Re: zero

[aburke5054@aol.com]

 What nonsense. NCLB adopted the goal of 100 percent proficiency as a driver to improve schools. So what if not every child becomes proficient? Suppose that when 2014 rolls around every school in America has improved as a result of NCLB, and that many of them improved a great deal. Clearly American parents and kids, and all of American society would benefit, even if less than 100 percent of kids were proficient. People should stop confusing themselves by conflating the metric of students' proficiency with the metric of school improvement. The next version of ESEA/NCLB should clear that up, but it probably won't, because the same people who don't want their boats rocked by measures of students' proficiency sure won't want their boats rocked by measures of school improvement.
 
 As to the continuing argument that NCLB started out as a stealth tool to privatize public education, all I can say is that there are no off-ramps on the paranoia superhighway. 
  
 Art 
  
 -----Original Message-----
 From: gbracey1@verizon.net
 To: arn-l@interversity.org; LiteracyForAll@yahoogroups.com
 Sent: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 12:28 PM
 Subject: [arn-l] zero
 
  Here are a few words titled "The Zero Chance of 100% Success" which is a slight 
paraphrase of what Bob Linn told a joint Senate-House hearing about the odds of 
getting 100% of the kids proficient.  Anyone who wants a formatted version can 
find it at www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-bracey.  

Jerry
---------------------

THE ZERO PERCENT CHANCE OF 100 PERCENT SUCCESS

“There is a zero percent chance that we will ever reach a 100 percent target,” 
said Bob Linn at the March 13 joint House-Senate hearing on the No Child Left 
Behind law.  The Washington Post identified Bob as the co-director of the Center 
for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing at UCLA and the 
University of Colorado.  He had actually shown the impossibility of getting 100% 
of students to be proficient years ago by using wildly optimistic assumptions, 
to project 100% proficiency in12th grade mathematics166 years from now.

The article did not say that Bob is the most respected living psychometrician, a 
former president of both the American Educational Research Association and the 
National Council on Measurement in Education.  But that is true.  He’s perceived 
as fair and objective.  I can’t imagine anyone accusing him of grinding an ax.  
I’ve known him since 1967 and the only negative thing I have heard in those 
years is that when he gives a speech he speaks too slow [I KNOW IT SHUD BE 
SLOWLY BUT I THINK SLOW BRINGS IT TO A BETTER HALT].  In any case, those 
legislators damn well ought to have been listening closely.

“But because the title of the law is so rhetorically brilliant,” Bob went on, 
politicians are afraid to change this completely unrealistic standard.  They 
don’t want to be accused of leaving some children behind.”  Indeed, US Deputy 
Secretary of Education Ray Simon actually said “We need to stay the course.  The 
mission is doable, and we don’t need to back off that right now.”  The Post 
article did not say if the audience groaned as Simon intoned these painful Iraq 
war slogans.  I wonder if he also said “We can’t cut and run.”  

What Bob didn’t say is that behind that rhetorically brilliant title was a 
strategically brilliant plan to transfer huge sums of taxpayer money to the 
private sector through vouchers and the takeover of public schools by private 
corporations.  Teddie Kennedy blocked the vouchers but compromised by permitting 
them to be replaced by Supplemental Educational Services.  The SES deliver only 
a meager $2 billion of public funds each year.
  
“Are we going to rewrite the Declaration of Independence and say that only 85 
percent of men are created equal?”  This lame analogy from Lamar Alexander, 
mister-run-for-anything and currently a Senator from Tennessee.  Of course, 
African Americans can tell you a thing or two about that, stemming from their 
3/5 of a human reckoning in the Constitution.  (For that matter the phrase’ 
author, Thomas Jefferson, rejected it in matters academic, setting up a plan for 
education in Virginia whereby “twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from 
the rubbish annually”).  In any case equality was something we’re endowed with 
by our creator, not something we attain by bubbling in answer sheets properly.

The whole proficient-or-left-behind dichotomy is, of course, phony.  
Achievement, reasonably defined, is a continuum, not part of an either/or.  If 
we set the standard for “proficient” as a score of 80, would a student who 
scores 79 be “left behind?”  To say so would be absurd, but that’s how NCLB 
operates.  

Moreover, the whole debate focuses on the wrong thing.  From Jefferson’s time 
through the 1940’s the schools’ function was civic.  Jefferson argued that all 
governments degenerate and to prevent this, the people themselves needed to be 
educated.  It is only in the post-Sputnik years that the focus has shifted, 
mistakenly, from education as necessary to preserve democracy test scores uber 
alles as necessary to get a job and keep America competitive in the global 
economy.  

But test scores tell us little in the long run.  A 1974 paper from the American 
College Testing Program stated, “We conclude that academic talent as measured by 
test scores, high school grades and college grades is not related to significant 
adult accomplishment.  Though a certain level of academic talent may be 
necessary to complete medical school, for example, the grades of medical 
students appear unrelated to later success as physicians.”    

Thus, high-stakes testing as represented in NCLB, Texas’ TAKS, Virginia’s SOLs, 
Florida’s FCAT, etc., is demoralizing and corrupting teachers and administrators 
by gun-barrel  emphasis on something that is, in the long haul, trivial.  One 
can only hope that some day in the future we will look back and ask “What were 
we thinking?


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