Category Archives: Testing

Sandra Mathison and I wrote a short piece on “The Promise and Peril of High-Stakes Accountability” for the Teacher Newsmagazine, a publication of the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation. You can read the article online here.

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The Washington Post sought an analysis of the ninth-grade hurdle to student progress from Walter Haney, professor at the Lynch School of Education and director of the Ford Foundation-funded Education Pipeline project in the Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation and Public Policy at Boston College:

Overcoming Obstacles to Progress:

Thirty years ago, only about 4 percent of students had to repeat ninth grade. Now, it is about 12 percent. In such states as Florida, South Carolina and New York, the ninth-grade hurdle, or bulge, is even worse, with more than 20 percent more students enrolled in ninth grade than were in eighth grade the previous year.

What is causing the grade 9 hurdle, what are its consequences, and what can be done?Historically the ninth-grade bulge has been associated with three waves of education reform. First, the so-called minimum-competency testing movement in the late 1970s and then the push for more academic requirements in the late 1980s. . . . A greater increase occurred in the 1990s with the rise of the so-called “standards-based reform” and “high stakes-testing” movements. The grade 9 hurdle is also associated with a structural change in how students typically reach high school. The movement from junior high schools to middle schools shifted a grade 7 bulge to grade 9, which is now the critical choke point in the education pipeline.

The consequences have been severe. A majority of students (as high as 80 percent) who are ordered to repeat grade 9 will not stay in school through graduation. This has led to a falling graduation rate in the last decade or so. According to a new report from the National Center for Education Statistics, the graduation rate nationally for the classes of 2002 and 2003 was less than 75 percent, and even lower in such states as South Carolina, Georgia, New York and Mississippi, where it hovered at about 60 percent.

Even more troubling than such appallingly low graduation rates – far lower than the graduation rate of 90% set out as a national education goal in 1994 – is this: Under the pressure of high stakes testing to raise grade 10 test averages, high school administrators in some states (such as New York, Alabama and Texas), have actually been pushing at-risk students out of school.

What can be done? Making high schools smaller and less impersonal and connecting schoolwork with students’ lives outside of school is one approach. Probably more important would be changes in policies — specifically providing schools with tangible incentives for keeping children in school and abandoning high-stakes testing used to make important decisions about students and schools based on test results in isolation. After all, test results can never cover all the broad goals of public education — academic, social and vocational.

Rates of keeping kids in school represent a more powerful measure for the simple reason that they reflect a host of factors affecting student progress, including performance in courses, attendance and citizenship, together with scores on standardized tests.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Peter Campbell has produce a short animation that exposes some of the core issues of No Child Left Behind.

You can download the Quicktime movie (7MB) here.

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Andy Hargreaves and Dean Fink wrote in yesterday’s Toronto Star that at a time when Ontario is pressing ahead with mandatory testing of students, Britain—whose model Ontario follows—is abandoning it.

Why Ontario doesn’t measure up

Oct. 25, 2005. 01:00 AM

When Ontario students returned to school in September, it was hard not to notice the sea change in the educational climate of the province. There is a renewed energy and optimism in schools that nine years of “more for less,” “naming, shaming and blaming,” and Tory crisis management had eroded.

The McGuinty government has ensured labour peace by orchestrating four-year contracts with teachers, pumping badly needed money into new textbooks, class-size reductions, and building upgrades. We applaud these efforts.

Yet we remain concerned for the long-term sustainability of the province’s educational system. Despite its laudable initiatives, the government remains fixated on imposing short-term targets and aligned tests in literacy and numeracy.
By setting the goal that 75 per cent of 12-year-olds will reach the required standard on province-wide testing by 2008, for example, it has boxed itself into a policy that will actually work against its attempts to return the Ontario educational system to its place as a world leader.

Ironically, the government has modelled its approach to imposed targets on that of Britain.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s international student achievement comparisons, Britain is less successful than Canada and Ontario in literacy and mathematics.

Moreover, the most recent research in Britain demonstrates that the so-called British achievement gains, based on imposed short-term targets and aligned testing, are mainly an illusion — partly because test items just got easier each year.

Britain’s own inspection agency has reported that since the introduction of the country’s National Literacy Strategy, fewer children are reading for pleasure.

In addition, the strategy’s overemphasis on the old basics of literacy and numeracy has narrowed the curriculum and short-changed British students on the new basics which they also need to compete in a dynamic knowledge economy: creativity, teamwork, multiliteracies (oral, written and visual), environmental responsibility, and ability to use modern technologies.

Britain is now turning around before it is too late.

Wales has abolished all educational testing up to and including age 14. England is starting to test younger children individually when they are ready, not in a state of high anxiety, all at once. And more emphasis is being put on teacher-designed tests that give them information they can use to help their students, which leads to better results.

All this has come about because of parent pressure. Strangely, Ontario is adopting a strategy th
at Britain is leaving behind. The international evidence is clear: Ontario’s strategy is unsustainable.
Our own research, in Ontario and New York State as well as our extensive involvement with educational systems in more than 40 countries worldwide, has convinced us that more sustainable educational policies preserve and develop deep learning for all students; they spread and last, in ways that do no harm to — indeed, create — positive benefit for others, now and in the future.

In our book, Sustainable Leadership, we identify seven interrelated and essential guides to sustainable educational policies that are derived from principles of ecology and successful organizational development in the business world.

The Ontario government’s approach to imposed, short-term achievement targets transgresses every one of these principles.

Depth: Sustainable policies address things that matter: teaching, learning, and caring for all students. Imposed, short-term achievement targets push most schools to focus on testing before learning; they put a priority only on learning that is easily measured; they narrow learning to the old basics, to the detriment of the new basics.

Length: Sustainable policies last and do not shift with every swing in the political climate. Government ministers and system leaders who implement top-down mandates frequently find they are unable to deliver the targets on time — and then their jobs are gone. Some do reach targets by forcing or faking them, but the results quickly plateau once the system runs out of tricks.

Breadth: Sustainable policies depend on widespread acceptance and broad support. Acceleration and standardization of imposed change and its targets reduces teachers’ time to work together and to learn from each other.

Justice: Sustainable policies are just; they do not favour a few to the disadvantage of many. Target-driven forms of competitive accountability create disincentives for neighbouring schools to share their learning and expertise.

Diversity: Sustainable policies promote cohesive diversity and avoid aligned standardization in teaching and learning. Short-term targets turn the focus on deep standards into a damaging fixation with standardized testing.

Resourcefulness: Sustainable policies develop and do not deplete material and human resources. High-speed implementation, driven by short-term targets, uses excessive energy, leaves no time for renewal, and makes teachers and leaders run out of gas.

Conservation: Sustainable policies honour and learn from the best of the past to create an even better future. Short-term targets force us to think and work in the present and future tense. Their creative destruction makes it hard for us to take the time to acknowledge, learn from, recombine, then move beyond the past.

There are ample grounds for optimism about the future of Ontario schools.

The infusion of more resources, a renewed belief in the professionalism and dedication of our teachers, and the government’s willingness to learn from evidence of what works, provide the firmest of foundations for improvement.

It would be a tragedy if all of this were undermined by a temporary fixation with short-term achievement targets designed to give the government quick but misleading results within one election period. It’s up to the electorate, like Britain’s parents, to press the government to produce something more long-lasting and sustainable than this.

The Liberals could follow the example of Alberta, Canada’s most successful province in student achievement, which has worked with its teachers and principals to develop shared, rather than imposed, targets for each school — with impressive benefits for achievement scores over three years.

Or it could take its lead from Finland, the most successful nation on OECD comparisons of literacy and numeracy, which continues to achieve stellar success by trusting its highly qualified teachers to deliver strong results without a top-heavy apparatus of targets and testing.

Our best way forward is not for bureaucrats to impose external targets in cultures of anxiety and fear that turn schools into little Enrons of educational change, prepared to do anything just to get the numbers right.

Instead, we should call for schools, with government support and monitoring, to commit to their own shared targets, in cultures of hope that bring real and lasting achievements in old and new basics, for all our students.

This government will persist with short-term, quick fix targets as long as it believes that’s what Ontario’s voters want. Let’s show them that we have a bigger and better vision than this.

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The St. Petersburg Times reports that a three-judge appeals panel has bolstered black students’ lawsuit that alleges they are not being properly educated.

The decision sets the stage for what will likely be one of the most important lawsuits in US education in recent years.

The big question is whether schools alone can be held accountable for inequities in achievement and disciplinary actions experienced by black students.

The strategy of the Pinellas County School District will be to argue that differences in achievement are an individual student matter— that some black students do well while others don’t and that the factors behind their performance vary.

At it’s heart, this strategy is a based on a deficit model of learning and works to protect the status quo in terms pedagogy, curriculum, and school organization. The fundamental idea is that students must adapt to schools, rather than schools taking responsibility for meeting the needs of students.

Another key issue will be how the so-called “achievement gap” is defined. For all intents and purposes the current discourse on achievement is narrowly focused on test scores. That is, as a result of NCLB, schools operate with a truncated definition of achievement success that deflects attention away from issues such as the limitations of instruments used to measure achievement; the narrowed curriculum (which is often racist and classist); and how the accepted educational practices, such as the use of high-stakes tests, leads to the under-serving and mis-serving of all students.

For more on the harmful effects of high-stakes tests see the American Evaluation Association’s Position Statement on High-Stakes Testing in K-12 Education

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Here are to recent articles from The New York Times that illustrate the contradictions people are confronting in efforts to close the so-called “achievement” gap.

In Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina the schools are using an “integration by income” approach to closing what is more appropriately described as the “test score” gap. The New York Times describes this as the most successful and ambitious effort to create economically diverse public schools. (This is an approach that has also been tried in LaCrosse, WI; St. Lucie County, Fla.; San Francisco; Cambridge, Mass.; and Charlotte-Mecklenburg, NC.)

In Wake County, only 40 percent of black students in grades three through eight scored at grade level on state tests a decade ago. Last spring, 80 percent did. Hispanic students have made similar strides. Overall, 91 percent of students in those grades scored at grade level in the spring, up from 79 percent 10 years ago.

The Wake Count board of education had two motives when it decided to make economic integration a main element in the district’s strategy: board members feared that the county’s three-decade effort to integrate public schools racially would be found unconstitutional if challenged in the federal courts (which in recent years has made a habit of declaring districts under desegregation orders as now “unified”), and they took note of numerous studies that showed the academic benefits of economically diversifying schools.

[Note that the federal courts’ pattern of ending desegregation plans in urban districts across the US has resulted in the REsegreation of schools in the US to level not seen since the late 1960s. For more on this see the Harvard Civil Rights Project recent report “Schools More Separate: Consequence of a Decade of Resegregation”.]

While there has been success in Wake County, there is opposition from some quarters, most particularly white, middle class parents.

On the other hand, wealthy school districts, like the one in Princeton, NJ, are not ammune to the built in racial and class biases of standardized tests, as illustrated in an article in today’s New York Times,The Achievement Gap in Elite Schools.

What the Times article illustrates is that simply having economic integration in a school system doesn’t rectify the deleterious effects of education and assessment that relies on fundamentally racist and classist standardized tests.Below are the NYT articles on Princeton, NJ and Wake County, NC:

September 28, 2005
The Achievement Gap in Elite Schools
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
PRINCETON, N.J.

AN uneasy amalgam of pride and discontent, Caroline Mitchell sat amid the balloons and beach chairs on the front lawn of Princeton High School, watching the Class of 2004 graduate. Her pride was for the seniors’ average SAT score of 1237, third-highest in the state, and their admission to elite universities like Harvard, Yale and Duke. As president of the high school alumni association and community liaison for the school district, Ms. Mitchell deserved to bask in the tradition of public-education excellence.

Discontent, though, was what she felt about Blake, her own son. He was receiving his diploma on this June afternoon only after years of struggle – the failed English class in ninth grade, the science teacher who said he was capable only of C’s, the assignment to a remedial “basic skills” class. Even at that, Ms. Mitchell realized, Blake had fared better than several friends who were nowhere to be seen in the procession of gowns and mortarboards. They were headed instead for summer school.

“I said to myself: ‘Oh, no. Please, no,’ ” Ms. Mitchell recalled. “I was so hurt. These were bright kids. This shouldn’t have been happening.”

It did not escape Ms. Mitchell’s perception that her son and most of those faltering classmates were black. They were the evidence of a prosperous, accomplished school district’s dirty little secret, a racial achievement gap that has been observed, acknowledged and left uncorrected for decades. Now that pattern just may have to change under the pressure of the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Several months after Blake graduated, Princeton High School (and thus the district as a whole) ran afoul of the statute for the first time, based on the lagging scores of African-American students on a standardized English test given to 11th graders. Last month, the school was cited for the second year in a row, this time because 37 percent of black students failed to meet standards in English, and 55 percent of blacks and 40 percent of Hispanics failed in math.

One of the standard complaints about No Child Left Behind by its critics in public education is that it punishes urban schools that are chronically underfinanced and already contending with a concentration of poor, nonwhite, bilingual and special-education pupils. Princeton could hardly be more different. It is an Ivy League town with a minority population of slightly more than 10 percent and per-student spending well above the state average. The high school sends 94 percent of its graduates to four-year colleges and offers 29 different Advanced Placement courses. Over all, 98 percent of Princeton High School students exceed the math and English standards required by No Child Left Behind.

So is the problem with the district, or is the problem with the law?

The answer seems clear to those parents – mostly black, but some white and Hispanic – who have been raising the issue of the achievement gap for years. While the Princeton community includes a slice of black bourgeoisie attached to the university or nearby corporations, most of the African-American population came here a century or more ago to serve as the butlers, maids, cooks and chauffeurs of a university and town with a nearly Southern fondness for segregation. The high school, for instance, did not integrate for nearly 20 years after its founding in 1898, and the elementary schools waited until they were compelled by state law in 1947.

As far back as the 1960’s, according to the local historical society, black students suffered from “low expectations from teachers” and a high dropout rate. In the early 1990’s, an interracial body calling itself the Robeson Group – in homage to Paul Robeson, the most famous product of black Princeton – mobilized to recruit more black teachers and help elect the first black member to the school board.

Despite such efforts, the achievement gap remained. A tracking system for math separates students in middle school. The high school, while not formally tracked, has such a demand for seats in Advanced Placement classes and honors sections that a rigid hierarchy exists in effect. Guidance counselors find their time consumed by writing recommendation letters for seniors who routinely apply to 10 or more high-end schools.

And until the No Child Left Behind law was enacted there were no concrete consequences for failing to address the resulting disparity. Which may be why a number of black parents here credit the federal law with forcing attention on the underside of public education in Princeton. It requires all districts to reveal test results and meet performance standards by various subgroups, including race.

“If you scratch the surface of this town, a lot of contradictions are going to emerge,” said Ron Plummer, a project manager for a technology company and a co-chairman of the school district’s minority education committee. “I do have some suspicions when measurements come from standardized tests alone. But if it’s going to shine a bright light on the inadequacies of the system, especially as it regards children of color, then I’m all in favor.”

In any case, there can be a tone of defensiveness, even smugness, among certain school leaders in Princeton. “We’re proud of our F,” said Lewis Goldstein, the assistant superintendent, referring to the contradiction between the district’s overall success and its standing under No Child Left Behind. “It’s as if you handed in your homework and the teacher handed it back and you got a 98 on it and an F. That’s the situation we’re in.”

TO be fair to Princeton, it is hardly the only community to include both a large number of superachieving students and a smaller but persistent number of low-income, nonwhite stragglers. Princeton, in fact, belongs to an organization of 25 similar school districts, the Minority Student Achievement Network, which includes Evanston, Ill.; Shaker Heights, Ohio; and Eugene, Ore., among others, that are working to find techniques to address the issue.

Princeton’s superintendent, Judith Wilson, has accepted the challenge of reducing the achievement gap. As a newcomer to the district – she arrived last February from the working-class, half-minority district in Woodbury, N.J., near Camden – she sounds less beholden than some of her colleagues to Princeton’s exalted sense of itself.

“If the gap can’t be narrowed in Princeton,” she said in an interview in her office last week, “then where can it be narrowed? There can’t be a question here of resources, or of community support, or of quality of staff. So if we can’t impact the students who are not born into privilege, then where can it happen?”

E-mail: sgfreedman@nytimes.com

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
______________________________________________

September 25, 2005
As Test Scores Jump, Raleigh Credits Integration by Income
By ALAN FINDER
RALEIGH, N.C. – Over the last decade, black and Hispanic students here in Wake County have made such dramatic strides in standardized reading and math tests that it has caught the attention of education experts around the country.

The main reason for the students’ dramatic improvement, say officials and parents in the county, which includes Raleigh and its sprawling suburbs, is that the district has made a concerted effort to integrate the schools economically.

Since 2000, school officials have used income as a prime factor in assigning students to schools, with the goal of limiting the proportion of low-income students in any school to no more than 40 percent.

The effort is the most ambitious in the country to create economically diverse public schools, and it is the most successful, according to several independent experts. La Crosse, Wis.; St. Lucie County, Fla.; San Francisco; Cambridge, Mass.; and Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C., have adopted economic integration plans.

In Wake County, only 40 percent of black students in grades three through eight scored at grade level on state tests a decade ago. Last spring, 80 percent did. Hispanic students have made similar strides. Overall, 91 percent of students in those grades scored at grade level in the spring, up from 79 percent 10 years ago.

School officials here have tried many tactics to improve student performance. Teachers get bonuses when their schools make significant progress in standardized tests, and the district uses sophisticated data gathering to identify, and respond to, students’ weaknesses.

Some of the strategies used in Wake County could be replicated across the country, the experts said, but they also cautioned that unusual circumstances have helped make the politically delicate task of economic integration possible here.

The school district is countywide, which makes it far easier to combine students from the city and suburbs. The county has a 30-year history of busing students for racial integration, and many parents and students are accustomed to long bus rides to distant schools. The local economy is robust, and the district is growing rapidly. And corporate leaders and newspaper editorial pages here have firmly supported economic diversity in the schools.

Some experts said the academic results in Wake County were particularly significant because they bolstered research that showed low-income students did best when they attended middle-class schools.

“Low-income students who have an opportunity to go to middle-class schools are surrounded by peers who have bigger dreams and who are more academically engaged,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who has written about economic integration in schools. “They are surrounded by parents who are more likely to be active in the school. And they are taught by teachers who more likely are highly qualified than the teachers in low-income schools.”

To achieve a balance of low- and middle-income children in every school, the Wake County school district encourages and sometimes requires students to attend schools far from home. Suburban students are drawn to magnet schools in the city. Low-income children from the city are bused to middle-class schools in the suburbs.

Some parents chafe at the length of their children’s bus rides or at what they see as social engineering. But the test results are hard to dispute, proponents of economic integration say, as is the broad appeal of the school district, which has been growing by 5,000 students a year.

“What I say to parents is, ‘Here is what you should hold me accountable for: at the end of that bus ride, are we providing a quality education for your child?’ ” Bill McNeal, the school superintendent, said.

Asked how parents respond, Mr. McNeal said, “They are coming back, and they are bringing their friends.”

Not everyone supports the strategy. Some parents deeply oppose mandatory assignments to schools. Every winter, the district, using a complicated formula, develops a list of students who will be reassigned to new schools for the following academic year, and nearly every year some parents object vehemently.

“Kids are bused all over creation, and they say it’s for economic diversity, but really it’s a proxy for race,” said Cynthia Matson, who is white and middle class. She is the president and a founder of Assignment By Choice, an advocacy group promoting parental choice.

The organization wants parents to be responsible for selecting schools, and it objects to restrictions that, in certain circumstances, make it difficult for some middle-class children to get into magnet schools.

“If a parent wants their kid bused, then let them make the choice,” Mrs. Matson said. “But don’t force parents to have their kids bused across town to go to a school that they don’t want to go to.”

Supporters of economic integration contend that the county offers parents many choices but that the school district needs the discretion to assign some children to schools to avoid large concentrations of poor children. “I believe in choice as much as anyone,” Mr. McNeal said. “However, I can’t let choice erode our ability to provide quality programs and quality teaching.”

The board of education had two motives when it decided to make economic integration a main element in the district’s strategy: board members feared that the county’s three-decade effort to integrate public schools racially would be found unconstitutional if challenged in the federal courts, and they took note of numerous studies that showed the academic benefits of economically diversifying schools.

“There is a lot of evidence that it’s just sound educational policy, sound public policy, to try to avoid concentrations of low-achieving students,” said John H. Gilbert, a professor emeritus at North Carolina State University in Raleigh who served for 16 years on the county school board and voted for the plan. “They do much better and advantaged students are not hurt by it if you follow policies that avoid concentrating low-achievement students.”

One sign of the success of the Wake County plan, Mr. Gilbert said, is that residential property values in Raleigh have remained high, as have those in the suburbs. “The economy is really saying something about the effort in the city,” he said.

About 27 percent of the county’s students are low-income, a proportion that has increased slightly in recent years. While many are black and Hispanic, about 15 percent are white. Moreover, more than 40 percent of the district’s black students are working- and middle-class, and not poor.

Wake County has used many strategies to limit the proportion of low-income students in schools to 40 percent. For example, magnet schools lure many suburban parents to the city.

Betty Trevino lives in Fuquay-Varina, a town in southern Wake County. Ms. Trevino drives her son, Eric, 5, to and from the Joyner Elementary School, where he goes to kindergarten. Students are taught in English and Spanish, and global themes are emphasized at the school, which is north of downtown Raleigh, more than 20 miles from the Trevinos’ home. With traffic, the trip takes 45 minutes each way.

“I think it works,” she said of her drive halfway across the county, “because it’s such a good school.”

Many low-income children are bused to suburban schools. While some of their parents are unhappy with the length of the rides, some also said they were happy with their child’s school.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” LaToya Mangum said of the 55 minutes that her son Gabriel, 7, spends riding a bus to the northern reaches of Wake County, where he is in second grade. On the other hand, she said, “So far, I do like the school.”

The neighborhood school has been redefined, with complex logistics and attendance maps that can resemble madly gerrymandered Congressional districts.

The Swift Creek Elementary School, in southwest Raleigh near the city line, draws most of its students from within two miles of the school, in both the city and suburbs. But students also come to Swift Creek from four widely scattered areas in low-income sections of south and southeastern Raleigh; some live 6 to 8 miles from the school, while others are as far as 12 miles away.

Ela Browder lives in Cary, an affluent, sprawling suburb, but each morning she puts her 6-year-old son, Michael, on a bus for a short ride across the city line to Swift Creek.

“We’re very happy with the school,” Ms. Browder said. “The children are very enriched by it. I think it’s the best of both worlds.”

Of the county’s 139 elementary, middle and high schools, all but 22 are within the 40 percent guideline, according to the district’s data. Some are only a few percentage points above the guideline, while others are significantly higher.

The overwhelming majority of the 120,000 children in the district go either to a local school or a school of their choice, officials said. Slightly more than 85 percent of students attend a school within five miles of home and another 12 percent or so voluntarily attend magnet or year-round schools.

Although the figures can be calculated many ways, Mr. McNeal says about 2.5 percent – or about 3,000 children – are assigned to schools for economic balance or to accommodate the district’s growth by filling new schools or easing overcrowding in existing ones. Most of those bused for economic diversity tend to be low-income, he said.

A school board election will take place in October. While the board has continued to endorse economic integration, some supporters worry that that could change one day.

“It’s not easy and it can be very contentious in the community,” said Walter C. Sherlin, who retired two years ago as an associate superintendent. “Is it worth doing? Look at 91 percent at or above grade level. Look at 139 schools, all of them successful. I think the answer is obvious.”

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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This short piece by Gerald Bracey is one of the best overviews/critiques of the No Child Left Behind Act that I’ve seen. Highly recommededed.

You can download it as a PDF here.

Or read it below.

THE SEVEN DEADLY ABSURDITIES OF NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND

Gerald W. Bracey

Gerald W. Bracey is an Associate of the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, Ypsilanti, Michigan and a fellow of the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University. His most recent book is Setting the Record Straight: Responses to Misconceptions About Public Education in the U. S.: Second Edition (Heinemann, 2004).

A recent website headline read “Revolt Against No Child Left Behind Spreads to 47 States.” It’s about time. If one considers Iraq and Katrina to be twin disasters for the Bush Administration, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) makes it a trifecta. Although the law consumes over 1100 pages, its most egregious flaws can be quickly described as The Seven Deadly Absurdities:

1. The law uses the phrase “scientifically based research” 111 times and demands that such research support any educational programs that a school or district adopts. The U. S. Department of Education judged that the reading program favored by New York City lacked such support and withheld $47 million in grants until the city caved. But there is no scientifically based research—or any research—to support the law’s mandates. No research supports NCLB’s contention that the way to improve schools is to test every child every year and to fail schools and districts that do no make the required—and wholly arbitrary–Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). Indeed, research argues against the use of such high-stakes testing as an instrument of school reform. Tests that serve as useful monitors lose their credibility, validity and value when high stakes are attached. As researcher Donald Campbell noted many years ago, the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more the indicator and the users are likely become corrupted.

2. NCLB lacks research support because NCLB depends solely on punishment. As schools fail to make the arbitrary AYP, the law imposes punitive, increasingly harsh sanctions. The law follows the grand tradition of “the beatings will continue until morale improves.”

3. Even those who think punishment can motivate people would never use it as NCLB does. It punishes the entire school for the failures of the few, often the very few. If a school’s special education students fail to make AYP, the whole school fails. If a school’s English language learners fail to make AYP the whole school fails. If a mere 5% of any group fails to show up on test day, the whole school fails. NCLB requires schools to report test score data by various student categories— ethnicity, socioeconomic status, special education, etc. Most schools have 37 such categories (California has more). Schools thus have 37 opportunities to fail, only one to succeed.

4. The law demands that all students must be proficient in reading, math, and science by 2014. In his 2003 presidential address to the American Educational Research Association, testing expert Robert Linn projected it would take 61 years, 66 years, and 166 years, respectively, to get fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-graders to the proficient level in math. Alas, Linn’s projections are wildly optimistic. They assume that each increase in percent proficient is equally easy to attain. It is obvious, though, that it is easier to make AYP the first few years than in the last few when schools will be working with children for whom all previous efforts have failed. Indeed, stories abound of schools currently targeting “bubble children”—those on the bubble near a passing score—in order to maximize their chances for making AYP.

Moreover, Linn created his projections from national results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, not data disaggregated by ethnicity. In the 2003, though, only 5 percent of African-American eighth graders and 7 percent of Hispanics were proficient in math. Only 37 percent of whites, 43 percent of Asians, and 15 percent of Native Americans reached this plateau. A recent journal article found the 100% proficient requirement so irrational it could well be unconstitutional.

5. As a consequence of #3 and #4 above, California projects that by the deadline year of 2014, NCLB will label 99 percent of its schools “failing.” California students generally do poorly tests, but high-scoring states will experience massive failure as well. For instance, in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, only 6 of the 41 participating countries outscored high-flying Minnesota in mathematics and only one of 41 attained a higher science score. Yet the state’s Legislative Auditor projected that by 2014, NCLB will find 80 percent of Minnesota’s schools wanting. A September, 2005 study estimated a 95% failure rate for six Great Lakes states, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota.

6. Any school that fails to make AYP for two consecutive years must offer all students the option to transfer to a “successful” school. Thus, if a school’s special education students or English Language Learners fail to make AYP two years in a row, the school must offer all students the “choice option” in spite of the fact that the school succeeded for the other 35 student categories.

In cities and rural areas, the choice option is a farce. To exercise choice in some rural areas entails a two-hour ride. In some parts of Alaska and Hawaii it requires airplanes. In 2004-2005, Chicago had 200,000 students eligible, but only 500 spaces for them. Although New York had more eligibles than Chicago—about 350,000—in 2003-2004, only 8,000 students chose to transfer. These 8,000, though, apparently created so much havoc in the receiving schools that principals rebelled. Responding to these principals, public schools Chancellor, Joel Klein, deliberately flouted the law, permitting only 1,000 transfers. Thus far, the Department of Education has not responded to Klein’s scofflaw defiance.

7. This is the biggie: Schools alone cannot possibly accomplish what NCLB demands. But this is what NCLB mandates. It commands schools, all by themselves, to close the achievement gap between affluent and poor, majority and minority. This is ridiculous. The gap appears before kids reach school—one study found that the three-year-olds of professional mothers used more words when interacting with their mothers than mothers on welfare used in interacting with their three-year-olds. That’s right, three year old kids in one group used more words than adults in another group. After all, if one assumes a six-hour school day and a 180-day school year, then between birth and age18 children spend only 9 percent of their lives in schools. Family and community factors such as poverty affect achievement (asthma and low birth-weight infants are epidemic in some city slums; fathers and libraries in short supply). Poor children enter school well behind their middle class peers. They learn the same amount during the school year, but they lose the gains over the summer and they fall farther and farther behind. Critics blame the schools for what happens in the months the schools are closed.

Other absurdities exist–for instance, the contention that any student not “proficient” is “left behind” promotes a false dichotomy. If the threshold for “proficient” is, say, a test score of 80, then a child who scores 79 is “left behind.” In actuality, achievement is a continuum, not a dichotomy.

Some have always viewed NCLB as yet another Bush administration Orwellian Double Speak program doing the opposite of what its name implies—like Clean Waters, Clear Skies, Healthy Forests. Behind the cover of its idealistic-sounding moniker, No Child Left Behind really intends to increase the use of vouchers, increase the privatization of public schools, transfer large sums of public funds to the private sector, reduce the size of the public sector, and weaken or destroy the teachers unions (two Democratic power bases). It is working.

Although children and their teachers lose under the law, the testing companies have benefited mightily from it. F. Peter Jovanovich of the mammoth Pearson Education looked at NCLB and said, “This reads almost like our business plan.” Then-Educational Testing Service vice president, Sharon Robinson, reportedly called the law “The Test Publishers Full Employment Act.” The law gifts testing companies over $2 billion annually.

The hot properties currently, though, are those that provide tutoring and other instruction that the law designates as “Supplementary Educational Services.” Nationally, some 1800 providers can collect as much as $2 billion dollars a year. And, while the law holds public schools accountable for making progress or not, it visits no such sanctions on these private companies. The test preparation and tutoring companies have no obligation to prove that their programs actually work and no “scientifically based research” supports the contention that they do. No one is looking at the results of the Supplementary Educational Services. U. S. Department of Education spokespeople are on record saying that they merely want to create conditions such that “the market [for providers] can be as vibrant as possible.” (In fact, such services were not a part of the original plan. That plan called for vouchers to send students to private schools. The supplemental services were added when Congress rejected the voucher provisions. If FEMA had responded as quickly to Katrina as the administration turned to vouchers as part of its Katrina repair program, Michael Brown might still head the agency).

An enduring mystery of NCLB is that prominent Democrats such as Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and George Miller of California supported its passage. In spring, 2004, Senator Kennedy and Representative Miller received information, both by email and postal service mail, explaining the logic of the outcomes described above. Senator Kennedy did not respond. From Representative Miller’s office, a staffer emailed a single sentence: “I certainly hope not.” From such a response one must conclude that Congress is not giving NCLB the critical scrutiny it requires.

The current law mandates annual testing for all children in grades three through eight in reading and math with science to be added in 2007. It also requires testing in one high school grade, to be decided by each state. President Bush has proposed extending the testing through the high school years. Given the chaos that the current law is producing in the lower grades, Bush’s proposal constitutes the domestic equivalent of invading Iran.

Notes:

(i) Formally, Campbell’s Law states, “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures, and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

(ii) The speech was published in the October 2003 Educational Researcher.

(iii) Wiley, Edward, Mathis, William and Garcia, David. “The Impact of the AYP Requirement of the Federal “No Child Left Behind” Act on Schools in the Great Lakes Region. www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/EPRU/documents/EPSL-0509-109-EPRU.pdf.

(iv) Betty Hart and Todd Risley, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young Children. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes, 1995.

(v) “Alexander, Karl, Entwisle, Doris, and Olson, Linda, “Schools Achievement, and Inequality: A Seasonal Perspective. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Summer, 2001.

(vi) Bracey, Gerald W., No Child Left Behind: Where Does the Money Go? www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/EPRU/documents/EPSL-0506-114-EPRU.pdf

(vii) Ibid.

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Dallas Morning News: Authors cite low rate of improvement, effects on minority students

Study faults high-stakes testing
Authors cite low rate of improvement, effect on minorities

09:59 PM CDT on Tuesday, September 20, 2005

By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN – High-stakes testing in Texas and across the nation has had little impact on student achievement and is disproportionately targeting minority students – as evidenced by increased retention and dropout rates in many states – according to a study by researchers in Texas and Arizona.

The study, which examined the impact of high-stakes testing in Texas and 24 other states, found “no convincing evidence” that the pressure associated with those tests – such as threatened sanctions for low scores – produced better student achievement than would otherwise have been expected.

“A rapidly growing body of research evidence on the harmful effects of high-stakes testing, along with no reliable evidence of improved performance by students, suggests that we need a moratorium in public education on the use of high-stakes testing,” said Sharon L. Nichols of the University of Texas at San Antonio, lead author of the report.

The study, released Tuesday by the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University, was undertaken to gauge the impact of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. States are required under the law to administer standardized tests that are used to hold schools and school districts accountable for student achievement.

Dr. Nichols and the research team reached their conclusions by creating a so-called Pressure Rating Index that ranked states based on how much pressure they put on schools to improve test scores. Texas had the highest index – based on tougher requirements and other factors – and Kentucky had the lowest among the 25 states.

Scores of each state on the National Assessment of Educational Progress were then evaluated against the indexes to determine whether a higher level of pressure on schools produced higher scores on the national test.

“The theory of action implied by this accountability program is that the pressure of high-stakes testing will increase student achievement,” the researchers said. “But this study finds that pressure created by high-stakes testing has had almost no important influence on student academic performance.”

Among the key findings of the study, titled “High-Stakes Testing and Student Achievement: Problems for the No Child Left Behind Act,” were:

•States with greater proportions of minority students implemented accountability systems that exerted greater pressure on educators and their schools. An unintended consequence is that problems associated with high-stakes testing disproportionately affect minority students.

•Increased testing pressure is related to increased retention and dropout rates. High-stakes testing in some states has increased the number the number of students – beginning with the eighth grade – who will leave school before their senior year in high school.

•Reading scores on the NAEP – administered in grades four and eight – did not improve as a result of increased testing pressure. That finding was consistent across all ethnic groups. While there was a weak correlation between pressure and fourth-grade math scores, researchers said the connection was more likely the result of “teaching to the test.”

Dr. Nichols said Tuesday that while all states fall under the basic mandates of the No Child Left Behind Act, states have discretion in meeting the requirements – such as the minimum percentage of students that must pass the state achievement test for the school campus or district to hit annual improvement targets.

In Texas, schools must show “Adequate Yearly Progress” on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.

Unlike Texas, which puts most of the emphasis on TAKS scores, Kentucky considers other criteria such as teacher evaluations of students, according to Dr. Nichols.

This year, nearly 87 percent of school districts and 77 percent of campuses in Texas made adequate progress under the federal law. Both figures were down sharply from a year ago because of tougher standards that took effect in the 2004-05 school year. For example, more students had to pass the math and reading sections of the TAKS.

E-mail tstutz@dallasnews.com

Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/092105dntextesting.1294db47.html

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