From: Stephen Krashen <skrashen@yahoo.com>
Date: Wed Mar 14, 2007 3:47:27 PM US/Pacific
To: literacyForAll@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [LiteracyForAll] ncLB recs from: Institute for Language and
Education Policy
Reply-To: LiteracyForAll@yahoogroups.com
Some notable features of this proposal:
(1) explicitly calls for a reduction in standardized
testing: “Allow states to assess students on alternate
years and use sampling approaches rather than
universal testing, so as to minimize lost learning
time.”
(2) Presents a full and reasonable policy for English
Language Learners.
(3) Puts the local communities and schools back into a
leadership role.
http://www.elladvocates.org/documents/nclb/
ILEP_NCLB_Recommendations.pdf
Reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act
Recommendations by the Institute for Language and
Education Policy
March 2007
Few would oppose the stated goals of No Child Left
Behind (NCLB): developing an accountability system for
public schools that (1) stresses a challenging
curriculum and high expectations for all students, (2)
strengthens the professional qualifications of
teachers, and (3) overcomes persistent achievement
gaps between racial and ethnic groups, children in
poverty, special education students, and English
language learners.
Yet NCLB is only one among many possible approaches to
accountability. It has established a top-down,
prescriptive, arbitrary, inequitable, and punitive
system that blames under- achievement on educators
alone, while ignoring the effects of poverty, funding
disparities, racial segregation, and other non-school
factors known to have a major impact on educational
attainment. The key question that Congress must answer
in reauthorizing NCLB is whether this approach is
effectively advancing the law’s stated goals or
whether it is doing more harm than good for the
children it purports to help.
After nearly five years of implementation, there is
considerable evidence – from scientific research,
surveys of state and local officials, and educators’
reports from the field – about the impact of NCLB.
Based on this evidence, the Institute concludes that
the law is failing to work as promised and needs a
thorough overhaul.
Not only has NCLB failed to increase the achievement
of “left behind” groups relative to other students. It
has also had unintended consequences that have
impoverished the school experience for the most
vulnerable students. These perverse effects include:
• teaching to the test, stressing low-level, basic
skills rather than enrichment programs
that develop critical thinking and problem-solving
abilities;
• narrowing the curriculum to two tested subjects,
language arts and math, at the expense of science,
social studies, art, music, physical education, and
other features
of an all-round education;
• basing decisions about school programs solely on
standardized tests, which are in many cases – e.g., in
the case of English language learners (ELLs) – neither
valid nor reliable in measuring student progress;
• encouraging “educational triage” – that is, focusing
attention on children perceived to have a chance to
score at the “proficient” level on tests, while
ignoring those deemed hopeless as well as those likely
to pass;
• forcing schools to choose from a small group of
politically favored reading programs, whose
phonics-intensive approach is often ineffective in
teaching comprehension, especially for ELLs;
• demoralizing educators – even encouraging some to
leave the profession – by labeling their schools as
failures and threatening punitive sanctions, despite
the fact that children may be making significant
progress; and
• failing to address formidable obstacles to school
achievement, which for ELLs include poorly designed
and poorly funded programs, opposition to
research-based practices such as bilingual education,
and inadequate training of teachers in how to serve
students with limited English proficiency.
2 Principles of Authentic Accountability
The Institute strongly believes that schools should be
held accountable for the education our children
receive. For that matter, so should policymakers at
all levels. But NCLB is not the accountability system
that we need to improve American schools. In
developing an improved approach to accountability,
Congress should consider the following criteria:
• Accuracy. A single snapshot of student performance –
one standardized test in language arts and math –
provides a distorted picture of school quality. Thus
it should never be used for high-stakes purposes. This
is especially true when it comes to ELLs, for whom
valid and reliable academic assessments are largely
unavailable today and for the foreseeable future.
Multiple outcome measures should be used,
including class grades, promotion and graduation
rates, and alternate assessments.
• Reasonableness. Demanding that all “subgroups” of
students must reach arbitrarily determined levels of
proficiency has no basis in scientific research. It
becomes either a prescription for large-scale failure
or an incentive to “dumb down” the curriculum.
Schools should be judged, among other things, on the
academic growth of individual students over several
years.
• Equity. A one-size-fits-all approach, ignoring the
greater challenges faced by some schools and some
students, ensures that many children will be left
behind. Requiring full proficiency for the ELL
subgroup, which is by definition unable to meet
proficiency targets because of language barriers, is
not only absurd. It also threatens to dismantle all
programs – whether good, bad, or indifferent – for
these students.
Instead of penalizing schools for their diversity,
accountability must be tailored to the needs of
diverse students.
• Balance. If our aim is truly to create an
educational system in which all students enjoy equal
opportunities, accountability cannot be based on
educational outputs – test scores – alone. Educational
inputs, including appropriate program designs,
adequate resources, and teacher qualifications are
just as important, if not more so.
• Flexibility. Supporting and disseminating research
on effective educational practices is a proper and
important role for the U.S. Department of Education.
Mandating the use of particular methodologies and
commercial instructional programs is not.
Pedagogical judgments should be left to local school
districts, provided that school programs are
demonstrably based on expert knowledge and classroom
experience.
• Constructiveness. There is no scientific evidence
that “holding schools accountable” with negative
incentives – the threat of labels and sanctions – can
motivate educators to make the changes needed to
improve instruction. Indeed, research on school reform
shows that unless there’s a “buy in” by classroom
teachers in particular, such
efforts are doomed to fail. Rather than taking a
punitive approach, accountability must serve to build
schools’ capacity to serve students, especially in
areas where many schools are weak, such as educating
ELLs.
• Decentralization. Breaking with a longstanding
tradition in this country, NCLB initiated an
unprecedented degree of federal control over local
schools, at the expense of state and district
governance. Educators are now focusing on prescriptive
mandates from Washington and answering to faraway
bureaucrats, rather than responding to
parents and communities. Since effective schools
require strong local input, accountability systems
should be locally designed and administered under the
supervision of state departments of education, with
the federal government restored to its pre-NCLB roles,
such as the enforcement of civil rights laws.
3 Specific Recommendations for Overhauling NCLB
Accountability Systems
• Base accountability on both inputs and outputs. The
Castañeda v. Pickard test, a civil-rights tool
currently used to determine whether school districts
are meeting their obligations to ELLs, could be
generalized to all students and enforced by states:
1. Programs must be grounded in an educational theory
deemed to be sound by experts.
2. Programs must be supported by adequate resources,
qualified personnel, and appropriate materials,
equipment, and facilities.
3. Programs must be evaluated on the basis of student
outcomes and, if necessary, restructured to ensure
that children are learning.
• Encourage school districts to develop their own
accountability systems – as currently allowed in
Nebraska, for example – with accreditation and
supervision by state officials.
• Leave decisions about “adequate yearly progress,”
the selection of assessment instruments, minimum
subgroup size, corrective action, and similar
operational details in state and local hands.
• Monitor states at the federal level to ensure that
accountability systems guarantee equal educational
opportunities for all students.
Assessment
• Require the use of multiple measures, not a single
standardized test, to determine whether students are
making adequate progress.
• Track the academic growth of individual students and
provide funding to enable school districts to upgrade
data systems for this purpose.
• Allow states to assess students on alternate years
and use sampling approaches rather than universal
testing, so as to minimize lost learning time.
• Ensure that only valid and reliable assessments and
accommodations are used for accountability purposes.
• Eliminate arbitrary and unscientific rules on when
ELLs may be exempted from testing and allow school
personnel to decide when students are ready.
• Expand funding for developing alternate assessments,
including those in students’ native language.
• Encourage the use of locally designed assessments
with teacher input, in order to make testing serve the
goal of improving instruction.
Professional Qualifications
• Rely on state certifications and endorsements to
determine whether teachers are “highly qualified”
rather than adding additional course completion and
testing requirements.
• Require states to ensure that all teachers with ELLs
in their classrooms receive the specialized training,
certifications, and/or endorsements necessary to serve
these students’ needs.
• Expand support under Title III – which was cut
severely by NCLB – for professional development
programs for ELL educators, including preservice and
inservice teacher training and graduate study.
4 English Language Learners
• Restore the goals of bilingualism and biliteracy
(which were eliminated by NCLB) as major priorities of
the Title III program.
• Restore competitive grant programs to develop
innovative approaches in areas of need, including
methodologies for teaching secondary and late-arriving
ELLs.
• Restore programs to encourage parental involvement
in the education of ELLs, such as family English
literacy efforts.
• Restore research programs to study effective
pedagogies for educating ELLs and make the findings
widely available.
• Develop a comprehensive definition of limited
English proficiency to enable states to set
research-based benchmarks for second-language
acquisition and to provide consistent data about ELL
enrollments.
• Ensure that providers of supplemental educational
services for ELLs are highly qualified in
second-language acquisition and effective ELL
pedagogies.
• Base Title III funding formulas on actual
enrollments of ELLs and recently arrived immigrants
rather than on census data, which is of poor quality
in measuring language proficiency and may include
children who are not being served.
• Restore the original purpose of the Bilingual
Education Act: to develop schools’ capacity – in
particular, their staff resources and expertise – to
address the needs of ELLs.
Funding
• Require states to ensure equity in school finance
among districts so as to avoid the use of Title I
funding to compensate for an unequal distribution of
educational resources between rich and poor
communities.
• Support research to determine the incremental cost
of serving ELLs and other diverse populations and
require that state funding formulas take these
differences into account so as to promote equal
educational opportunities.
• Double Title III authorization levels (to $1.5
billion annually) to compensate for rapidly expanding
populations of ELLs and recent immigrants, as well as
added testing requirements; then index future funding
to increasing enrollments and inflation.
Approved by the Board of Directors, 14 March 2007
Please address comments and questions to:
James Crawford, President
Institute for Language and Education Policy
P.O. Box 5960
Takoma Park, MD 20913
www.elladvocates.org
bilingualed@starpower.net
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