deluded to the max

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

Art,

As someone who wrote an anti-NCLB tract before the plan even had a name, almost a full year before the plan became law (Newsday, January 28, 2001), I would like to pronounce my self at this time King of the Terminally Deluded and ask a few questions from the throne.

1).  If the goal of NCLB was to improve public schools, why did it contain provisions for vouchers?  These were stripped in the Senate and replaced by the SES provisions, but John Boehner in the House tried on six separate occasions to get them back in and Bush pandered shamelessly to the Catholic schools in a cynical attempt to win the Catholic vote--his biggest pitch for vouchers was delivered to 350 Catholic educators at the White House (they were in town for a conference).  The value of the vouchers was so low--$1500--they would have been of interest principally to Catholic schools and unusable by the truly poor.

2).  Why does anyone think rising test scores = improved schools?  Back in 1991, Dan Koretz, Bob Linn, Steve Dunbar, and Lorrie Shepard (some fairly competent folk) showed that test scores don't generalize, even to other tests.  They noted that test scores attained a certain level on Test 1, then fell when the districts changed to Test2.  Scores on Test2 rose over the years, eventually attaining the same level as on the Test1.  The experimenters then returned and administered Test1.  Presto magico, the scores on Test1 were now as low as they had been on Test2 in the first year of Test2.

You castigate educators for gaming the testing system, but in so doing you ignore Campbell's Law (Donald, not Pete):  "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."  Hard to think of evidence for the law stronger than NCLB. 

Or, to repeat Bracey's Paradox, circa 1979,  Test Scores Only Mean Something When You Don't Pay Any Attention To Them.

David Berliner and Sharon Nichols will expand their long (188 pages) documented corruption from high-stakes testing in Collateral Damage, due out in February.  

3)  Why does anyone think 100% proficiency is attainable?  I tell audiences they can have a meaningful definition of proficient or they can have 100% proficiency.  Not both.  Human variability absolutely precludes it.  This view has now been elaborated in an important new paper from Richard Rothstein and colleagues, "Proficiency for All: An Oxymoron."  Interestingly when I saw a draft of this about a month ago, there was still a "?" at the end of the title although the paper totally negated that punctuation mark. www.epi.org/webfeatures/viewpoints/rothstein_20061114.pdf.  As with most Rotstein oeuvres, the paper is highly readable and scholarly at the same time.

There are more questions.  These will do for the moment.

Jerry