Re: zero

["GERALD BRACEY" <gbracey1@verizon.net>]

The Iraqi Communication Minister has been genetically merged with Polyanna.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: <aburke5054@aol.com>
To: <arn-l@interversity.org>
Sent: Friday, March 16, 2007 6:33 PM
Subject: Re: [arn-l] zero


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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