NCLB Does Not Narrow Racial Test Score Gap

[Bob Schaeffer <bobschaeffer@earthlink.net>]

 SCHOOLS SLOW IN CLOSING GAPS BETWEEN RACES

New York Times -- November 20, 2006
by Sam Dillon

When President Bush signed his sweeping education law a year into his 
presidency, it set 2014 as the deadline by which schools were to close 
the test-score gaps between minority and white students that have 
persisted since standardized testing began.

Now, as Congress prepares to consider reauthorizing the law next year, 
researchers and a half-dozen recent studies, including three issued last 
week, are reporting little progress toward that goal. Slight gains have 
been seen for some grade levels.

Despite concerted efforts by educators, the test-score gaps are so large 
that, on average, African-American and Hispanic students in high school 
can read and do arithmetic at only the average level of whites in junior 
high school.

“The gaps between African-Americans and whites are showing very few 
signs of closing,” Michael T. Nettles, a senior vice president at the 
Educational Testing Service, said in a paper he presented recently at 
Columbia University. One ethnic minority, Asians, generally fares as 
well as or better than whites.

The reports and their authors, in interviews, portrayed an educational 
landscape in which test-score gaps between black or Hispanic students 
and whites appear in kindergarten and worsen through 12 years of public 
education.

Some researchers based their conclusions on federal test results, while 
others have cited state exams, the SATs and other widely administered 
standardized assessments. Still, the studies have all concurred: The 
achievement gaps remain, perplexing and persistent.

The findings pose a challenge not only for Mr. Bush but also for the 
Democratic lawmakers who joined him in negotiating the original law, 
known as No Child Left Behind, and who will control education policy in 
Congress next year.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Representative George 
Miller of California, who are expected to be the chairmen of the Senate 
and House education committees, will promote giving more resources to 
schools and researching strategies to improve minority performance, 
according to aides.

“Closing the achievement gap is at the heart of No Child Left Behind and 
must continue to be our focus in renewing the act next year,” Mr. 
Kennedy said in a statement.

Experts have suggested many possible changes, including improving the 
law’s mechanisms for ensuring that teachers in poor schools are 
experienced and knowledgeable, and extending early-childhood education 
to more students.

Henry L. Johnson, an assistant secretary of education, said: “I don’t 
dispute that looking at some comparisons we see that these gaps are not 
closing — or not as fast as they ought to. But it’s also accurate to say 
that when taken as a whole, student performance is improving. The 
presumption that we won’t get to 100 percent proficiency from here 
presumes that everything is static. To reach the 100 percent by 2014, 
we’ll all have to work faster and smarter.”

The law requires states, districts and schools to report annual test 
results for all racial and ethnic groups, and to show annual 
improvements for each. It imposes sanctions on schools that do not meet 
the rising targets.

Many experts and officials, including the president’s brother, Gov. Jeb 
Bush of Florida, have supported the goal of raising all students to 
academic proficiency, but they have also called it unrealistic to 
accomplish in a decade.

But President Bush, who put education at the center of his 2000 
campaign, has been insisting that it is not only feasible but that the 
gaps are already closing.

“There are good results of No Child Left Behind across the nation,” Mr. 
Bush said last month at a school in North Carolina. “We have an 
achievement gap in America that is — that I don’t like and you shouldn’t 
like.”

“The gap is closing,” he said.

The researchers behind the reports issued last week in Washington, D.C., 
New York and California were far more pessimistic, though.

“The achievement gap is alive and well,” said G. Gage Kingsbury, an 
author of the report issued in Washington by the Northwest Evaluation 
Association, a nonprofit group based in Oregon that administers tests.

Examining results from reading and math tests administered to 500,000 
students in 24 states in the fall of 2004 and the spring of 2005, the 
study found: “For each score level at each grade in each subject, 
minority students grew less than European-Americans, and students from 
poor schools grew less than those from wealthier ones.”

Minority and poor students also lost more academic ground each summer, 
the study said.

Ross Wiener, a principal partner at the Education Trust, a group that 
works to close achievement gaps and has consistently supported the 
federal law, called those findings “profoundly disturbing” and said it 
showed that schools continued to be a “significant source of 
disadvantage for minority students.”

“The Bush administration wants to hang a ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner 
over N.C.L.B., but a fair assessment is that progress thus far in 
closing achievement gaps is disappointing,” Mr. Weiner said. He pointed 
to financing and teacher assignment systems that lead to schools with 
mostly poor and minority students getting less money, offering fewer 
advanced courses and having weaker teachers.

The 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress, a battery of 
reading and math tests administered to thousands of students in every 
state, showed some rising scores for all ethnic groups, and the 
black-white score gap narrowed in a statistically significant way for 
fourth-grade math. But on fourth-grade reading, and on eighth-grade 
reading and math, the black-white and Hispanic-white gaps were 
statistically unchanged from the early 1990s.

Over the past three decades, the gaps narrowed steadily from the 1970s 
through the late 1980s but then leveled out through 1999. Since then, 
some have narrowed again, but at a rate that would allow them to persist 
for decades. That picture showed up in a separate National Assessment 
test devised to measure long-term trends, administered in late 2003 and 
early 2004.

That test showed that regardless of race, scores increased a bit over 
three decades for 9- and 13-year-old students, with the best gains 
coming between 1999 and 2004.

Test administrators warned against attributing those gains to the 
federal law, because it had been in effect for about only a year when 
the 2004 test was given. Prekindergarten programs, higher standards and 
increased testing carried out by many states during the 1990s also 
contributed, they said.

But Bush administration officials have routinely credited the law for 
the improved scores on that test.

A group that has supported the federal law, the Thomas B. Fordham 
Foundation, whose leaders include former officials from the Reagan and 
the current Bush administrations, conducted a review of state exams and 
other indicators and issued a report this month. It found that none of 
the 50 states had made widespread progress in narrowing the gaps, and 
that eight states, including New York and New Jersey, had made “moderate 
gains.”

Chester E. Finn Jr., the foundation president, said, “Poor and minority 
students are doing very poorly, and in most states are not making 
significant gains — and this in spite of N.C.L.B. and all the other 
reforms of the last 15 years.”

Suggestions abound for ways to narrow the score gaps faster. Since 
scholars have documented that minority children enter kindergarten with 
weaker reading skills than white children, some experts advocate 
increased public financing for early education programs.

No Child Left Behind provides money for tutoring in schools where 
students are not succeeding, but critics say it does not provide 
sufficient financing to help states and districts turn the schools 
themselves around.

Several of the new reports urged better provisions to ensure that poor 
and mostly minority schools have quality teachers, to reward teachers 
who help struggling students improve, and to keep good teachers from 
leaving city schools for higher-paying suburban ones.

“If I’m in a bad school and make serious progress, I need a reward,” Dr. 
Nettles said. “If you perform on Wall Street, you get a bonus.”

But the news is not all bad. Individual schools in some states have made 
progress in narrowing the gaps between black and white, Hispanic and 
white, and the poor and more affluent, according to a Standard & Poor’s 
unit that analyzes school performance.

The unit credited Morgan County Elementary School in Madison, Ga., with 
significantly raising the scores of black fourth and fifth graders. The 
principal, Jean Triplett, attributed that success in part to 
after-school tutoring by volunteers in black churches.

Edwin E. Weeks Elementary School in Syracuse was singled out for 
narrowing the gap between black and white students. Dare Dutter, the 
principal, credited a prekindergarten program and a school health clinic 
that helped keep poor students from missing class.

Standard & Poor’s has sifted test data from 16,000 schools in 18 states, 
identifying 718 schools making significant progress toward the national 
goal.

“They are the classic diamonds in the rough,” said Paul Gazzerro, 
director of analytics at Standard & Poor’s School Evaluation Services. 
“But in general, schools are not closing achievement gaps.”

One of the exceptions, the unit said, is Hoover Middle School in 
Lakewood, Calif., a community in Los Angeles County where the aircraft 
manufacturing industry has been hit by job losses. The school has raised 
Hispanic scores so much that in the spring of 2005 Hispanic students 
outperformed whites, said the principal, Michael L. Troyer. He said the 
progress resulted from focused instruction, frequent diagnostic testing 
and several tutoring programs.

“Some of it’s after school, teachers do it at lunch, and we have people 
who tutor in the morning before school, too,” Mr. Troyer said.

Across California, however, achievement gaps have not narrowed, and in 
some cases they have widened since 2001, according to a study of 
California test results released last week by Policy Analysis for 
California Education, a research center run jointly by the University of 
California and Stanford.

“Not only have all boats stopped rising, but the boats that are under 
water are sinking further down,” said Bruce Fuller, an education 
professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who contributed to 
the study.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/20/education/20gap.htm