scores and Microsoft’s inability to fill 3,000 positions for high-skill workers.

Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to Mr. Gates or the Senators questioning him that Microsoft has become an undesirable place to work.

Don’t believe me? Business Week is but one publication chronicling the difficulties Microsoft has attracting and retaining talent. It’s articles, Troubling Exits at Microsoft & Revenge of the Nerds - Again offer a primer on how not to sustain organizational innovation.

"There was a lot of buzz around the Google [employment recruiting] table and not a lot around the Microsoft table," says Bob Richard, associate director of employer relations at MIT. (source)

One web site claims that Microsoft is doing little to attract recent graduates.

What is really disturbing about the Microsoft connection with the H-1B issue is that they are not even making a show of trying to hire US high-tech workers. Microsoft did not attempt to recruit at any of the 22 California State University campuses, where many of the high-tech US computer workers graduate. Microsoft is also not participating at this year's Engineering Job Fair at CSUS. (source)

Gates also fails to acknowledge a trend regarding the career aspirations of young people. The USA Today article, Gen Y Makes a Mark and Their Imprint is Entrepreneurship, describes how young Americans are less attracted to jobs in large corporations.

"People are realizing they don't have to go to work in suits and ties and don't have to talk about budgets every day," says Ben Kaufman, 20, founder of a company that makes iPod accessories. "They can have a job they like. They can create a job for themselves." (source)

Other analyses of employment conditions at Microsoft may be found here & here. Like most large American companies, Microsoft has also outsourced thousands of jobs to other countries.

Microsoft might be better served by creating more attractive working conditions and responding to the market than by beating up on high schools.

Article challenges 'No Child' law

This from New Hampshire. I will never understand why there has not been more of this throughout the country these last five years.

One of the proposed warrant articles on the Shaker Regional School District agenda has drawn attention from Washington.

The article, a non-binding resolution, recognizes the goals of the No Child Left Behind mandates to raise academic achievement, but says the law itself has some serious flaws and that include unfunded mandates and "costly testing of students with misleading results."

"Now therefore, be it resolved that the Shaker Regional School District is committed to either correcting and responsibly funding or repealing the (No Child Left Behind) act," the article reads....

NOT WORTHY OF A PASSING GRADE: The No Child Left Behind Act

From EURweb comes this assessment of NCLB. The author sees early childhood education as the key to success. That's OK but I did not think we were looking for expensive solutions, or ones that might have a chance of actually working...

...NCLB's heart is an accountability-based reform, but this type of reform has a weak track record. A review of accountability reforms published in the American Journal of Education last year concluded that NCLB's chances were "neutral at best." Why is such a monumental educational initiative centered on one of the least promising policies?

An effective national educational reform program should begin by expanding pre-kindergarten programs like the successful one now operating in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This program has produced significant gains for Hispanic and black children. There is a large body of research showing the benefits of quality early childhood education.

The commissioners agree and state that "half of the white-African American achievement gap in 12th grade can be explained by the gaps in achievement in 1st grade." NCLB, however, does little in the area of early childhood education. Because the commissioners are trapped within the NCLB framework, they too marginalize the issue of early childhood education and relegate their discussion of it to one-third of the last chapter of their report.

Given that perhaps 50 percent of racial achievement gaps are due to differences in early childhood education, how can an educational reform dedicated to eliminating racial achievement gaps not make early childhood education one of its major components? A real assessment of NCLB would point out that the Act has ignored highly effective reforms like early childhood education, reducing class sizes, small schools and school integration in favor of something that is "neutral at best."

While there are some good recommendations in Beyond NCLB, the authors are mainly trapped by the flawed assumptions and biases of the Act. If we really want to leave no child behind, we have to get beyond NCLB and the Commission's report also.

Don't Take This to the Bank, But...

This from NCLBlog

March 8, 2007 08:45 AM

This bit of speculation may not be worth the paper it's written on, but...there's some talk that we can rule out 2008 as the year when NCLB will be reauthorized. The idea is that election-year politics will prevent Congress from passing the bill during 2008, which leaves 2007 and 2009 still in the running...

...

The Senate Education Committee is moving faster than the House in the NCLB reauthorization process, meaning that they held their second hearing today, while the House has not begun their hearings. For bettors on the NCLB reauthorization date, I think this slows things down considerably.

The result: 2009 emerges as the favorite. But I'd sooner bet on the Washington Nationals
(ranked 30th out of 30 teams in this analysis) winning the World Series than lay down money on the NCLB timeline.

Why do we prolong what this horrible bill is doing to children? Because it's not about kids, it's about politics. (See Below)

Republican Congressman to Introduce No Child Left Behind Alternative

From the Cybercast News Service. There are moments, and issues, where I do, actually agree with right wing republicans and this is one..

By Monisha Bansal
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
March 08, 2007

(CNSNews.com) - With the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) scheduled for reauthorization this year, some in Washington are judging the effects of the federal education policy.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), now a member of the House minority, plans to create his own education proposal, because he is unhappy about the bureaucratic elements that have arisen over the last several years.

"You have a bunch of unintended consequences out of No Child Left Behind that destroy our public education system," Hoekstra said at a discussion at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.

"With No Child Left Behind we shifted down the road toward federal government education," he said. "We are now on the road to a national curriculum, national accountability, national testing ... and then we will also have a process of federally mandated corrections standards for those who don't meet the standards."

Hoekstra added, "Every school in the country will begin to look exactly the same. Say goodbye to local control, and say hello to federal government schools."

Under his proposal to be introduced next week, the Academic Partnerships Lead Us to Success Act of 2007, states would no longer be required to follow regulations tied to federal funding, and it would allow them to "assume full responsibility for the educational needs of its students."

But Andrew Rotherham, co-director of the education think tank Education Sector and a member of the Virginia State Board of Education, said, "The reason we're in the jam we're in is in no small part because of the states."

Rotherham said the federal government has had to intervene to improve equity in America's school systems as well as the quality of education.

"It just doesn't work," Susan Neuman, former assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education at the Department of Education, said of the NCLB. "We've stopped improvement with greater accountability."

Under the NCLB, students take 14 standardized tests between grades three and 11 on math and reading. Hoekstra noted that this number is likely to grow with the reauthorization to 84 or more standardized tests as more subjects are added.

Bush has mandated that children be proficient in math and reading by 2014. "This notion that by 2014 all children will be proficient is a fantasy, and it's rhetoric and it's unfortunate, and it's turning people against and afraid of our schools," Neuman said.

Neal McCluskey, a political analyst with the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, told Cybercast News Service that Hoekstra's proposal "probably won't be enacted given the political circumstances."

Hoekstra was cast into the House minority when Democrats swept control of the chamber in November.

"I think a lot of this depends on how badly President Bush wants to have a reauthorization of his education law as part of his legacy," McCluskey said. "If he wants it badly enough, I think he will be willing to compromise [with congressional Democrats].

"I think we will definitely see it happen before he leaves office," he said.

"Virtually all behavior in Washington over the last several years has been covered by political considerations," said former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas). "Politics is a curious form of juvenile delinquency."

Armey said the NCLB is not about effective policy, but about politics.

"No Child Left Behind has always been a major political initiative of the Bush administration, and it has scarcely been anything other than that," he said. "There will be very little about this education bill that will be intellectual, and a whole heck of a lot that will be political and emotive."

"Federal education programs live or die by whether or not they work politically, not academically," said McCluskey.

But Andrew Coulson, director of the Cato Institute Center for Educational Freedom, defended the intent of the NCLB, even though he is a strong critic of the program.

"The NCLB's goals of raising academic achievement and diminishing the gaps between socio-economic groups are admirable and universally popular," Coulson said.

"But the regulatory means by which the law tries to achieve those goals is ineffective, harmful, contrary to policies that actually do work, and unconstitutional," he said, noting that the U.S. Constitution does not address education.

Coulson said students would be better served by allowing school choice or vouchers.

"A vast body of empirical research points to competitive education markets as significantly better than bureaucratically-run school systems in achieving all of the NCLB's goals," he said.

"Parents will become meaningful consumers," McCluskey added, as they will choose the schools that serve their children best.

But Neuman disagreed. "Some of you believe choice alone will make a difference. It will not," she said. "We know that from the existing provisions in No Child Left Behind."

I applaud the reporter. This is a piece that offers different views of NCLB. There's plenty her to agree and disagree with. And I never thought that I would agree with what Dick Armey has to say, "NCLB is not about effective policy, but about politics."

NCLB needs to be replaced

A great letter from the Petuluma (CA) Argus-Courier

How long will it finally take until we realize that pouring more money into enforcement of this law, and that tweaking its most egregious problems, will get our public education system nowhere? NCLB needs to be replaced with a genuine national commitment to the education of our children, a commitment that’s designed to provide a public school environment for our children that promotes creativity and critical thinking. I can’t believe that any administrator or legislator actually buys the notion that turning our children into minimally- to high-scoring standardized test-takers will keep America safe from its enemies and our citizens competitive in the global economy, and will maintain our fragile position as the leader of the free world.

Some administrators will continue to defend this law, its testing mandates, and its punitive stance. Some will continue to blame its problems on lack of funding. Until, that is, enough of us with children in this system let it be known that we don’t want our education resources wasted in this way, and that we want real change in both the way we educate our public school students, and in how we measure their improvement.

Here! Here!

Critics Say No Child Left Behind Report Misses Real Problems

This from Livia Gershon of The New Standard

An ‘elite’ commission that has reviewed President Bush’s keystone education policy avoided difficult issues and has recommended an expansion of standardized testing.

Mar. 6 – This year, Jevon Cochran’s English class has been "postponed." Instead of the usual mix of reading, writing, grammar and vocabulary lessons and discussion, Cochran, a junior at Lewis Cass Technical High School in Detroit, said he and his classmates are now drilling for the ACT exam. They must take the national scholastic test as part of Michigan’s effort to evaluate students and schools under federal standards passed in 2001. That, he said, has meant a change in the classroom atmosphere.

In past years, Cochran said, "while we would be reading these novels and stories and whatnot, the teachers would try to get us to become better critical thinkers by getting us to write essays and getting us to talk about what we read in class and how it pertains to things in life that we go through today. Now we’re learning just a bunch of crap that’s going to be on the ACT."...

...Later this year, Congress will consider reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). When it does, the chairs of the House and Senate education committees have said that their evaluation of the program will be guided by a report released last month by the Commission on No Child Left Behind, an independent group that evaluated the law’s effects over the past year.

But critics say that in creating its report, "Beyond NCLB: Fulfilling the Promise to Our Nation’s Children," the Commission ignored the perspectives of students like Cochran as well as parents and educators who see problems with the law...

...The Commission, chaired by former US Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson and former Georgia Governor Roy Barnes, essentially concluded that No Child Left Behind is moving schools in the right direction, but needs to be applied more forcefully. The report recommends creating a more-uniform national standard for the tests required by law, adding a new 12th-grade test, and evaluating individual teachers and principals in part based on their students’ performance on the tests.

"If anything, their recommendations would intensify the role of testing," said Robert Schaeffer, the public-education director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), a nonprofit group that promotes changes in the use of standardized testing. "It’s more of the same bad thing."

The Commission, which is housed at the Aspen Institute, was launched with financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and six other private foundations. Its thirteen members are mostly academics and education officials, though about half of them worked as classroom teachers at some point in their careers. In the course of its study of the law, the Commission held a series of hearings across the country, where they heard almost exclusively from high-level education, government, union and business leaders.

Schaeffer argues that the Commission’s conclusions are not surprising, given the way the body was formed.

"It was a very elitist operation in which they spent very little time talking to actual practitioners, the people on the ground dealing with the effects of No Child Left Behind every day," he said...

...n particular, the report does not question the value of standardized tests, probably the most-widely criticized of NCLB’s features. The Commission’s summary of its hearing on the use of standardized tests begins with the statement, "There is broad agreement that testing plays a critical role in education reform by giving educators, administrators and the public a means to understand how schools and students are performing."

But critics like Cochran say emphasizing standardized tests encourages teachers to focus on skills that are ultimately not very useful to students.

"The tests are supposed to measure how good you would do in college, and I don’t see how," said Cochran, who is a member of By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), a civil rights coalition that works to defend affirmative action and immigrant rights. "For instance... [in a lesson] on the English section of the test, there was this whole section on where you have to place semicolons in sentences. I don’t see how learning about where you place semicolons is going to help you better prepare yourself for college."

Cochran said he would like to see his classes focus more on developing critical thinking skills and helping individual students figure out what learning techniques work best for them.

Another BAMN member, Christopher Sutton, a senior at Murray Wright High School in Detroit, said he notices teachers becoming dispirited and showing less creativity in their teaching when they are preparing students for a standardized test: "It’s like, ‘Okay, you all know what this is, you already know what we’re preparing for, it’s boring, I know, I’m sorry, but I have to go over this information because it’s mandated by the district.’"

Another flaw some critics see in the report is that its discussion of funding is almost completely limited to making recommendations on how to spend money that is already allocated for education.

Caprice Taylor-Mendez, the director of the Boston Parents Organizing Network (BPON), an advocacy group for parents of Boston public-school students, said that even if test-based evaluations could determine which schools are having trouble, what is really needed is more funding to address the problems. "What does assessment do but flag problem areas?" she said. "Then where is the support?"...

...The report does recommend a minor increase in federal education funding, but it is for education research and state data systems, not individual schools’ budgets.

It's good to see some reporting that tells it like it is.

The Kids Are OK, But Journalists and U.S. Department of Education Bureaucrats...

...

It is quite possible that reading scores are down because the kids are taking more math and science courses. Sure there are other more familiar villains to charge: television, video games, the strange spelling and syntax of text messaging, even multitasking. But the number of courses the average high school student takes in mathematics, science, and computer science enroute to a diploma have all increased since 1990 (English classes have not). The time for these courses has to come from somewhere. Reading about quarks or taking derivatives jeopardize Jane Austen.

Mostly, though, I think the kids just don't give a damn about NAEP and I bet they give less of a damn now than they did 15 years ago. Nor should they care. I once said to then-NAEP Executive Director, Archie Lapointe, that NAEP systematically underestimates achievement because kids don't take it seriously. Yes, he laughed, the major challenge for NAEP was keeping the kids awake during the test.

Over the last 15 years, much of schooling has been reduced to testing. SATs, ACT's, APs, high school exit examinations, formative assessments (in reality, just little tests). Plus test-obsessed NCLB. These tests all have consequences (although some, like the SAT, have many fewer than commonly believed). And now, in the second semester of the senior year comes NAEP (did the Senior Slump exist in 1992? I don't recall having heard that phrase back then).

Dude, you seriously want me to take this test seriously? It won't tell me or my parents anything. It won't tell the teachers or administrators or district anything (NAEP does not report below the state level). It means doodley squat, nothing, nada, nil for my future and you want me to give it my all? It wouldn't surprise me if teachers and administrators, saturated by tests and test-related anxieties communicate through body language that kids can blow off NAEP with no consequences. In fact, NAEP is having trouble these days getting schools to agree to test.

Motivation bears tremendously on test outcomes. When I directed Virginia's testing programs, my staff developed a computer program to detect what the state superintendent called "inappropriate administrative procedures"--cheating to the rest of us. One year a heretofore middling rural district popped way up. We visited the local superintendent to determine how he'd done it.

He had done it by transferring testing from the academic realm to the sporting world. You should bust your gut, not to show how smart you are or how well your teachers taught you but so that we can beat the adjacent archrival county like we try to in football, basketball and baseball.

If you walked around the school and asked kids "What are you going to do on the SRA's?" The answer was, "Beat Orange County!" The week of testing, teachers dressed as cheerleaders and the schools held pep rallies in the auditorium. Students in grades not tested cheered on those who were under the gun. It worked.

Find me something that makes seniors take NAEP seriously and then maybe I'll take 12th grade NAEP results seriously.

Frameshop: Bush to Tout "No Child Left Behind" in New Orleans

I try not to link to other blogs. I really am trying to dig up news or commentary that you might have missed. This from a blog that is new to me, Jeffery Feldman's Frameshop.

In a cynical photo-op in New Orleans, today, President Bush will use the backdrop of a local charter school to promote his "No Child Left Behind" policy.

If anything, the disaster of hurricane Katrina represents the willingness of the Bush administration not only to leave children behind -- literally, leave them behind in rising flood waters -- but to then blame those children's predicament on their lack of education.

The announcement for a local protest planned today frames the situation best. Even before Bush failed in the face of Katrina, his policies were already ripping the roof of the public school system.

From Humid City:

JOIN THE KATRINA SURVIVORS’ REBUKE OF PRESIDENT BUSH
2:00 PM THURSDAY MARCH 1
SAMUEL GREEN SCHOOL
2319 VALENCE ST. (Near Freret and Napoleon)
NEW ORLEANS

New Orleans Needs Federal Aid, Not Presidential Photo-Ops.

Mr. President: Katrina Survivors Do Not Welcome You, We Rebuke You!

We live in a devastated city and you are a big part of the reason why it sill sits in ruins. Your administration has abandoned our children by savaging their public schools. Your administration has tortured our working class people by refusing to reopen the city’s public housing developments. And your administration is fully complicit in placing our uninsured in harms way by ruthlessly pursuing the privatization of local public healthcare in the aftermath of Katrina. And, finally your administration is guilty of sending our sons and daughters to war for oil and empire just when we need them most to help us rebuild our community.

Mr. President, we, Katrina Survivors all, do not welcome you to our city, we rebuke you!

Sponsored by Survivors Village, United Front For Affordable Housing.

(504) 587-0080

Keep in mind that one of the major frames that Bush and the authoritarian right cling to about Katrina is that the disaster was a "failure of citizenship."

As Newt Gingrich put it his 2006 speech at Johns Hopkins:

The last great domestic challenge I think is the fact that we have large structured government institutions that simply don't work. You saw some of this with what happened in New Orleans and Katrina. The fact is, in Katrina, government failed. The federal government failed. The state of Louisiana failed. The city of New Orleans failed. And for 22,000 citizens in the lower 9th ward, citizenship failed. They literally did not have the education, the training, the habits of responsibility, or the capacity to get out of the way of a hurricane. And so you have got to look at that experience and say how much do you have to change each of those four layers, so that if it happened again you didn’t have the same failure?

In Gingrich's logic -- which has largely become GOP logic -- the really real cause of the humanitarian disaster in New Orleans was not the failure of the federal government to mobilize its resources on behalf of citizens in need, but the failure of citizenship to work on behalf of citizens.

It is an odd rhetorical construction, but we see where he is heading. Government should change, he is telling us, but it should change by accelerating the destruction of government programs and public schools -- moving faster to set up an authoritarian vision of a country where all government action is displaced by a vague notion of responsibility.

By touting "No Child Left Behind," today in New Orleans, Bush is really saying that the disaster in Katrina happened because his Utopian vision of free-market America was hampered -- ergo, the people of New Orleans became victims instead of what they were supposed to be prepared citizens.

All of this, of course, glosses over the continuing cry of voices on the ground in Katrina -- people who spend every waking moment of their lives rebuilding a city from scratch, only to be rewarded by a college flunky President who claims education is the key to getting ahead.

Education is important, no doubt. But it was not so much children who were left behind by the authoritarian conservative movement in this country in the decade before Katrina. What was left behind -- or rather thrown from the moving train -- was the American principle that the purpose of government is to help individuals in situations where they cannot help themselves.

Flood waters crashing through a levee system left in disrepair was precisely one of those moments where individuals needed the collective strength and ability of their government to help them.

President Bush should be ashamed of himself for promoting such a cynical ideology of personal responsibility in a city still reeling from the failures of his worldview and actions.

© 2007 Jeffrey Feldman,

He should also be ashamed of what he and NCLB are doing to education in this country.

Governors Uniting for NCLB Changes

Another from Ed Week this time about a National Governors meeting. It seems they disagree about the changes NCLB needs but do agree about..

They all agree, for instance, that more funding is needed, and that some of the accountability provisions need to be made more flexible, especially regarding the testing of English-language learners and special education students.

That's all rather vague isn't it? Also...

Gov. Gregoire said the governors will work closely with their chief state school officers and designate one person from each state to form a coalition that will develop more specific policy goals as the debate over reauthorization continues. She said the NGA is considering convening an NCLB summit to talk about what changes should be made to the law.

I'm waiting with baited breath.

How Are These NCLB Reports Like All The Other Reports? Lotsa Ways.

From the Ed Week column This Week in Education...

Written by former Senate education staffer and journalist Alexander Russo, This Week in Education covers education news, policymakers, and trends with a distinctly political edge...

Back in the day, there used to be a thing called a "side by side" that would compare the key provisions of different versions of legislation category by category or even sometimes provision by provision. Maybe it's still done.

In the meantime, David DeSchryver from Brustein & Manasevit has done somewhat the same thing based on seven NCLB reauthorization reports (USDE, Commission, Chiefs, NEA, AFT, NASBE, NCSL.

Common if not unanimous areas of interest and direction include: a focus on standards and cross-state comparisons, calls for more flexibility in accountability models, improved assessment quality, a better menu of sanctions and corrective action, addressing the special education system, incentives for teachers in high need schools and districts, more exemptions for ELLs, and increased funding. However, the devil is in the details...

Interestingly, he says it's the Aspen Institute Commission Report that is the real outlier in terms of size and scope (I had thought it was the USDE proposal).

This is a pretty thorough review of what people are thinking, and as the man says the devil is in the details...

Study says students are learning less

Another from O'Hanian's site. You have read this. It is all over. Everywhere. But this post come with comments from a CA teacher. He asks questions we should all be asking...

California Teacher Comment: This article has made me so angry I'm finding it hard to concentrate on anything else.

Why do they think that one test would be more valid than all of the courses and all of the assignments completed by these kids?

Why are they accepting that a standardized test is a more accurate measure of students' ability than coursework?

Why does no one trust teachers anymore?

Why do they automatically assume that there is grade inflation and course inflation and not that the test is unreliable and invalid?

Why don't they take other variables into consideration, like the fact that there was a 57.4 (% increase) in foreign population in the U.S. from 1990 to 2000?

Or that maybe the seniors didn't take the test seriously whereas they took their courses seriously.

Arrgh!

Arrgh! Indeed!

NCLB 'drills and kills' the spirit of education

This is a great comment from a retired teacher fro the Lehigh Valley PA, with 40 years experience. The clincher is at the end...

NCLB needs serious revision. Legislators must listen to educators who are in the schools day in and day out. Assessment must begin to chart individual student academic growth over time. We cannot continue to compare the same grade levels year after year. We must begin to acknowledge that students who live in poverty, who have special needs, or who are English language learners present unique educational challenges. Funds must go directly to the schools to hire more teachers and establish effective instructional programs, particularly in reading. Schools must strengthen their ties with parents because all parents must realize the importance of academic success for their children. Congress must fund social programs for low-income children. Outreach specialists must be placed in every impoverished school. The schools alone cannot do it.

Teachers regulate the heartbeat of their school. They know what is needed and what to do. They know that some kids need extra help; some need a favorite class; yet others can succeed alone. The primary focus of the new NCLB must focus on the realities of education. Like a good teacher, the revised NCLB legislation must have a positive philosophy where multiple types of assessments are used to improve education.

If only someone was listening.

No child left behind - including smaller schools

From Forida comes this commentary:

...

Federal policies should recognize the unique needs of small rural school districts.

A third of our nation's schools are classified as rural, and their characteristics are far different from schools in large urban centers.

Rural schools are often in isolated communities with limited resources. In rural and small communities, there is often just one high school. They struggle to attract and retain effective teachers, particularly in math, science, special education and other specialized subjects.

It is now time to provide all districts with the flexibility they need to truly improve instruction and equip every child with the skills needed to succeed in school and the workplace...

...

The goal of NCLB - proficiency for all - matters just as much in small towns as it does in large cities. That goal must not change. Nor should the approach the law takes toward meeting that goal - high standards, accountability, teacher quality and options for students.

But applying those approaches means different tactics in different parts of the country. A size-6 suit will not fit everyone, yet everyone can wear a suit. Tailoring suits to meet everyone's needs will only make everyone look and perform better.

Unless you want everyone to stop wearing suits.

There's no cheap, easy way to help children

This is a powerful commentary:
...

We spout slogans such as "No child left behind" while refusing to fund the programs that would, in fact, help us to leave no child behind. We cut school funding, we cut funding for social support systems, we cut finding for youth intervention programs, we cut programs for parental education and support, we cut programs for family planning and sex education - we save a few dollars, and we willingly sacrifice young people to do it. We should be ashamed of ourselves.

And the rest of us, those of us who "know better," are guilty too. Too often we just shake our heads, wring our hands and wear our sackcloth in silent dismay. We, too, should be ashamed - ashamed not of our dismay, but of our silence...

...

It's both tough and expensive to support programs for intense early intervention for children in abusive and neglectful families; it's easier and cheaper to minimize the level of intervention and, quite literally, hope things get better for those kids and those families.

But face it: Cheaper and easier is not the answer. Today's neglected, abused, uneducated and disenfranchised child becomes tomorrow's neglectful, abusing, uneducated, disenfranchised, disaffected, and nonfunctioning adult and parent. Today's "savings" have a huge cost, both in dollars and misery, for future generations.

We piously state that "children are our most precious resource," then we knowingly watch as that resource is squandered. We need to feel a sense of shame, replace that shame with a sense of hope, and then parlay that hope into action for the sake of all of our children.

It's not too late. But with each day, it is getting later and later for those kids I'm talking about.

Gary Crum of Junction City is a former teacher and counselor.