Re: Finn & Hess: NCLB threatens education gains.

[aburke5054@aol.com]

 Finn and Hess correctly identify NCLB as a civil-rights manifesto.  However, they pose a false choice between states' complying with NCLB and applyingcu "gusto and creativity" to their schools.  There is ample evidence that states are applying gusto and creativity in ways that work against the best interests of parents and children by dodges such as large minimum groups sizes and statistical tricks to avoid identifying schools and districts for improvement.  The feds recently called out MIssouri for failing to identify districts that need improvement and for lagging in intervening in schools that failed to demonstrate adequate progress. Clearly, trusting states' and districts' gusto and creativity is not enough.

The claim that all there is to NCLB is "threatening educators and testing children" is pure propaganda and for FairTest there is no hope.

Art


 

-----Original Message-----
From: Monty Neill <monty@fairtest.org>
To: ndsgroup@yahoogroups.com; ARN-state@yahoogroups.com; ARN-L <arn-l@interversity.org>; arn2-strategy <arn2-strategy@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Fri, 12 Oct 2007 7:15 am
Subject: [arn-l] Finn & Hess: NCLB threatens education gains. 










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
Donate: https://secure.entango.com/servlet/donate/MnrXjT8MQqk=



 


________________________________________________________________________
Email and AIM finally together. You've gotta check out free AOL Mail! - http://mail.aol.com