Re: Finn & Hess: NCLB threatens education gains.

[Erwin Morton <erwin@morton.net>]

Hi, Monty --

Chester Finn wrote this???
> At its heart, today's NCLB amounts to a civil rights
> manifesto dressed up as an accountability system.
Have I had it backwards all this time?  I always thought
NCLB was an "accountability" system dressed up as
a civil rights manifesto.

And perhaps I've been mishearing everything else
Checker has been saying for the past however many
years; or perhaps there's some serious "discovery
learning", or at least an "Aha!" moment, going on here.

But then there's this stuff about NCLB ...
> threaten[ing] to undermine two decades of hard-won
> gains on educational accountability
Silly me.  I always thought the goal of education reform
was supposed to be gains in student learning and
understanding.  I guess that still doesn't matter, as
long as we have measurement and accountability.

It feels as if I've gone through the looking-glass -- or
perhaps gone halfway through and gotten stuck in a
twilight zone in the middle.

Cheers --

-- Erwin




Monty Neill wrote:
> Joel Packer of NEA forwarded this. It further opens what now might 
> become an opportunity to go after the absurdity/insanity in NCLB, that 
> by threatening educators and testing children, the kids will all score 
> "proficient" in 2014. While multiple measures, multiple (local and 
> performance) assessments and sanctions have been at least modestly 
> (though inadequately) addressed in the House discussion draft on NCLB, 
> 2014 and AYP have not. It is the entire interlocked structure that is 
> causing the reduction of schooling to test prep in two subjects, with 
> ironically an ensuing slowdown in score gains in reading and math on 
> NAEP at grades 4 and 8. BTW, FairTest does not support Fordham's 
> support for national tests, nor do we believe that state 
> accountability systems have been a beneficial approach to school 
> improvement - indeed, they have had many of the same damaging effects 
> as NCLB. That is, NCLB is state systems on steroids. Monty
> Just published in Checker's newsletter (Fordham Fdn) - NCLB continues 
> to produce interesting bedfellows.
>
> From Checker's and Rick's Desks
>
> Leave no (none, zero, nada) child behind?
>
> Passed by Congress in late 2001 and signed by President George W. Bush 
> one year after his inauguration, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) 
> is the most ambitious federal education statute ever.
>
> After five years of experience with a statute that aims to produce 
> ''universal proficiency'' (in math and reading, mainly in grades 3-8) 
> by 2014, and with reauthorization looming, it's time to draw some 
> conclusions about how NCLB has unfolded on the ground--and how it 
> ought to be changed.
>
> Much has been written about NCLB's particular testing regimen. Far 
> less has been written about the law's remedies, whereby a Title I 
> school that fails to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) is subject to 
> a parade of stiffening interventions designed to change it and give 
> new options to its students. Our new book pries into this facet of 
> NCLB to examine these remedies and their effectiveness (you can read 
> more about our findings here and here).
>
> But as Congress sets about reauthorizing the law, diving into its 
> innards to tweak this and that, it will pay insufficient heed to 
> NCLB's main problem, which is not concerned with tests or remedies but 
> with philosophy.
>
> The law began with the noble yet naïve promise that every U.S. 
> schoolchild will attain ''proficiency'' in reading and math by 2014. 
> While there is no doubt that the number of ''proficient'' students can 
> and should increase dramatically from today's 30-ish percent (using 
> the National Assessment definition of proficiency), and while the 
> achievement of children below the proficient level also can and should 
> rise closer to proficiency, no educator in America believes that 
> universal proficiency will, in fact, be attained by 2014, not, at 
> least, by any reasonable definition of proficiency. Only politicians 
> promise such things. The inevitable result is cynicism and frustration 
> among educators and a ''compliance'' mentality among state and local 
> officials. (See here, here, and here.)
>
> At its heart, today's NCLB amounts to a civil rights manifesto dressed 
> up as an accountability system. This provides an untenable basis for 
> serious reform, as if Congress declared that every last molecule of 
> water or air pollution would vanish by 2014, or that all American 
> cities would be crime-free by that date.
>
> There is evidence from states such as Florida and California that the 
> act is causing them to restructure reasonably good schools, to 
> confound their own pre-existing (and sometimes superior) 
> accountability regimens, and to fracture coherent school improvement 
> strategies. NCLB is also pushing states to move aggressively in too 
> many schools at once, ensuring that capacity won't be up to the 
> challenges at hand.
>
> Whatever the political value of promising to ''leave no child 
> behind,'' the results thus far threaten to undermine two decades of 
> hard-won gains on educational accountability. NCLB's dogmatic 
> aspirations and cobbled-together design are producing a 
> compliance-driven regimen that recreates the very pathologies it was 
> intended to solve.
>
> It's time to relearn the lessons of the Great Society, when ambitious 
> programs designed to promote justice and opportunity were undone by 
> utopian formulations, unworkable implementation structures, and a 
> stubborn unwillingness to acknowledge the limits of federal action in 
> the American system. In the end, Washington is not well-positioned to 
> effect radical change in a sphere that depends primarily on state and 
> local action, or successfully to require states and districts to adopt 
> measures whose efficacy hinges on gusto and creativity rather than 
> compliance.
>
> No matter how finely the legislative craftsmen tune NCLB 2.0, powerful 
> cultural and political forces will continue to impede school 
> improvement. A sense of urgency and outsized aspirations is 
> commendable, but there's a world of difference between determination 
> and delusion. We have spent forty years since the LBJ era learning how 
> hard school reform actually is. Yet too many otherwise serious people, 
> such as the members of the Aspen-based NCLB Commission, sustain that 
> pretense, indeed worsen it by suggesting that sixty-plus technocratic 
> changes and considerably more federal control will cure what ails the law.
>
> Wrong. What Washington can do best, given the structure of the 
> American federal system, is deploy its ''bully pulpit'' to change the 
> political climate, set common standards, collect and disseminate data, 
> cultivate research and technical expertise, nurture pioneering state 
> efforts and cast a spotlight upon them, and promote a clear 
> understanding of what constitutes unacceptable school performance. 
> Given different machinery, Washington might be able to do more. Until 
> that day comes, however, responsible governance demands that the feds 
> do what they can do well--and not sacrifice hard-won gains in the 
> service of sloganeering.
>
> This piece was adapted from No Remedy Left Behind: Lessons from a 
> Half-decade of NCLB, recently published by the AEI press. This book 
> will be discussed at a forum on October 16th (see here).
>
> by Frederick M. Hess and Chester E. Finn, Jr
>
>
> Monty Neill, Ed.D.
> Co-Executive Director
> FairTest
> 342 Broadway
> Cambridge, MA 02139
> 617-864-4810 x 101; fax 617-497-2224
> monty@fairtest.org
> http://www.fairtest.org
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