Now that President Obama has put reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)/ No Child Left Behind (NCLB) on the front burner and it is widely recognized that NCLB is failing to achieve its goals, the critical question is how should it be restructured.
As Senators Michael Enzi (Wyo.) and Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), senior Republican members of the Senate's education committee, recently recognized, for Congress to develop appropriate remedies for NCLB, it must first understand NCLB's deficiencies. [Education Daily, Feb. 4, 2011, p.1]
This common-sense observation leads to profound consequences. Because the current law rests on false premises and has serious harmful effects, it cannot simply be "fixed" -- it needs to be overhauled.
While NCLB's goals are laudable -- bringing all public school students to academic proficiency and closing the achievement gaps between poor and minority children and others -- how it seeks to achieve them is fatally flawed. NCLB's problems extend to both what it does and what it does not do.
NCLB's critical underlying problem is its fundamental "theory of change," i.e., "tests and sanctions": Test students at the front end, sanction schools when students fail to sufficiently raise test scores at the back end, and essentially jump over the middle -- the harder part -- explaining what changes schools should make to substantially improve student learning, and then helping them do so.
I believe that NCLB's "tests and sanctions" theory of change is built on several implicit premises:
1) Public schools know how to dramatically improve student learning, but they must be pressured to try harder; publishing the results of required annual tests and the embarrassment of being labeled as failures for not meeting Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) "proficiency" targets, will induce schools to make any necessary changes in teaching and learning.
2) Insofar as tests and embarrassment may not be sufficient to generate the needed changes, a series of mandatory, escalating sanctions over multiple years, including transfers and tutoring, replacing curriculum or selected staff, or other "corrective actions" and ultimately, major changes in governance, including converting to a "charter school," "private management" or a state takeover, will substantially improve the schools.
3) Each sanctioned school's deficiencies are predominantly unique, rather than a result of historical structures, policies and social conditions typically applicable to schools serving high concentrations of poor and minority children nationwide.
4) States have the skilled and knowledgeable human resources to effectively assist schools and districts transform their low-achieving schools and, where necessary, lead the transformation themselves.
5) NCLB's tests and sanctions accountability system will enable most public schools to bring virtually 100 percent of their students to academic proficiency by 2014, regardless of their concentrations of students by poverty, race, English speaking ability or disability.
These premises are false. NCLB's approach to "school reform" is not only fundamentally misconceived and ineffective, but has led to significant harms.
Contrary to the first premise, most sanctioned schools do not currently have the capacity, including the knowledge and skills, to make the systemic changes necessary to dramatically improve instruction and the level of student learning. Pressuring them to raise test scores generally does not induce the necessary changes in expectations, beliefs and practices. Harmfully, the threat of embarrassment and sanctions widely generates "teaching to the test," "narrowing the curriculum," and various manipulations to lower standards and raise test scores to try to avoid or postpone schools' being sanctioned. Moreover, the NCLB accountability scheme has led to destructive labeling of an increasingly large percentage of schools as failing, damagingly undermining the morale and self-confidence of teachers, school leaders, parents and community members.
Second, mandated, piecemeal, escalating sanctions have not significantly improved low-achieving schools overall. This strategy is not only unduly rigid, but misunderstands what it takes to turn around a chronically low-achieving school: as with other complex organizations, this requires not a pre-sequenced, rigid, mechanistic process, but skilled leadership and a multi-faceted, concurrent and responsive process of organic change.
Charter schools and private management are no more effective overall than traditional public schools, if that. Moreover, they undermine our democracy by giving up local public control and public funding -- to private individuals -- of America's key public institution for educating our youth.
Third, by treating each school's deficiencies as predominantly unique, NCLB has led the public to overlook that America has historically had a two-track public school system that has disproportionately assigned poor and minority students to non-academic tracks. Simply superimposing a new requirement that such students learn much more academically, as NCLB has done, does nothing to equip their teachers and staff to dramatically raise their historically lower level of curriculum and teaching, nor to help the students' families provide the necessary academic support at home. Moreover, it harmfully encourages a narrow emphasis on blaming and removing individual "bad" teachers and staff, rather than focusing chiefly on the much greater need to improve systemic staff preparation, training, collaboration and support, so as to significantly improve what goes on in classrooms generally.
Fourth, states do not now have nearly the human capacity to provide essential technical assistance and support for all schools failing AYP, let alone to turn them around by themselves.
Finally, during NCLB, there has been virtually no increase in the percentage of students at "proficiency" in reading as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress and only a modest increase in math. It is projected that about 85 percent of schools would fail AYP by the 2014 deadline.
NCLB is based on false premises and produces harmful effects. ESEA needs to be profoundly redirected.
My subsequent blogs will discuss how a reauthorized ESEA should be overhauled to accomplish its goals.
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (The No Child Left ...
No Child Left Behind (CA Dept of Education)
Once-staunch proponent of No Child Left Behind has moved on
We are not Finland. We do not need to emulate Finland. Please stop talking about Finland.
Having two kids in the public schools for the last five years, one thing is very clear to me. Student achievement is based on a symbiotic balance of a strong school principal, good, motivated and dedicated teachers and involved parents. If just one of those elements is missing, the child's experience is less than optimal and learning suffers.
Lets have 4 tiers/tracks for basic schooling:
Tier 1 - Basic Laborer can read, write, and do basic math. Maybe 8th grade level?
Tier 2 - Vocational Profession. 10th grade.
Tier 3 - Undergrad track. 12th grade.
Tier 4 - Research university. Top students might be placed in special high schools, and then get fast tracked into top universities for specialization.
System would need some flexibility to allow cross pollination between tiers, but my monitoring aptitude and performance, and allocating resources required to let the students achieve their full potential, society will get a much higher return overall.
I love my job and I love my students but frankly, I just don't spend enough time in any one student's life to affect a permanent life-long change. I try. I spend 4 hours a day for 180 days = 720 hours a year with any one student. Over 13 years of school times 7 hours a day for 180 days a year = 16,380 hours -- that's time spent by all school personnel over a typical school career. 10% of a child's time.
Parents or the child's community spends 18 years with that person or 157,680 hours minus the time they are @ school = 141,300 hours. 90% of a child's time. Parents/community are much more likely to affect life-long change. If NCLB were serious about improving test scores - money should have been spent teaching parents and the people in their communities to be better students so they could support their kids because they will spend thousands of more hours with any one kid than I ever will.
I love my job and will do the best I can with my 10% - but I'm scared it's simply just not enough time.
http://theeducatedsociety.com/what-no-education-reform-ever-addresses/
A high school teacher who teaches a very challenging class is far moire likely to have complaints than one that passes everyone and teaches very little.
No books in the home. No one reads to them. No food in the home. No pencils, crayons, markers, scissors. No homework support. No one in the home who has been successful at school. No one to stimulate them, everyone working. No one teaching them basic educational skills - like sitting, listening, obeying rules.
Notice I did not say - no one who cares. I have found most parents CARE deeply. But a teacher speaking to an adult parent who hasn't been successful in school is intimidating, scary, and the language might not be understood. The teacher cares, the parent cares, and the child cares. At least in the beginning where I teach them - 1st grade. But to fail, fail, fail every test because you are competing again an upper middle class student somewhere else in the United States is discouraging and detrimental. NCLB is damaging generations of people by the comparisons.
The stated goal of NCLB: "We as a nation believe all children are capable of learning at grade level, we will give them resources to do that and we will measure them to make sure they are moving toward that learning at grade level."
I don't know why you would make the comment: "When children of poverty compete with even a middle class student they are very likely to fail." Those sorts of blanket, across-the-board generalizations from educators are exactly why there was a demand for accountability.
Your comment is simply not true, and we now have the statistics to show that in certain classrooms, students -- who teachers had written off -- suddenly start to bloom. Certain teachers (of widely varying years of experience) are able to increase student achievement, and the increase is consistent over time.
We now have evidence that teaching matters and we know what it looks like. Claims about not having books or crayons in a "middle class" home are the useless predictions from a deficit model. Effective teachers talk about what children DO have and know.
It is flawed to sweep 60% failure by Grade 3 in Reading under the carpet-and being poor means the kids haven`t been read to which means the instruction has to be as research states and delivered by excellent teachers.
Again, I agree, Asian immigrants had many obstacles and lived in impoverished areas, but they brought a very different culture with them. I just think it's more complicated than just saying look how Asians did it, you can too.
THE PROBLEM WITH NCLB: It attempts to "fix" the teacher or the set of teachers. Teachers as a whole have proven to be good at systems and successful at least partially. The main culprit isn't the school or the teacher - it's the community.
My inner city kids are being raised in homes where parents simply don't know how to be successful in the system. Their community and culture of poverty does not necessarily make education a priority. Even if it is the priority the people in the child's life don't necessarily know how to support a successful educational career. NCLB has now labeled them as failing - before they even start. It never addressed the real problem with a real solution.
teachingtounderstand.blogspot.com
1. The standardized tests have NO negative consequences for parents or students. Poor achievement means nothing. Since they suffer NO opportunity cost to doing poorly, they do NOT CARE. If class placement depended upon standardized test performance, or if these tests were INCLUDED IN A STUDENT'S GRADE, then the scores would change.
2. All children are ABOVE AVERAGE. Every child can be a rocket scientist. Every child is an undiscovered Feynman. This preys upon the very worst inclinations of parents, and it has seriously damaged our schools.
It is very simple really. One just has to think about the issue clearly and that is NOT possible for those INSIDE the system. They are entirely tied up with wrong ideas, illogical beliefs, and a lifetime's worth of work and effort that ought to be flushed down the toilet.
I think it is OK to outsource education, (using boarding schools) if the child and parent so desire. We will likely get better education at lower costs. American children will grow up in an international enviornment.
Out-sourcing education will also stimulate Americans at home to come up with a better education system that educates, teaches and disciplines children in a competitive and free-market environment.
Your choice (current sytem) is better than the choice a child's parent will make?
Incentives to do the right thing haven't worked. Its time to disincentivize poor choices and outcomes