With No Child Left Behind Overhaul Stalled, More Schools 'Failing'

WASHINGTON -- By the standards of the decade-old No Child Left Behind law, almost 87 percent of New Mexico's schools aren't making "adequate yearly progress."

"I don't believe 87 percent of our schools are failing our kids," Hanna Skandera, New Mexico's education secretary, told The Huffington Post, though she stressed that they still need improvement. "It's not an accurate portrayal. We need a clear picture of who's making progress and who's not."

As states tally their standardized test scores and graduation rates this summer, they are feeling the squeeze of the 2001 No Child Left Behind law, which Congress has failed to revamp since it came up for reauthorization in 2007.

In order to make "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) under the law, schools must satisfy ever-increasing performance targets set by states. AYP measures the percentage of students making certain target scores on standardized tests in reading and math and graduation rates -- regardless of students' growth. For example, if a student grows two grade levels during a school year but is still below the NCLB-set bar, his scores count against the school’s AYP rating.

Under NCLB, schools that fail to make AYP for two years in a row in the same category, such as graduation rate, are deemed "Needs Improvement." These schools face consequences, such as requiring supplemental education or giving students the option to transfer into another AYP-making public school or charter school. Schools that fail to make AYP for longer periods of time can face restructuring interventions that involve staff turnover.

Built into NCLB is the requirement that all students be proficient across subjects by 2014, a goal that has universally been called utopian. Because Congress has failed to address the law since it came up for reauthorization in 2007, its mandated targets have continued to increase, creating a slow-moving time bomb for schools. This March, Duncan projected that 82 percent of schools would be deemed as failing by next year.

"Everyone knew this day was coming, and now it is upon us, and we need to have an open, honest debate about the consequences of a law that will label a majority of our schools as failing," Justin Hamilton, press secretary at the U.S. Department of Education, said in an email.

Skandera said she, too, was not surprised by the inevitable.

"What we're missing under the law is the ability to capture progress and acknowledge where we're seeing change and where we're not," Skandera said. "Our school grading should be based not only on grade level but also on the progress made by all students."

Other states are also coming to terms with exactly what an unchanged NCLB will mean for students and teachers in the upcoming school year.

In Georgia, 63.2 percent of schools made AYP in 2011, down from 71 percent in 2010. Standards increased in all four measured categories, which include three standardized tests and overall graduation rate. (The state numbers exclude Atlanta, which may have its funding revoked because of a cheating scandal there.) In some districts, like Forsyth County, while some scores increased, fewer schools made the measure.

Forsyth Central High School did not make AYP because of poor performance on English exams among the Hispanic and Economically Disadvantaged subgroups. But, according to Patch:

Forsyth Central High also increased its graduation rate this year to 87.7 percent (a 2.7 percent jump from the previous year and the highest in the school's history). The school also posted an 11 percent increase in the number of Economically Disadvantaged students that graduated this year.

While states grapple with higher targets and more of their schools labeled 'underperforming,' Congress is in a standoff over how to proceed with NCLB reform. The lag prompted U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to propose a "Plan B" to give states waiverson meeting NCLB-mandated targets in exchange for implementing certain education reforms of his choice.

President Obama and Duncan both gave Congress a deadline.

"The best way to fix this broken law is for Congress to send the president a comprehensive, bipartisan reform bill to sign before the start of the school year," said Hamilton, the Department of Education spokesman. "If that doesn't happen, we'll be prepared to issue regulatory relief in exchange for reform."

Kirsten Holtje, a first-grade teacher in Fairfax County, Virginia, recently learned based on preliminary reports that her school failed to make AYP for the third year in a row. As a result, Woodlawn Elementary had to implement the school-choice measure and lost enrollment from nearby military families. The first two years, the school failed to make AYP because of special education scores. This year, while special education scores increased, reading scores fell -- so the school received the designation yet again.

Holtje said the failing designation has led administrators to emphasize preparation for standardized tests, thereby limiting the curriculum.

"We stress performance on state tests, even in first grade," she said. "We don't have time to teach science and social studies."

NCLB's stipulations are so stifling that some states, such as Montana, Idaho and South Dakota, have said they would defy its regulations. Montana could face a decrease in federal education funding as a penalty for that decision.

States such as Georgia, Wisconsin and New Mexico, meanwhile, are moving to create new accountability systems that they hope can replace NCLB's strictures -- but to do so, they will need Duncan's approval.

Georgia, according to the state's education chief John Barge, is looking into developing a new accountability system that considers about 20 different factors in assessing student performance. Test scores, Barge said, are only one component.

"Secretary Arne Duncan ... has been very open about thinking about the next generation of accountability in light of the fact that Congress has been made no progress on NCLB and because of that we will still be bound by its strictures next year," Barge said.

Because NCLB deems entire schools as failing because of lack of progress on a specific subject, Barge said it creates a situation where schools face misleading descriptors and stigmas.

If the bar keeps increasing, he said, more and more schools will not make AYP and face "a significant financial impact." While the numbers in Georgia can be discouraging, Barge said he is pressing parents to look beyond the AYP designation of their children's schools.

Skandera said New Mexico is seeking to replace AYP's blunt measures with a school grading system.

"It's about being transparent and accountable," she said. "We need to capture student progress." She has discussed the waivers with Duncan, who, she said, "seems committed to holding the bar high."

Comments

[elblanc0]

11:09 PM on 08/04/2011

When all the schools are left behind, it's time to leave the policy behind.

[c8edid]

04:38 PM on 08/01/2011

We are so laser-focused on the NCLB assessments and meeting their demands that we aren't even thinking about how the public school model desperately needs to evolve to better meet the educational needs of modern children and diverse populations.

[Bobby Wayne Rathbone]

04:59 PM on 07/27/2011

It was interesting to hear Diane Ravaich (sp?) speak in reference to NCLB. She (as a former ed sec) was originally in favor of it, but has since changed her stance calling it a systematic chance for the privatization of the public school system, ensuring its dismantling. I completely agree with her. While NCLB was supposed to make things better, it's made everything so much worse and created an awful blame teachers environment in the country where we can't work to make things better instead.

[AmigaMan]

01:19 PM on 07/27/2011

Perhaps New Mexico should stop tying special education scores with those of regular education. This is why more schools are failing AYP in the state (and many others too).

NCLB has to go IMO and replaced with what used to work. i.e. Students, do your work. Stop playing with your music player/cell phone all day long. If not, you fail. Teachers, teach like you are supposed to. If not, you are fired. Real simple.

[c8edid]

03:31 PM on 08/01/2011

Well, you know, there needs to be some motivation for the student to do their work. Parents also play into this. Teachers do what they can, but like they say, you can lead a horse to water . . .

[J R M]

11:46 AM on 07/27/2011

I suspect that we are seeing the long deferred impact of the boob tube in its varied forms. When my wife was growing up in a small village in the Soviet Union kids from the age of toddlers up were out playing with one another on the road in multi-age groups that looked out for one another. Her mother or grandmother just had to make sure that there was some food on the table for when she got hungry.

Now we pretty much find a dichotomy. The children of educated mothers are largely in expensive high-end nurseries or at the center of attention of a dedicated, it tired, mother. Other kids are largely left to watch the tube. By the age of 2 to 3 there is a largely permanent difference between the children of the two groups. The educated mothers continue to push and mold their kids for educational and professional success. The other mothers allow their kids to grow up in the popular culture, a culture that does not value education or hard work.

Are we surprised that the children of less educated and driven mothers are "left behind" in school? They are growing up in a popular culture that does not value this and do not have parents who attempt to override the popular culture.

[kinger50]

10:30 AM on 07/27/2011

While many who favor "diversity" may choke on this idea, it is important that at some level, we agree what students need to know and in what order. We have a transient society. People move around and students are learning different material in a variety of scope and sequences, making any efficient exploration of curriculum content. When school starts, a month or two will be spent figuring out what students know and don't know. This is very wasteful. Tests should be based upon a specific scope and sequence of material, regardless of student age or grade, and then students placed based upon their mastery of the material. Boy would teachers save time that way! The problem is the more we focus on the exceptions and identity of students based upon diversity, the longer it takes to educate everyone. Diversity is great but we need to slow the education system down to accomodate differences or decide that people are more alike than different.

[c8edid]

04:33 PM on 08/01/2011

Personally, I'd rather slow things down a little, focus on quality and creating schools that work for our communities, and lower the dropout rate here in NM. It's much more wasteful for our kids to fall through the cracks. Yes, there are some important things that all kids across the board need to learn, but how they learn them really varies from child to child (even within the same cultural group).

[kinger50]

10:16 AM on 07/27/2011

This headline is very misleading. The link talks about NM but then only mentions it with no details. It does not mention poverty or the high percentage of students who are not fluent in English. No small oversight. Please have the headlines match the article.

[c8edid]

03:58 PM on 08/01/2011

You're absolutely right. We also have a large population of Native American students, for whom the traditional public school model does not work well. One cannot compare New Mexico to some more homogenous, primarily Anglo midwestern state. I think we need the breathing room to create schools that work for our unique population (as does every state).

[userw014]

08:46 AM on 07/27/2011

I've been reading Bob Woodward's "Bush at War" trilogy - and one of Woodward's early points (besides that revenge for the Clinton victory over his father was a major motivation for Bush) was that Bush wanted to be the Education President - in a country where education policy is largely driven by local and state politics.

And so Bush has done for "Education" what he did for "Al Queda" - he attacked the wrong population and devastated it.

[eceresa]

08:29 AM on 07/27/2011

Kudos to the HP for putting "failing" in quotation marks in the title. Those schools aren't necessarily failing. It's just a label they're saddled with.

Want to fix the problem? Stop using student test scores to judge schools. Those test scores can tell you about the students, but they tell you very little reliably about their schools and teachers. Proponents will tell you, "It's data based!" but a system that ranked schools based on the height of their students would be similarly 100% data-based. The problem is that it's garbage data. Height tells you mostly about nutrition and hereditary factors, and tests tell you mostly about parent and student factors. Neither are helpful in evaluating schools.

And anyone who's read a bit about education knows it's garbage data. If it was accurate and useful, really reflecting what goes on in schools, I'd expect that we wouldn't see the sorts of things we saw in Atlanta very often. But when you base people's jobs on garbage data, and they KNOW it's garbage data, they're not going to feel the moral compunctions against faking it that they would if we were talking about data that was more relevant.

[deans2cents]

07:46 AM on 07/27/2011

I am sure the 1%ers are qute happy with New Mexico's 87% failure rate for schools.....After all thedumber the populus the easier to brainwash and keep in line.
Tie to stand upand be heard, before the only permitted voters become the 1%ers and we all become tenants.

[trespanieli]

06:23 AM on 07/27/2011

It's time to dumb down the curriculum again. Expect less, and you get what you don't pay for.

[Lauren Lamourine]

04:22 AM on 07/27/2011

The reason students are doing so badly is the school board sets up a cirriculum which is extremely slow-moving, and years count more than course level in the grading process. The students are put into lower-level classes, but still have to take the same test as those in the higher level.
If we want to use tests to determine which schools are "failing"; there has to be more on those tests besides grammar and math, and the earlier grades need to start pursuing a faster teaching rate. It should not take 8-10 years for a child to reach the algebra level of mathematics. What might make it easier for students to understand is if they link the math level directly with the science it applies to the most.
We should follow the examples of what other countries are doing-- Finland, Japan, and South Korea. In a test of 30 countries, the United States came in 24th for mathematic proficiency. They scored 489 out of 1,000 points in science. Depressing numbers.

[TurgidCaterwauling]

02:59 AM on 07/27/2011

Evaluate any organization, business, or corporation and their employees with an instrument that uses criteria similar to NCLB and watch what would happen.

[Dozygoats]

02:45 AM on 07/27/2011

Education reform is incredibly challenging and many well-meaning people have plunged ahead with great ideas that have not proven especially effective.

I don't have any brilliant answers, but I do favor one system-level reform. This is not a popular proposal, I know. I believe in local empowerment combined with accountability and targeted incentives.

I think we should empower principals and allow them to hire and fire teachers at will. The howls of protest at this idea tend to come from teachers who have had to endure life under dopey, favorites-playing principals. I get the horror. To deal with the problem of bad principals, we have to empower the superintendent to more easily hire and fire the principals.

Here is the thing: Good principals will hire and support good teachers who will produce better educational outcomes. Bad principals will hire and support favorites and drive good teachers away. Good superintendents will reward effective principals and remove the bad principals based on their bad results.

We need national accountability, effective incentives and local control. You can't devise a test or a system to properly identify and reward good teachers. You need empowered local management - and you need to actively manage that management. Everyone loses when a community fails to educate its youth. We all pay the consequences. However, centralized control is a proven failure. Reform the incentives and localize decision making. To do that you have to give local managers the power to build their own teams.

[eceresa]

08:32 AM on 07/27/2011

How do you deal with bad superintendents? More power to school boards?

How do you deal with bad school boards? More power to state education boards?

How do you deal with bad state education boards? More power to governors?

How do you deal with bad governors? More power to the US President?

The problem is, at each step, you've got people who are farther removed from teaching kids. That's how we got NCLB in the first place: we listened to a bunch of people that didn't know what they were talking about, while teachers told us it was a bad idea. Unsurprisingly, the teachers were right.

In a perfect world, I'd agree with your idea. In the world we live in, it's a horrible idea.

[Dozygoats]

11:37 AM on 07/27/2011

NCLB did one thing well. It spotlighted the fact that too many schools are taking tax payer dollars without fulfilling their mandate: to educate the students in their care.

So what do you do with that knowledge? Some sort of reform is essential. Everyone agrees on that point. Many experiments are currently playing out and the main thing we have learned is that this is much harder than it looks from the outside.

Our entire school system was designed to be controlled at the local level. That local control has been severely eroded over time to the point that you have entire communities of educators going through the motions because they lack both the tools and the power to turn things around.

I don't know what the ultimate answer is, but I strongly believe that motivated individual leaders and performers need to be given space to figure out the answers for their own schools. How do you do that? One way is to return more power to the local principal - and then hold that principal to a very high standard.

It is also extremely important to give teachers the option to vote with their feet (by moving to another school or district). That puts principals in a position in which they need to work to actively create an environment in which teachers want to teach and students want to learn.

[kinger50]

10:22 AM on 07/27/2011

While in principle this sounds great, the fact is that years will be lost using this market approach. By the time this "shakes out" (who is a good principal and who is a bad one) a whole generation will have missed the boat under "bad principals" and what you suggest will be a system of cronyism. In my opinion, there needs to be professional standards across the board at all levels of admin, teaching in education. Each principal should not be setting up a "fiefdom". Teachers should be able to move to different schools and be able to maintain the same approaches and professional standards. As an increasingly transient population, students too would benefit if the educational fare is somewhat standardized. How can one student be way ahead and one way behind based upon the principal? Standard processes implemented with fidelity matter more than test scores. Then we need patience once we have the improved processes.

[Dozygoats]

11:19 AM on 07/27/2011

Whole generations are already missing the boat under the current system. I do agree that reforming teacher contracts is essential to real reform.

Good teachers should be free to move when they get a better offer. Schools should need to compete a bit to attract and retain them.

Backloaded pension plans keep teachers locked into districts - because they have to put in the years in order to retire comfortably. That system also keeps burned out teachers in the classroom longer than they might otherwise stay.

I'm not 100% sold on this idea either, actually - and it typically gets near-zero support whenever I mention it. Having worked with both bad managers and bad principals, I understand a lot of the negative reaction. I throw the idea out there because so much reform talk centers around schemes to evaluate teacher quality using standardized testing of students. When you start making decisions about performance bonuses, you need to live in a world in which real performance is measured. I don't think there is a way to standardize measurement of teacher performance.

We have to find a way to insert an human evaluation and management process. One way to do that is to set high standards for schools, give principals the power to put a team together to meet those standards and then evaluate progress. It is much easier for a district to manage a handful to principals than it is for them to try to evaluate every teacher in every school.

[MadJayhawk]

02:42 AM on 07/27/2011

Having standards and requiring accountability shouldn't be the problem in education. Why is it really a problem? People in the educational industry do not seem to want standards and do not seem to want to be held accountable. I have always felt that they did everything they could to undermine the program and if they failed at that they badmouthed it 24/7. That continues to this day. Is there a way to hold schools/teachers accountable that unions approve of or do they just want to operate without any accountability whatsoever?

When 80+ % of your schools do not meet standards, it is not the test. It is your schools. You do not have to have a doctorate in education to realize that.

Removing the test or dumbing it down seems to be a popular way to skirt the accountability issue. Our state dropped standardized testing when 70% of certain groups of kids could not pass the test in spite of all kinds of adjustments to the test including making the questions so simple a smart chicken pecking the answers could pass it and extensive one-on-one remedial efforts. Now no one is accountable and our schools turn out hundreds if not thousands of functionally illiterate kids who will supported by the government (you and I) for the rest of their lives. Our educational system is ruining lives.

[eceresa]

08:35 AM on 07/27/2011

The tests reflect mostly parent and student factors. When 80% of your schools' students fail the test, we blame the schools. But only the ignorant actually believe it's due to the schools that they failed.

I don't think the unions oppose accountability; they just oppose schools and educators being held accountable for things they can't control.

[MadJayhawk]

10:01 PM on 07/27/2011

Of course standardized tests reflect many things other than teacher competence.

I taught for 4 years at the high school level. My own classroom testing (a subset of standardized tests) told me two things: how well I taught the material and how well the child learned it. The scores I got very week did not tell me what kind of parents the student had or whether he valued diversity.

If I didn't test I would not have a clue how to improve myself/my approach to the subject or whether the child needed help. As a further benefit the child got a chance to see where he was relative to his classmates. And the tests served as a motivating factor to encourage the child to try harder. If a child failed, I blamed myself for it if the child was willing and capable of handling the material. I made myself accountable for the child's success. I was not a union member so I cared about the kids in my classes and not about money, time off, and work rules.

I had to get my child out of unionized schools. It was a nightmare. My child hated it. The teachers were not motivated and, to me, hated the children.

Unions, despite what you say, are against any form of accountability. In unionized school districts it is almost impossible to fire a teacher for incompetence. That says it all when it comes to accountability doesn't it?

[kinger50]

10:25 AM on 07/27/2011

You make a good point. The reason people don't seem to "want standards and to be held accountable" is that what you call standards are not standard at all. How else can a student who transfers schools be way ahead or way behind based upon the material covered at one school in one classroom vs another. If there is a curriculum-based versus standards based approach then teachers can walk in a class and assume that students have covered specific material. Curriculum based measures are superior to some Bell-curve, standards based systme like we have now.