Bush v Bush in School Testing Duel

[Bob Schaeffer <bobschaeffer@earthlink.net>]

AS 2 BUSHES TRY TO FIX SCHOOLS, TOOLS DIFFER

New York Times -- September 28, 2006
by Sam Dillon

Daytona Beach, Fla. — Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida has long played the 
dutiful younger brother.

Well before President Bush signed his No Child Left Behind law, Jeb Bush 
poured his own ideas into a school improvement program for Florida.

Over the years since, Governor Bush has mostly held his tongue about the 
president’s very different law, even as detractors of all stripes have 
attacked it.

But in recent weeks — perhaps seeking to cement his legacy as a 
school-policy expert as he prepares to leave office — Governor Bush has 
been speaking out about the federal law, mixing dollops of praise with 
measured criticisms — and taking an occasional potshot. He has been 
caustic, for instance, about the requirement that 100 percent of the 
nation’s students be proficient in reading and math by 2014.

“I mean perfection is not going to happen,” Mr. Bush said Sept. 12 at a 
news conference in Orlando, arguing that achievement targets are 
important but that unrealistic ones discourage educators. “We’re all 
imperfect under God’s watchful eye, and it’s impossible to achieve it.”

He followed up in an interview with criticisms of other provisions.

“With all due respect to the federal system,” the governor said, “our 
accountability system is really the better way to go.”

Other figures also say the federal law, which comes up next year for 
Congressional reauthorization, could use some improvement. But Bush vs. 
Bush may be the most striking part of the debate.

It is natural, of course, that the brothers might feel a bit of 
fraternal rivalry on this topic, because each built a political career — 
George in Texas, Jeb in Florida — around promises to improve their 
states’ schools.

Still, this is more than a brotherly squabble, as Governor Bush’s 
comments could well provide the president’s opponents with ammunition 
against his signature law.

No Child Left Behind and the Florida law, the A-Plus plan, differ in 
many ways. For one, the federal law grades schools pass-fail, while 
Florida’s gives schools A to F grades.

One reason the governor may be wading into the debate over the federal 
law is that every year since it took effect in 2002, the school-grading 
systems have contradicted each other. Hundreds of schools have received 
an A from Florida while flunking under the federal system, often because 
they narrowly missed testing targets.

At the Orlando news conference, Paul E. Peterson, a professor of 
government at Harvard, urged Congress to make the federal law more like 
Florida’s.

“Florida’s school-grading system is clearly superior to the one used 
under No Child Left Behind,” said Dr. Peterson, who with a colleague, 
Martin R. West of Brown University, expands on that argument in the 
current issue of Education Next, an academic journal.

In the article, Drs. Peterson and West described the federal system as 
so “badly flawed” that it might err with nearly 3 of every 10 schools it 
classifies as low performing.

The federal law also puts sanctions on schools that do not meet testing 
goals, but does not reward ones that do. The Florida law, on the other 
hand, gives large cash bonuses to schools that help low-performing 
students improve their scores.

“Punitive actions don’t work nearly as well,” Governor Bush said in the 
interview. Accountability, he added, “works better when it’s viewed as a 
reward.”

In criticizing No Child Left Behind, Governor Bush signaled disagreement 
with the position staked out by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, 
who told reporters on Aug. 30, “There’s not much needed in the way of 
change.”

“I talk about No Child Left Behind like Ivory Soap,” Ms. Spellings said. 
“It’s 99.9 percent pure.”

Governor Bush said that when he had lunch in early September with Ms. 
Spellings in Washington “I was loaded for bear, to go in and say, ‘What 
was that quote about?’ “

“But she disarmed me completely before I got around to my attack,” he 
recalled. “She is eager to reform, to reauthorize N.C.L.B. There’s still 
work to do, and she knows it.”

In an interview, Ms. Spellings said that in characterizing the law as 
“99.9 percent pure” she meant to convey only that no changes were needed 
to its “core principles.” She cited several changes she hoped for, 
including extending the reach of the law into high schools.

Months after Governor Bush took office in 1999, the Florida Legislature 
approved his education plan. It requires schools to administer tests in 
reading and mathematics every year in Grades 3 through 10 and assigns 
grades based mainly on the results.

Two years later, a legislative audit found that the A-Plus plan was 
improving student performance, but noted a weakness in its comparing 
scores at each grade with the previous year scores from the same grade, 
measuring a different set of students.

Florida overhauled the plan to track the achievement of individual 
students from grade to grade, allowing the state to calculate how much 
specific students had learned in a given year. That has made it possible 
for the state, for instance, to reward schools for raising the 
achievement of the lowest-performing 25 percent of students.

No Child Left Behind has broad similarities with the A-Plus plan, but 
the two plans also differ in important ways.

Rather than tracking individual students, the federal plan measures 
whether schools have made “adequate yearly progress,” based on whether 
the percentage of students who demonstrate proficiency at each grade 
level, and within racial and other groups, increases by a required 
amount. For example, the system, like A-Plus before its revision, 
compares scores this year from fourth graders with those from last year. 
The federal law took effect just as Florida was rolling out its revised 
plan. Sharp contradictions emerged almost immediately in many states 
between the federal and state ratings given to local schools.

These contradictions became especially notable in Florida in the summer 
of 2003, when 1,200 of the state’s 3,050 schools earned A’s from the 
state. At the same time, more than 950 of the top-rated schools failed 
to make adequate yearly progress under the federal law. Similar 
discrepancies re-emerged in 2004, 2005 and 2006.

R. J. Longstreet Elementary School here in Daytona Beach is an example. 
The tidy one-story building near the Atlantic Ocean has fallen short on 
the federal yardstick every year, but Florida has given it an A for five 
years straight.

It earned its latest A because on tests in spring 2006 tests 80 percent 
of students met “high standards” in reading, math and writing, and 
because 60 percent of students, and nearly 80 percent of the 
lowest-performing students, increased their scores. In August, the 
school received a $42,800 reward check.

“Congratulations on your outstanding performance,” Governor Bush wrote 
to the school.

But it fell short on 2 of 17 federal requirements, and that was enough 
to fail under the federal system. On a writing test administered to 55 
fourth-grade students, 50 needed to show proficiency; 48 did. On math 
tests administered to 42 disabled students, 21 needed to score at grade 
level; 20 did.

Having failed the school four years running, each time because it barely 
missed a target or two, the federal law requires the Volusia County 
District to make plans this year to replace the staff at Longstreet or 
to undertake another form of corrective action, said Chris Colwell, a 
deputy superintendent.

“We’re not opposed to measuring achievement in our schools, but our 
point is, measure accurately,” Dr. Colwell said. “Longstreet has a 
high-performing faculty. Why would we change them?”

In their Education Next article, Drs. Peterson and West used test 
figures to calculate how much students learned, on average, in each 
school in Florida in the 2003-4 school year and compared the gains in 
schools with adequate yearly progress with those in schools that did not.

Their conclusion?

The federal accountability system does not perform as well as Florida’s 
“in distinguishing schools where students are learning more from those 
where they are learning less,” the professors wrote.

At the Sept. 12 news conference, called to publicize a broad review of 
education initiatives, Governor Bush listened approvingly as Dr. 
Peterson praised the A-Plus plan and criticized No Child Left Behind. 
But the governor has been careful to note what he considers to be the 
federal law’s contributions.

Florida, for instance, began focusing increased attention on disabled 
and limited-English students after the federal law required states to 
improve those students’ achievement, Governor Bush said.

He approaches the law, he said, “not from the standpoint of saying it’s 
bad, but that it’s good and needs to be better.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/28/education/28child.htm