From: Stephen Krashen <skrashen@yahoo.com>
Date: Fri Mar 9, 2007 6:21:07 PM US/Pacific
To: literacyForAll@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [LiteracyForAll] Bush Claims About NCLB Questioned
Reply-To: LiteracyForAll@yahoogroups.com
A good article! (Quote from me represents about .001%
of what I sent Manzo.)
Bush Claims About NCLB Questioned
Data on gains in achievement remain limited,
preliminary.
By David J. Hoff and Kathleen Kennedy Manzo
Ed Week
Vol. 26, Issue 27, Pages 1,26-27
Is the No Child Left Behind Act working?
President Bush says it is, pointing to
student-achievement results from a single subsection
of the National Assessment of Educational Progress and
tentative Reading First data. But the evidence
available to support his claim is questionable.
“Fourth graders are reading better,” the president
said during a March 2 visit to a school in New Albany,
Ind. “They’ve made more progress in five years than
the previous 28 years combined.”
In mathematics, he said, elementary and middle school
students “earned the highest scores in the history of
the test.”
The data Mr. Bush cited at that event are from just
the “long-term trend” NAEP in reading and math,
researchers say. All available data, they add, show
modest improvements that can’t be attributed to the
5-year-old law. Instead, progress in achievement is
more likely a continuation of trends that predate the
law.
“There’s not any evidence that shows anything has
changed,” said Daniel M. Koretz, a professor of
education at Harvard University’s graduate school of
education.
Other researchers suggest that the standards and
accountability system of the NCLB law is drawing
attention to achievement gaps and other inequalities
and is causing educators to change their practice. But
it’s too early to say whether the federal law will
result in achievement gains, they contend.
The law’s “mechanisms are just coming into play, and
not enough time has passed to establish a trend,” said
Adam Gamoran, a professor of sociology at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison.
‘I’m Lobbying Congress’
Portraying the No Child Left Behind law as a success
is a critical element in President Bush’s argument
that Congress should renew it on schedule this year.
The president signed the legislation, an overhaul of
the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, with much
fanfare in January 2002 and has cited it as his most
important accomplishment in domestic policy.
“I’m not only speaking to you, I’m lobbying,” Mr. Bush
said at the Silver Street Elementary School in New
Albany earlier this month. “I’m lobbying Congress. I’m
setting the stage for Congress to join me in the
reauthorization of this important piece of
legislation.”
Congress is laying the groundwork for reauthorizing
the measure. This week, the Senate education committee
held a hearing on the law’s teacher-quality
requirements. Next week, the House and Senate
education committees plan to hold a joint session on
an overview of the law.
Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., and Sen. Edward M.
Kennedy, D-Mass., the chairmen of the education
committees and two of the architects of the bipartisan
law, say they hope to renew it this year. But many
observers expect the process will be delayed until
next year or even after Mr. Bush leaves office in
2009.
At the New Albany school, Mr. Bush highlighted the
gains on the national assessment’s long-term-trend
tests in reading and mathematics. Secretary of
Education Margaret Spellings pointed to the same NAEP
data on the law’s fifth anniversary in January, and
during several other recent speeches.
Citing One Set of Numbers ...
President Bush likes to cite the “long-term-trend”
NAEP as proof that the No Child Left Behind Act is
working. The gains are significant only for 9- and
13-year-olds in math and 9-year-olds in reading.
What’s more, the gains fall into a five-year testing
window, and only two of those years occurred after the
law took effect.
*Click image to see the full chart.
Between 1999 and 2004, the reading scores of
9-year-olds climbed from 212 to 226 on the test’s
500-point scale. The gap between African-American and
white students that age narrowed to 26 points in 2004,
compared with 35 points five years earlier. The gap
between Hispanic 9-year-olds and their non-Hispanic
white peers tapered from 24 points to 21 points in
that same time period.
On the math test, 9-year-olds’ scores rose by 9
points, and the gaps between Hispanics’ and
African-Americans’ scores and whites’ scores narrowed
slightly as well.
Although the results for 9-year-olds on the reading
test are positive, researchers say they can’t be
linked to the law. The testing window extends back to
1999—three years before President Bush signed the NCLB
legislation into law and even before he was president.
“With some of the claims that Spellings has made, for
most of the time period there was no NCLB, so she
can’t really say [any improvement] is because of the
law,” said Gerald W. Bracey, the author of Reading
Educational Research: How to Avoid Getting
Statistically Snookered,who runs a LISTSERV, or e-mail
forum, tracking what Mr. Bracey calls the
administration’s “disinformation.”
Mr. Bracey, a frequent critic of testing programs,
points out that implementation of the law began in
2002, but didn’t start to fuel significant change in
schools until the 2003-04 school year. “So I guess
[the Bush administration] should be sharing some of
the credit with the Clinton administration,” he said.
In math, the gains since 2002 are the extension of an
upward trend that dates back more than 20 years,
researchers say.
“They just pay attention to what happened after NCLB,”
said Jaekyung Lee, an associate professor of education
at the State University of New York at Buffalo. “Part
of it is just a continuation of a trend from
pre-NCLB.”
The administration appears to ignore other data that
suggest the law has had little or no positive effect
on achievement.
On a different NAEP exam, gains haven’t been as
significant, Mr. Lee said. What is known as the
“national” NAEP, as distinguished from the
long-term-trend tests, shows 4th grade reading scores
the same in 2005 as three years earlier, when the law
was signed. Math scores rose 1 point between 2003 and
2005. While that increase was statistically
significant, it was smaller than the 9-point gain
between 2000 and 2003.
The scores on the “national” NAEP demonstrate that the
NCLB law’s impact is incomplete, said Katherine
McLane, the U.S. Department of Education’s press
secretary.
“The secretary is the first to say we have more work
to do,” Ms. McLane said in response to the criticisms.
“That is one of the issues we have to look at in
education.”
Regardless of whether NAEP scores go up or down, it’s
almost impossible to link those changes to the NCLB
law without a well-designed research study, said Mr.
Koretz of Harvard. That would compare a group of
students who were exposed to NCLB policies against one
that hadn’t participated in the testing and
accountability measures in the law.
Those are the types of studies that the Bush
administration says must be presented as evidence to
select reading materials for the Reading First program
and to win approval for research grants from the
department.
Also, scores in the upper grades on both versions of
the national assessment are for the most part
unchanged from before the law’s passage.
NAEP is given to a sampling of students nationwide.
Scores on states’ own tests, however, are used to
determine whether schools have made adequate yearly
progress under the federal law. Mr. Gamoran of the
University of Wisconsin said the debate over NAEP
scores is probably irrelevant. Even in 2005, the law’s
most significant policies weren’t fully phased in.
Those include the requirements that all teachers be
“highly qualified” and that all states annually assess
math and reading achievement in grades 3-8 and once in
high school, said Mr. Gamoran, the director of the
university’s Wisconsin Center for Education Research.
‘Reading First’ Results
In addition to speeches citing the NAEP
long-term-trend data, members of the Bush
administration have lauded the success of the $1
billion-a-year Reading First program, the largest new
initiative in the NCLB law.
In the administration’s blueprint for the
reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act,
unveiled in January, the Education Department
described Reading First as “the largest, most focused,
and most successful early-reading initiative ever
undertaken in this country.”
Few disagree that it is the largest and most focused.
The initiative, which requires that participating
schools use “scientifically based” materials and
assessments, includes more than 5,600 schools in 1,600
districts. An estimated 100,000 teachers have had some
kind of professional development associated with the
program, according to the blueprint.
But there is scant empirical evidence showing the
program’s effect on student achievement. An
independent interim study on Reading First
implementation, released last year, included survey
results from state officials. It showed that the
program had led to significant increases in the time
participating schools spent on reading instruction, as
well as more substantive professional development and
support for teachers, and the use of assessment data
to inform instruction.
A later survey, conducted by the Center on Education
Policy, a Washington-based research and advocacy
group, indicated that states were generally pleased
with the program, with most claiming some improvement
in student scores on state tests.
President Bush’s blueprint includes preliminary
results showing some gains in students’ reading
fluency. “For the 2004-05 school year, students in
Reading First schools demonstrated increases in
reading achievement across all performance measures,”
Education Department officials wrote in the blueprint.
“The percentage of 2nd grade students who met or
exceeded proficiency in reading on Reading First
outcome measures of fluency increased from 33 percent
in 2003-04 to 39 percent in 2004-05 for economically
disadvantaged students; from 27 to 32 percent for
[limited-English proficient] students; from 34 to 37
percent for African-American students; from 30 to 39
percent for Hispanic students; and from 17 to 23
percent for students with disabilities,” the document
adds.
Those gains, however, are based on a compilation of
all test results in annual state reports for Reading
First.
That compilation includes results from the DIBELS
assessment, or Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early
Literacy Skills, developed by researchers at the
University of Oregon and used in more than 35 states
to monitor student progress on fluency and other
measures. But they also include results from a variety
of other assessments, including the Iowa Test of Basic
Skills and Terra Nova.
“The results show that more kids in the early grades
are making great progress on learning the basic
components of reading under Reading First,” Ms.
McLane, the department’s press secretary, said of the
data reported in the blueprint.
Although such an assemblage of test scores can provide
a general view of student progress, some researchers
question whether the compilation says much about
reading proficiency.
“If the goal is just to see if students are improving,
I think there is nothing wrong with using different
tests as long as it is established that the tests are
reliable and valid, and reasonably comparable,”
Stephen D. Krashen, an education researcher and
linguist at the University of Southern California, in
Los Angeles, wrote in an e-mail. However, “many
[researchers] feel that DIBELS is not valid.”
Critics of DIBELS cite the tendency of some educators
to teach to the tests or give the measures too much
weight in judging reading ability. They also question
whether a test that gauges how many words a student
can read accurately in a minute, as DIBELS does, is a
valid indicator of their proficiency. ("National Clout
of DIBELS Test Draws Scrutiny," Sept. 28, 2005.)
According to Mr. Bracey, fluency—the ability to read a
text accurately and quickly—is not a good indicator of
reading mastery, which requires comprehension.
“Kids can be very fluent and not have a clue about
what they just read,” he said.
Success of Standards
While most researchers say it’s too early to measure
the NCLB law’s impact on achievement, many are
beginning to see evidence that educators are changing
their behavior as a result of both the federal law and
policies that took root in the 1990s at the onset of
the movement for higher standards and greater
accountability in education.
“The big success of No Child Left Behind so far is to
galvanize attention to the challenges we face,
particularly the challenges of inequity,” Mr. Gamoran
said.
But critics of the law question, in any case, the
central place it gives to test scores. They say it
puts too much emphasis on the negative consequences of
failing to meet annual student-performance targets and
glosses over the professional development and other
interventions needed to improve struggling schools and
get to the heart of elevating student achievement.
“What’s troublesome about it is the idea that you can
eliminate [achievement] gaps by putting pressure on
schools and nothing else,” said Gary A. Orfield, the
director of the Civil Right Project at Harvard and the
University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s making a
bad situation worse.”
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