Realizing the mistake that was NCLB.

Interview in US News & World Report with Diane Ravitch, former Assistant Secretary of Education under George W. Bush. Ms. Ravitch has gone from a conservative advocate of school choice, vouchers and high-stakes testing to being critical of same. Change of heart? Her book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education, is reportedly a strong indictment of No Child Left Behind and other Bush-era policies she helped create.

In the interview, Ms. Ravitch answers the question, What should parents do to ensure that their children are getting the best education? She answers:

There are two different questions. One is what should parents do, and the other is what should policymakers do. If policy makers simply say, "It's every family for itself," we're going back to the early 19th century, before we had public education. Some people had private tutors, and some people sent their kids to religious schools, and some people got together and had little schools that they created. Then at a certain point, there was an awareness that the public had a responsibility to educate the children of the community. If we're doing a bad job of that, we really should develop public policy that looks to improving the quality of those schools and not just close them down and hand them over to private entrepreneurs. Because then we're creating a marketplace, and markets have failures. Markets do not succeed in providing equal opportunity. They succeed in creating winners and losers. We saw that in the [economic collapse] of the fall of 2008, and that could happen to our schools as well.

Interesting and sure to incite protests from pro-school marketplace folks. I have to admit, the winners vs losers point is a good one...because when there are losers they will be children, and that's not acceptable.

President Obama's education budget highlights...the long road to reform starts here?

The US DOE has posted President Obama's education budget, which confirms that the new Race To The Top goals will inform spending going forward in the near term. Some highlights:

* $539 million for innovative teacher and leader reforms such as performance pay, bringing the total to $950 million, and $269 million for teacher and leader recruitment and preparation, bringing the total to $405 million.
* $354 million for school turnaround grants, bringing the total up to $900 million.
* $250 million for special education students, bringing the IDEA Grants to States total to $11.755B
* $210 million for Promise Neighborhoods, a new competitive grant program modeled on the Harlem Children's Zone that combines comprehensive social services with school improvements in order to transform whole neighborhoods.
* $197 million for programs designed to promote a well-rounded education, supporting comprehensive literacy, STEM and other core subjects including history and arts.
* $81 million for expanding educational options, including at total of $365.5 million in funding for charter and other autonomous schools.

The budget...
...does not seem to mention "No Child Left Behind." See ya.
...features a continued heavy emphasis on merit pay, expansion of charter schools, and closing failing schools.
...includes $14.5 billion for states to align standards with college and career-readiness, but those standards are still in the works. Trying to achieve a consensus should be interesting, to say the least.

Stay tuned...

Race to the Top or race to more problems?

In the world outside the Ridgewood referendum...
As reported in the Bergen Record, various state lawmakers are upset with Education Commissioner Lucille Davy for not getting New Jersey's application in for Federal Race to the Top education funds. It seems her office decided to leave it for the new governor's staff to handle. I'm not going to comment on the politics of all that (and you can bet it's about politics), but I'm thinking it may not be such a bad thing to drag our feet in the race to the Race. Sure, it would be great to get $200 million to $400 million from the the Federal government for NJ schools, but at what cost? The Obama administration's education policy is something our students will live with for years, and parts of it concern me:
• There's a big focus on charter schools, even though research shows that student achievement in charter schools is as mixed as it is in traditional public schools;
• I have yet to see practical, real-world description of how student test scores can be linked with teacher evaluations;
• Why would NJ want to adopt national common core standards, if many of those standards are lower than New Jersey's existing academic standards?

All I'm saying is, these things are giving me pause and hoping we can get more info/explanations/assurances. The rush to this Race to the Top reminds me of the early days of No Child Left Behind, and we know how well that turned out.

Comments on Obama's "Race to the Top" education initiative

Educators are criticizing President Obama's Race to the Top plan, one of the main tenets of which is to link teacher compensation to their students' test scores. While on the surface it seems like a good idea to have something more quantifiable to judge teachers' performance, something "real" that concerned parents can refer to instead of what can appear to be a vague "insiders club," but there are a big dangers in the concept -- especially if one approaches it with education as the priority and not budgets or spending. I thought we had learned from No Child Left Behind that too much focus on standardized tests is bad for education.

Here are snippets from several letters to the New York Times on this issue (click here to read full letters):

From a former teacher:
"For many years, there has been a terrible distortion of education’s promise, as everything besides reading, writing and math has increasingly been cut. The arts, imaginative endeavors, recess, inquiry, curriculum that integrates various domains: these are not luxuries but are integral to student identification with learning."

Another educator:
"... it is critical that the incentive not reward solely yearly results; the financial services industry debacle has taught us a hard lesson about short-term orientation and how it distorts behavior... propose that teachers be evaluated on three criteria: student data, principal evaluation and peer review, which would encourage an enduring teamwork culture within and across departments that is the hallmark of great schools."

Former teacher:
"I left my job as a public school teacher shortly after the No Child Left Behind law was passed. My job went from teaching children to teaching test preparation in very little time. Many of our nation’s teachers have left their profession because the focus on testing leaves little room for passion, creativity or intellect."

Teacher:
"High test scores do not guarantee student learning. The evaluation of a student’s progress and a teacher’s abilities requires an act of human judgment (much like evaluating a work of art)."

Math educator:
"To “teach to the test” in mathematics by having students memorize facts and mnemonic devices takes away from the true value of learning mathematics and its ever-increasing importance in our technological society. To deny students the opportunity to be enriched with mathematical concepts prevents them from learning to appreciate the power and beauty of mathematics. In the long range, this could cause irreparable harm to our society!"

Are all these comments to be dismissed simply because they are from teachers, who you might cynically say don't want to be held accountable? Absolutely not. I understand the desire to quantify something which is hard to quantify. But this plan is not it, as NCLB was not it. We need some big thinking here, folks. Not a quick fix.

What are schools for?

I ran across this fascinating essay by John Goodlad, regarding the state of our education system and the time (now) for us (all of us) to make some real changes. You can click here to read the entire essay, but I'm going to extract the heart of the essay here:

[Begin quote...]
Unless we get above the endless bickering that has kept our system of schooling stranded in the deep structure that hardened into place many decades ago, we will find ourselves only tinkering with school reform one more time. Enough already! There are children here.

There are some obvious improvements to be made that will arouse little controversy, such as upgrading the infrastructure of schooling and providing high-level equity in instructional and curricular learning and teaching resources. And there is a rich array of ideas that have been briefly implemented in innovative school programs that were not brought to scale and sustained. Their stories are readily accessible but have been virtually ignored by policymakers, even by federally appointed committees such as the National Commission on Excellence in Education that in 1983 produced the influential report A Nation at Risk. In all probability, some of these will be rediscovered, funded, not brought to scale, and fade, largely because of the ideological differences embedded in our multilayered system of schooling.

Over a period of sixty years, I have taught in a one-room school and school for delinquent boys, taught in every grade from the first through graduate school, been a dean for sixteen years, and studied in depth and breadth educational change, schooling, the education of educators, and more. I now look back in wonderment, anger, and near-despair at the stark reality of we the people scarcely murmuring for eight years over the imposition of the No Child Left Behind Act on our PUBLIC SCHOOLS. No powerful intellect is required for coming to the conclusion that we the people are grossly undereducated in what education is and negligent in the informed care of our irreplaceable asset, the public school. Where art thou, Horace Mann, arguably its founder, who proclaimed over 150 years ago that “the public school is the greatest discovery made by man”?

I have concluded that we will never have the schools our democracy requires until their well-being is a major priority of local communities. And we will not have them until policymakers, business roundtables, educational organizations, teacher-preparing institutions, and community leaders agree on what all schools are for. The challenges are enormous and, unless we take them seriously and begin the necessary learning now, our century-old tinkering with schooling will continue.

These are not tasks to delegate to national commissions. They are for all of us—the “yes we can” people, the young and the old, and everyone in between.

[End Quote]

Something to think about. What do you think schools are for?

The value (or lack thereof) in testing

This morning, a reader wrote:
Test scores are the only thing that matter. They tell us what has been learned and retained by a student. All this nonsense ridiculing test scores is from the same folks who ridicule drills as "drill and kill." Laurie, you have bought into the liberal mindset of the educrats who we have hired to administrate our district. How unfortunate for our students that you abhor critical thinking.

My response:

Au contraire, mon frere!
(Sorry, I could not resist)
It is precisely because I do not abhor critical thinking that I can argue against your narrow belief that “test scores are the only thing that matter.” (I do, however, abhor the word abhor, and other such hyperbole, on my blog.)

First, let’s address the specific issue in question – whether test scores are the best (or “only”) way to judge a textbook’s value. My point was that the textbook alone is not the only variable influencing scores. Do you completely discount the influence of teachers? Do you not believe there are good teachers and bad teachers? Does it make no difference if students spend 20 minutes per day vs. 90 minutes per day on math? What about other materials, aka supplementation? What about tutoring? What about the students themselves? Don’t they play into this equation at all? The members of Ridgewood’s Math Planning Team listed student achievement (in other districts) as one of the criteria to consider when evaluating the textbooks, but they decided as a group that it would not be the #1 criterion. I think that makes sense, and this whole paragraph is an example of me using “critical thinking” on the topic.

As for the value of testing in general...well, I’ve sort of addressed it above, haven’t I? Standardized tests don’t measure much besides test-taking ability. They do not show how students are learning, what they are learning, what kinds of help they might need or the quality of teaching they are receiving. They don’t measure the ability to think or create or use the critical thinking of which you are so enamored.

The standardized tests that our children are subject to in 2009 are based on behaviorist psychological theories of the 19th century. In the past 100+ years, cognitive and developmental psychologists have come to understand that people learn by connecting what they already know with what they are trying to learn – not by recalling isolated facts and narrow skills.

Relying on standardized test scores is the easy way out, the lazy way, and the political way, via misguided efforts like No Child Left Behind. Standardized tests are also the dangerous way, dangerous to education in general. As schools feel more and more pressure to focus on test scores, we are pressured to narrow curriculum to match the tests. And if you're looking for a way to ensure accountability, the tests our kids take really make our schools accountable to one thing only: the test companies.

Want to hear something interesting? Singapore’s education officials have been studying U.S. schools, with a special interest in reducing their emphasis on standardized tests and increasing their use of authentic assessment. (More to come on this topic.)

Finally, I’m not going to take your bait on the “liberal mindset” criticism...politics should have no place in education. Why do you folks always fall back on that?

What is Left Behind

I stumbled on this interesting essay which was written in late 2007. I hope the Obama administration can inject some sense into this senseless situation.

What Is Left Behind
As NCLB’s reauthorization or expiration takes center stage in Washington, American citizens who care about the future of our public schools and our democracy must be heard. Our shared future is not an abstract political possibility but, rather, one that breathes in every son or daughter, every niece or nephew, every grandson or granddaughter, every neighbor’s child, and every one of our own students who enters the schoolhouse door.

While Secretary Spellings and legislators from both parties stubbornly proclaim that NCLB is working—despite of all the empirical evidence indicating otherwise—and as politicians boast that no child is being left behind, let us pause to consider what has been jettisoned. Let us take a moment to think about what has been left behind, what has been dumped, what has been pushed out the door because there is no longer space or time for it in the school day.

Now if your school still has some of these things, I say congratulations. At the same time, however, I say beware. Beware, because the unattainable goal of 100% proficiency that is the bedrock of NCLB makes it most likely that over the next seven years, your school will join the 30% of schools today where these crucial elements of school have already been left behind.

As American citizens deeply concerned about the health of our democratic republic, we are, of course, concerned and horrified that the social studies have been left behind. In Florida and other states, social studies teachers, afraid of losing their jobs, are lobbying for social studies to be tested, so that their work will survive.

The emphasis on math and reading tests has meant less geography, civics, and government, which leaves children ignorant of how public decisions are made or where their community fits into state, national, and global contexts—or even that there is a context beyond their street and TV screens. Children are left, in effect, stranded on lonely islands of ignorance, without the impetus or skills to have their voices heard in ways that make the world listen.

History, too, has been left behind, making it assured that this next generation will grow up more likely to be swayed by the mistakes and misdeeds of the past to which they remain clueless. What is a democratic republic and where did it come from? Sorry, that’s not on the test, either.

And economics? While children in wealthy communities, the ones without AYP worries yet, play stock market games and learn about hedge funds, the economic education of children in schools under the testing gun consists of collecting “Scholar Dollars” that they trade in for bags of Skittles, a pittance of pay for a meaningless labor whose significance remains a mystery to them.

Health and physical education have been left behind, too, leaving children out of shape and subject to diseases associated with obesity and inactivity. At the same time, children are left in the dark about the importance of healthy foods, fresh fruits and vegetables, the kinds of foods that are scarce in the small stores of poor neighborhoods. And left behind, too, is information about the hazards of a never-ending diet of Taco Bell and McDonalds—because that's not on the test, either.

Art and music have been left behind, leaving in their crossing wakes an imagination gap, a creativity gap, and expression gap, an aesthetic gap, a souls gap. We can add these gaps to the achievement gap that parallels a widening economic gap – despite years and years of increased testing and accountability in those schools where the economic gaps are at their deepest points.

Diversity of thought has been left behind. What remains in failing schools and the ones teetering on the testing bubble are collections of remote and desiccated facts that represent not even a single culture, but rather, an anti-culture that has essentially eradicated cultural values as a discussable issue.

Science has been left behind, too, and thus the primary tool for understanding how the modern world is organized. Where science survives, it is where it is tested, and the kind of science that remains is the kind that can be fit into a multiple-choice format, not the kind that exercises children’s ability to think, solve problems, conduct experiments, and make good decisions.

Literature has been left behind, and with it the love of reading and books and the curiosity that is spawned and kept alive by the life of the imagination. Stories are now substituted by the measured mouthing of nonsense syllables and the framing of comprehension responses that the children who utter them do not understand.

Recess has been left behind in a third of all American elementary schools, and as the percentage of failing schools increases, we may expect that number to rise. Play, itself, then becomes left behind, and along with it one of the most useful skills of all—to think as if, what if, as in what if life were somehow different than, or what if there were a choice beyond a, b, c, or d?

Nap time has been left behind in kindergarten and even in pre-K, as teachers focus on replacing dream time with skill practice time for a future of testing.

Field trips, holidays, and assemblies have been left behind unless they can be used for test preparation, or unless they come after the test, those short precious weeks when smiles may be seen to return to teachers’ lips and to students’ eyes.

The love of the teacher for her craft has been left behind in so many schools, replaced by the burdensome regimen of the pacing guide and the production schedule and the script. And time for teacher-led discussion, exploration, reflection? There is only time for teachers to learn their lines, trying to become good actors in a very bad play where the audience is compelled to participate. And time to weigh the results of the practice tests in order to get ready for the real tests.

Left behind, too, are teacher autonomy and professional discretion. Now whole hallways of fourth grade classes are on the same page of the same scripted lesson at the same moment that any supervisor should walk by, supervisors who are identically trained to look for the same manifestations of sameness, from bulletin boards to hand signals to the distance that children are trained to maintain from one another as they march to lunch, with their arms holding together their imaginary straightjackets.

Most troubling, however, of all that has been left behind is the teacher’s nurturing care, the teacher whose advocacy for and sensitivity to every child’s fragile humanity has been a trademark of what it means to be the teacher of children. With the current laser focus on avoiding test failure, even as expectations become higher with each passing year, the child who cannot do more than a child can do now becomes viewed as the stumbling block to a success that is increasingly elusive.

Instead, then, of being viewed as the reasons we have schools to begin with, the needful child who is, indeed, behind, becomes the obstacle to a proficiency that becomes further and further out of reach. When this occurs, as it surely does every time teachers and principals fall prey to the pressure, children become the burden that must be reluctantly borne, obstacles to a success that their own disability, poverty, or language issues complicate— and that even the best teacher can never compensate for.

Students, then, come to be seen as complicit in creating the failure that, in fact, no one, teacher or student, can remedy, because there is a monstrous system that has made child failure and, thus, school failure inevitable, a monstrous system that has traded and treated this generation of children as a means to attain a political end—a political end that, in fact, threatens our future as a free people who are able to think, to solve problems, to care, to imagine, to understand, to have empathy, to participate, to grow, to live.

So as you listen to the growing debate this fall in Washington, please do not leave your political responsibility behind and your good sense with it. Go online tonight and order the Linda Perlstein book, Tested. . .. Read it and, as you do so, keep in mind that the horror that she so ably describes occurred in a school that is considered a success, a “lighthouse school.” Think, then, of what it must be like in the thirty percent of American schools that are now labeled failures.

Recently, a quote by Cal State professor, Art Costa showed up on one of internet discussion groups, a quote that is horribly relevant today: "What was once educationally significant, but difficult to measure, has been replaced by what is insignificant and easy to measure. So now we test how well we have taught what we do not value."

Call and write and visit your school boards and your Congressional delegation. Remind them what you value and what you believe to be significant for now and for our future, and what you know that now and finally must to be left behind.

Jim Horn
Monmouth University
September 2007

Test Scores

The NJ state Board of Education recently changed the so-called "cut scores" for proficiency and advanced proficiency in grades 5-8, in language arts and math. Before the change, a score of 33%-46% was considered "proficient." The new cutoffs are:

6th Grade Language Arts: 53% = Proficient; 76% = Advanced Proficient

6th Grade Math: 50% = Proficient; 82% = Advanced Proficient

8th Grade Language Arts: 55% = Proficient; 74% = Advanced Proficient

8th Grade Math: 50% = Proficient; 77% = Advanced Proficient

These new cutoffs will be applied to the tests that were taken last spring.

So...I have several thoughts about this. The first one is surprise that a score of 33% on any test could be described as "proficient" in that subject. Really? So, following this logic, 47% was called "advanced proficient." And then what...does that mean, say, 60% would be considered "perfect?"

I don't know the history of how these scores and labels were developed, but it reminds me of Starbucks' marketing...you know, where "Tall" is the smallest drink? 

It's frustrating for parents and community members (and this BOE member) to learn about the low cut-offs, and I have to say it does seem to be a good move to raise the cutoffs. Honestly, does it seem crazy to expect "proficient" to mean 50% or more? Not to me. I think it will help us have a much more realistic picture of how our students are doing, how well they are actually learning.

HOWEVER, you realize what this means, right? When Ridgewood gets its scores for grades 5-8 testing from last spring, many students who would have scored "proficient" under the previous system will now miss the cutoff. Same thing for Advanced Proficient. Bottom line, even though our students' numerical scores (and their actual performance) may have improved, our numbers of proficient and advanced proficient will go down. This will upset some people -- even though it should not. All of the first scores using the new system will be like re-setting the gauge. It makes it harder for us to compare this year's performance to last, but it doesn't affect our ability to compare our students' performance to that of other districts. Also (and this is the state's stated reason for the change), we should be able to better identify those students who need help. Perhaps any student who falls from Proficient to Partial Proficient should immediately be given some sort of remedial or special attention.

Statewide, there are concerns that some groups and some schools will not make AYP in the No Child Left Behind sweepstakes. I'm sure that will happen...and then those schools will be punished...even though students' actual performance may have improved. Maybe  the NCLB police will take this into consideration. In any event, it will definitely add to the NCLB drama.

It's too bad the only scores the district gets are these "proficient" or "advanced proficient" numbers. I wonder if there is any way to get the actual numbers, the actual scores. That would allow us to track our own students more carefully. Even better, wouldn't it be great if we could get test scores broken down into smaller areas, for example, in addition to an overall "math" score, how about scores for geometry vs. algebra...or calculations vs. word problems? Then we'd REALLY know how our instructional programs are doing. I think I'm getting a little carried away and I can already guess the answer, but I'll see what I can find out about this.

In the meantime, we'll wait for our Grades 5-8 scores to come in and see where this new rating system gets us.