CA Accountability Program Fails Federal Standards

[George Sheridan <gsheridan@BOMUSD.EDCOE.K12.CA.US>]

Peter Schrag: Testing, accountability and wedge politics
(Published in the Sacramento Bee Jan. 31, 2001) 
http://www.sacbee.com/voices/news/voices04_20010131.html

Last week, at almost the same moment President Bush announced his education 
program, which is focused on testing and accountability, along comes a 
letter from the Clinton administration, sent Jan. 19, its last full day in 
office, declaring that California's testing and accountability program 
doesn't meet federal standards.

Were those gremlins that snatched the W's off the White House computer 
keyboards just playing another merry prank? No, the letter, sent to state 
schools chief Delaine Eastin and signed by U.S. Assistant Education 
Secretary Michael Cohen, appeared to be in deadly earnest. The SAT9 test 
that the state uses, said Cohen, isn't aligned with the state's standards, 
and the "augmented" items, questions that are supposed to be based on the 
standards, haven't been validated.

"No evidence was provided," says the letter, that the state's review 
process "ensures fairness and accessibility of the assessments. Moreover, 
no evidence was provided on the way the state will ensure that the 
assessment results are comparable for different schools and for different 
years, nor of systematic plans for reviewing and improving the assessments."

Moreover, the letter states, the tests aren't valid for students with 
limited proficiency in English. Unless the state acts quickly, its federal 
Title I funding, which is designed to help disadvantaged students, could be 
in jeopardy.

All this, no doubt, will get fixed when the appropriate Bush administration 
official finds his desk. But it is an indication of how murky and marginal 
all this federal rule-making can get.

California, like the great majority of other states, already has in place 
almost precisely the state-devised testing and accountability plans 
requiring schools to show annual progress that the Bush proposals 
contemplate. A few don't test in every year between grades three and eight 
in reading and math, as Bush wants, but even they could easily adapt their 
testing programs to that requirement.

While no one yet knows what it will regard as adequate progress, the new 
administration presumably will review state proposals to make certain they 
meet some minimal criteria. Bush is not likely to get Congress to buy his 
voucher program, which would allow poor children in failing schools to use 
$1,500 in Title I money for tutoring or private school tuition.

But if Congress attaches any financial sanctions to state or local failure 
to show progress, states that had on their own been demanding as much as 
possible -- and often more than could be expected -- in the way of test 
scores from their schools and students will be tempted to reverse course. 
If the feds are going to punish you for failure, why make things 
unnecessarily hard for yourself?

There are important elements in the Bush plan that have hardly been 
discussed -- among them the teacher-training proposals and the literacy 
initiative, which places Washington squarely behind phonics-based 
approaches in teaching reading. While phonics has strong research support, 
the proposal gives Washington a stronger role in telling state and local 
districts how to teach than it's ever had before.

At the same time, the testing and accountability proposals, which are 
getting all the attention, add only incrementally, and sometimes not at 
all, to what the states are doing. Nor does Bush attempt to force states to 
use their federal Title I money more efficiently. As the lame-duck Clinton 
administration warning to California indicates, both the administration and 
Congress have been trying for years, generally with little success, to make 
the states more accountable.

But testing and accountability, like vouchers, have enormous political 
importance, the former because they require little that's new and are 
likely to produce a quick, uncontroversial bipartisan success, the latter 
because, paradoxically, they offer Bush and the GOP a great opportunity for 
wedge politics down the road.

In the past 10 days, there's been a love-in between Bush and Rep. George 
Miller, the liberal from Contra Costa County who is now the ranking 
Democrat on the House Education and Work Force Committee. Miller also likes 
testing and accountability. But at this point there's hardly anyone on the 
Hill who doesn't, provided that they don't make too many parents worry that 
their kids won't get their diplomas or cost too many districts their 
federal money.

The school proposals are a great (and maybe a rare) opportunity to show 
that everybody can work together. (Meantime, Bush is slowly draining the 
rage of Florida out of the Democrats.) Ditto for the president's brilliant 
show of flexibility on vouchers. His proposal -- allowing poor kids in 
chronically failing schools to take their Title I money as a "scholarship" 
-- was always too limited in scope and funding to be more than a symbol.

But as a symbol it's great, not only because its focus on poor kids 
burnishes the president's mantle of compassionate conservatism -- the play 
to moderates -- but also because it will be mighty useful in poor and 
minority communities.

Bush failed dismally to attract black voters last year, but vouchers have 
increasingly strong support in minority communities, where many kids are 
stuck in ugly, dangerous, dead-end schools. Bush and Secretary of Education 
Rod Paige, himself a product of segregated Southern schools, can make a 
strong case that it's Democrats, in thrall to teachers unions, who are 
resisting vouchers and keeping them there. That could make things more than 
a little uncomfortable for a lot of them.

Peter Schrag appears on this page Wednesdays. He can be reached at Box 
15779, Sacramento, CA, 95852-0779, or at pschrag@sacbee.com


Copyright © The Sacramento Bee


George Sheridan

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