Re: NCLB Stalled, But Still Armed and Dangerous

[aburke5054@aol.com]

 Only a charlatan, or someone hopelessly naive or terminally deluded could claim, as Karp does in the second paragraph, that NCLB promotes a "test and punish" agenda.? The remainder of the piece goes downhill from there.

Art


 

-----Original Message-----
From: MONICALUCIDO@comcast.net
To: arn-l@interversity.org
Sent: Mon, 26 Nov 2007 8:47 pm
Subject: [arn-l] NCLB Stalled, But Still Armed and Dangerous










NCLB Stalled, But Still Armed and Dangerous
by Stan Karp
November 17, 2007
Rethinking Schools
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George Miller is not making adequate yearly progress. Neither is Ted Kennedy.
 
As a result, reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law has been 
left behind, at least for now. Last month, Rep. Miller (D-Calif.) and Sen. 
Kennedy (D-Mass.), the two main Democratic co-sponsors of the original 
legislation and the key congressional committee chairs pushing for its renewal, 
conceded that the prospects of passing a reauthorization bill in 2007 had faded. 
Prospects for 2008 are not looking good either.
 
But while the bipartisan consensus that passed NCLB in 2001 has fragmented, the 
old, unimproved version of the law is not going away anytime soon, and a better 
one is nowhere on the horizon. This means NCLB's "test and punish" approach to 
education reform will continue to abuse schools across the country and its 
impact will worsen as increasingly unreachable test score targets and more 
drastic penalties kick in.
 
The law technically expired on Sept. 30, but was automatically renewed for one 
year. Congressional committee work on House and Senate bills will continue and 
efforts may still be made to move a reauthorization bill next year. But election 
year politics makes passage unlikely.
 
This means the existing law is likely to be in place for at least several more 
years. Based on NCLB's track record so far, the consequences will be uniformly 
negative:
 
Thousands more schools will be sanctioned for failing to make adequate yearly 
progress. The number identified for the law's more drastic sanctions, including 
"restructuring" and closure, will far exceed the capacity to respond 
effectively.
 
A host of unproven "interventions" for schools deemed "in need of improvement" 
will sow chaos, feed privatization schemes, and further erode support for public 
education
 
The curriculum will continue to narrow to what is poorly tested by multiple 
choice questions.
 
Special needs students and English language learners will be subjected to more 
federally mandated educational malpractice, including test-driven standardized 
instruction that ignores the very special needs that gave rise to these 
categories.
 
Parents will continue to be pitted against teachers in a politicized "blame 
game" for school and student "failure" that is wrongly defined and inadequately 
addressed.
 
Tens of millions of dollars in public funds will be siphoned off by publishers 
of standardized tests and curriculum materials, private educational management 
firms, and barely regulated supplemental educational service providers.
 
Academic achievement gaps, and the multiple inequities in opportunity and 
resources that they reflect, will remain far beyond the reach of NCLB's 
punitive, privatizing approach to school reform.
 
The law's many contradictions will sharpen as the deadline nears for meeting 
NCLB's central mandate that 100 percent of all students achieve proficiency on 
state tests by 2014. There are numerous reasons that this dubious goal will not 
be met, some that expose the law's fundamental lack of reality or fairness. For 
example, the subgroup of English language learners (ELL) is made up of students 
who have not yet learned the language the tests are given in. When they learn 
it, they're no longer in the group. So the prospects that the ELL subgroup will 
ever be 100 percent proficient on state tests is, by definition, non-existent. 
There are many other examples of how NCLB sets up schools to fail.
 
As the Boston-based advocacy group FairTest noted, "The real problem is that the 
goal that all children will score proficient in 2014 is totally arbitrary, lacks 
any evidence of feasibility, and therefore produces educationally questionable 
and harmful responses by those who bear the brunt of the sanctions."
 
During the first six years of NCLB implementation many schools, states and 
districts avoided sanctions for missing their adequate yearly progress (AYP) 
targets by employing a variety of maneuvers: lowering the passing scores on 
state tests, changing the minimum size of subgroups to exclude certain scores 
(such as special education students) and projecting exaggerated test score 
progress as the 2014 deadline approaches (a "balloon mortgage" approach to AYP).
 
Over the next several years, most of these gimmicks will have run their course. 
The remaining students not passing the tests will be less susceptible to quick 
fix test prep "solutions," while the AYP benchmarks will steadily rise to levels 
that no real schools have ever met. The longer the NCLB testing regime remains 
in place as is, the more schools it will trap. A review by FairTest of studies 
in 11 states projected that most will eventually see failure rates in the 80 
percent to 100 percent range.
 
Providing "safety valves" for this increasing pressure was a major aim of 
numerous reauthorization proposals. Reforming the AYP system with "growth 
models" and more "flexible formulas" would not have fundamentally changed it. 
But it would have partially addressed concerns that the NCLB dragnet was 
over-identifying "schools in need of improvement." With reauthorization bogged 
down, this won't happen any time soon. (However, we can expect more regulatory 
sleight-of-hand from the U.S. Department of Education which has shown a tendency 
to issue regulations that allow more privileged and more racially homogeneous 
suburban districts and schools to avoid sanctions, while more diverse urban ones 
are flagged for penalties.)
 
Reforming the AYP system was just one of many thorny reauthorization issues that 
complicated congressional deal making. Six years of partisan battles over 
funding levels eroded the basic bargain Democrats contended they had entered 
into with Bush, linking significant increases in federal education spending to 
increased testing and "accountability" mandates. (Kennedy claims Bush came up 
$56 billion short of his promises.) Midterm elections also brought some 
candidates who had campaigned against NCLB back to a Democratically controlled 
Congress. Massive grassroots pushback from their members and congressional 
flirtations with merit pay schemes weakened support for the law within the 
National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers. A 
FairTest-led coalition of nearly 150 civil rights, religious and education 
groups pressing for radical revision of the law undercut the illusion, nourished 
by the Washington-based Education Trust that the civil rights community st
 ood so
lidly behind NCLB.
 
On the Republican side, a weakened President Bush couldn't keep his own party 
members from breaking ranks. Last spring, 65 Republican Congress members signed 
a petition supporting the right of states to opt out of NCLB without losing 
federal funding. Scandals over the Education Department's handling of "Reading 
First" contracts and direct payments to selected media outlets to shill for the 
law added a taint of corruption to what was regularly misrepresented as Bush's 
"most successful" domestic accomplishment. With Bush setting his own benchmarks 
for failure and declining popularity, conservative support for the law eroded.
 
But as noted above, the stalled effort to reauthorize NCLB is a mixed bag. While 
congressional prospects for turning NCLB from a test and punish law into a 
credible school improvement measure were never very good, leaving NCLB in place 
as it exists is no solution either. The Business Roundtable and the Chamber of 
Commerce, which stood firm for renewal of NCLB in its current form, don't yet 
have the reauthorization they wanted, but the status quo remains intact and that 
is not good for public education.
 
The impasse sheds light on a larger issue. In almost every area of federal 
policy, successive Reagan/Bush Administrations, aided and abetted by 
Clinton-style neo-liberal Democrats, have put in place regressive legislative 
and regulatory policy frameworks. From the imperial conduct of foreign policy to 
the erosion of basic civil liberties and human rights to the systematic 
dismantling of the regulatory agencies designed to protect everything from food 
safety to forest lands, anti-social, pro-privatization frameworks are now deeply 
embedded in federal policy and practice.
 
NCLB is one of these policy frameworks. It reflects a fundamental shift in 
federal policy that has dramatically expanded the federal role in education, but 
transformed it for the worse. Historically, federal education policy -- in an 
area that has always been primarily a state and local responsibility -- was 
designed to promote access and equity, for example, through school integration, 
financial aid for poor schools, and programs for special needs students. Under 
Bush and No Child Left Behind, the goals of access and equity have been 
superceded by federal mandates to promote test-driven, top-down "standards and 
accountability" on every school and district in the country.
 
For Bush and company, this is a thinly veiled plan to systematically discredit 
and privatize public education. But despite the primary inspired bashing of NCLB 
by Democratic presidential candidates, most congressional Democrats, themselves 
nourished on years of business roundtables and governors' education summits, 
have also drunk the standards and testing "Kool-Aid." They have been full 
partners and enablers of the mainstream marriage between test-based 
"accountability" and punitive sanctions. The Democrats have also largely 
abandoned the commitments to equal opportunity that once framed federal 
education policy, at least rhetorically.
 
As bilingual education advocate James Crawford has written, "Despite its stated 
goals, the No Child Left Behind law represents a diminished vision of civil 
rights. Educational equity is reduced to equalizing test scores. The effect has 
been to impoverish the educational experience of minority students -- that is, 
to reinforce the two-tier system of public schools that civil rights advocates 
once challenged."
 
Uprooting neo-liberal policy frameworks, like NCLB, will take much more than 
replacing Bush with a Democratic president. Much as the massive sentiment 
against the Iraq war was enough to give Democrats control of Congress but so far 
not enough to force them to do anything very useful with it, the train wreck 
that is NCLB can't be avoided if the parties in power remain on the same track.
 
 
Stan Karp is a Rethinking Schools editor. This article will appear in the winter 
issue of Rethinking Schools.
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