Most kids left behind
New evidence shows that the Bush administration's famous "No Child Left Behind" education law creates standards that aren't really standards, with unfair and exasperating outcomes for the nation's students.
League of Education Voters
For those still uncertain why changes to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act — birthed in 2001 as the No Child Left Behind Act by the Bush administration and, disappointingly, Ted Kennedy — were a bad idea, a recent story in the New York Times provides the answer.
What No Child Left Behind did was allow each state to set its own standards for proficiency in reading and math at fourth and eighth grade. It also set out a timeline (by 2014, with progress benchmarks every year along the way) for states to get 100 percent of students to proficiency in those subjects or face penalties on a continuum from some loss of funding to mandatory reorganization of the underachieving schools. (All the bad teachers would lose their jobs, so that idea sounds pretty cool to some.)
But if you started with a low bar in the first place, then your progress easily looks pretty good and you avoid penalties. Conversely, if you set an honest standard for proficiency on your state test (ours is the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, or WASL) then it is harder to make the required progress. The result is that better schools in tougher states and districts are penalized sooner and more severely than weak schools in states with low standards.
Sam Dillon’s New York Times article reports a study by the federal Department of Education covering 2005 and 2007 data from the National Assessment of Student Progress (NAEP), a test that has been given across the country to a representative sample of students in grades 4, 8 and 12 every two years since the early 1970s. Thus it provides a tool for comparing the relative difficulty — or proficiency levels — of different states’ tests.
The range is shocking. It takes an NAEP score of approximately 230 to be considered proficient in fourth-grade reading in Massachusetts, the state with the toughest test. In Mississippi, which has the lowest standard, educators think they’ve done their jobs if their fourth-graders score only 125 on the same test. The Department of Education mavens say fourth-grade reading proficiency takes a score of 208.
“We’re lying to our children,” says Education Secretary Arne Duncan, quoted by Dillon.
We sure are in the 32 states whose standards are lower than the NAEP’s. And that includes Washington, where fourth-grade readers are deemed proficient at a score just above 200, about the middle of states nationally. Oregon’s kids are declared proficient at about 185.
How on earth could federal officials ever think it fair to base Title I funding (low-income student enrollment compensation) and even school closures on failure to make progress against such inconsistent standards? The Seattle School District came close to the ultimate sanction against a couple of its schools, but can anyone really think they’re turning out weaker readers than their counterparts in rural Mississippi?
Under No Child, standards aren’t really standards, and the variation among states looks like proof that state education bureaucracies often act in their own interests; that's not necessarily in the best interest of the nation’s kids.
Kids in Washington and Oregon — all states — deserve an education that gets them to a recognized national, even international, standard. The NAEP provides a lot better benchmark than the WASL and its ilk.
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Comments:
Posted Fri, Nov 13, 7:26 a.m. Inappropriate
"The NAEP provides a lot better benchmark than the WASL and its ilk."
Not really. Look at the push right now out of the DoE for national standards; if the NAEP was what it's presented to be ("The Nations Report Card"), couldn't we just use the NAEP standards?
Similarly, given the breadth of measurable goals in reading and math, isn't there a high possibility that the WASL and the NAEP measure different things?
The idea that a national test may be a more authentic measure of state-to-state performance is a good one, IMO; I'm just not convinced that the NAEP is that test.
Posted Fri, Nov 13, 11:30 a.m. Inappropriate
How about eliminating the Dept of Education, and apportion all the money among students, which then can be used by parents and students to pick the best method of education. Let's put the decision making back in the hands of parents. If they want private schools, traditional or blended online schools, homeschooling, it's their choice. It's well documented that private schools and home schooling score better than traditional schooling. And online public schools score about 80 points higher on SATs also than traditional schooling, and that is despite 30% of those students being drop outs who returned to school via the online system.
Posted Fri, Nov 13, 1:17 p.m. Inappropriate
So (to Randy Dorn's point), if we eliminate the Dept. of Education, kids could go to any school they choose? Would that include Islamic madrassas? Or, say, the Ayn Rand Elementary School for Objectivism? Or the Leninist Kindergarten? Timothy McVeigh Jr. High? The Atheism Academy?
We'd be spending all those federal dollars (which presumably you wouldn't even want to spend, not to mention accumulate) on religious schools--or even anti-religious schools? And if anything could be taught, in accord (presumably) with the parents' wishes, then where is the accountability for how the money is spent? What standards would there be, if any? And who would enforce them--some body of noble, patriotic, unbiased volunteers?
You can't have it both ways. Either we spend federal money and have federal standards of some kind, or we spend no federal money and have no standards. Don't we as a citizenry have both the right and responsibility to surround ourselves with educated children? What we have with NCLB is a mandate without money. What happened to the "conservative" notion of fiscal responsibility?
Posted Fri, Nov 13, 1:25 p.m. Inappropriate
Randy: I'm going to have to challenge you on that, because the graduation rates and WASL percentages for most on-line schools here in Washington State are abysmal. Consider Insight Academy in the Quillayute Valley School District, where less than 20% of the kids manage to get past the 10th grade math WASL and the on-time graduation rate is 5.7%
I think that, when it comes to evaluating on-line schools, the WASL that everyone has to take is a much more authentic measure than the SAT that only the best self-select.
Posted Sat, Nov 14, 7 a.m. Inappropriate
I vote for the Ayn Rand Elementary School for Objectivism. I wish there'd been an alternative like that when I was a kid. I'd have gotten more out of "We the Living" than "On Cherry Street."
Posted Wed, Nov 18, 3:29 p.m. Inappropriate
I agree if you are going to measure states against states as far as progress is concerned it needs to be on the same standard. However, as a school nurse for over 20 years, my observation is that numerous children are being left behind. Not by schools failing to provide educational resources, but a failure of parents to get their children to school, on time and on a regular basis. Student's who miss 20, 30, 50, 80 days of school aren't going to succeed. They effectively drop out of school way before the age of 16. We have gotten rid of our truant officers why? No one seems to care about this issue. I have yet to figure it out.
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