Tag Archive for ‘NCLB’ at The Core Knowledge Blog

Tag Archive for 'NCLB'

“We Are the Poster Child for NCLB”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 13, 2008 in Educational Policy. 0 Comments

A sobering look at the intersection of policy and reality courtesy of the Associated Press. Juliet Williams visits Las Palmitas Elementary School and the Coachella Valley Unified School District in Southern California, where “99 percent of students live in poverty and fewer than 20 percent speak English fluently.” Las Palmitas and other schools in are just the type policy makers had in mind when Congress passed the federal No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 to shed light on the disparities facing poor and minority children, she writes.

Nineteen of the district’s 21 schools — including Las Palmitas — have not met the federal law’s performance benchmarks for four years. Now the entire district faces sanctions for the first time. “We have hardworking, dedicated, trained teachers like everybody else. They’ve got to teach a language, they’ve got to teach the content, and they’ve got to counter poverty,” adds Foch “Tut” Pensis, the district’s superintendent. “We are the poster child for NCLB.”

“Over the next few years, hundreds more districts are destined to enter the next phase that California already has begun. The state has ordered districts to undergo everything from reporting how they are implementing the federal law to having a team of specialists assess every aspect of their operations. In the most extreme cases, California districts could be subject to a state takeover,” Wiliams reports. “How California and the other states will turn around those struggling districts is unclear.”

According to the AP, California has 97 school districts that failed to meet their goals under the law for four years, more than twice as many failing districts as any other state so far. Kentucky has the next highest number facing sanctions, with 47. Nationwide, 411 school districts in 27 states now face intervention.

“No one, on a large scale, has figured out how to solve the achievement gap,” Pensis said. “Everybody’s looking for that answer.”

Petrilli Schools Obama

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 7, 2008 in Educational Policy, Parents and Testing. 0 Comments

Mike Petrilli over at Fordham’s Flypaper is offering free advice to presumptive nominee Barack Obama this morning on using education to tack to the center in the general election. Responding to Timesman David Brooks’ observation Obama supporters “look more and more like the McGovern-Dukakis constituency,” Professor Petrilli prescribes a little ed talk:

“He should surely continue to channel Bill Cosby and talk about the need for parents to take responsibility for their children. (Beyond being sensible, this appeals to social conservatives.) This is a standard theme he mentions when addressing predominantly African-American audiences (themselves quite socially conservative); he should use it all the time.

“As for suburban independents, his position on No Child Left Behind most likely appeals to them already, what with his talk about saving art and music and literature from the ravages of “teaching to the test.” But he could go one step further and also talk about high-performing students who are being forgotten by our current education system and the need to help them achieve their potential too. (What suburban independent doesn’t think that his or her own child is gifted?)”

Pay attention, Senator. This will be on the test.

More Than Meets the Eye

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 5, 2008 in Educational Policy. 0 Comments

A little over a week ago, the Sacramento Bee broke a story that created a minor stir, documenting how many California schools are gaming No Child Left Behind by reclassifying minority kids to different ethnic groups, thus flying below the law’s reporting threshold. Good, solid reporting. One principal, Jim Wong of Will C. Wood Middle School in Sacramento, was on the record, talking about how persuading the parents of four students to change the racial designation of their mixed-race kids kept him out of trouble. Dead-bang, unambiguous gaming the system and flouting the spirit of the law, right?

Today the paper comes back for a second bite at the apple in an editorial defending the principal. And it’s a pretty good defense.

Gaming NCLB

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 27, 2008 in Educational Policy and Testing. 0 Comments

Eighty California schools got “out of trouble” with No Child Left Behind in the past two years by changing the way they classify their students, according to an analysis by the Sacramento Bee. The changes enabled the school to alter their status from failing to passing under the law.

The paper cites the example of Sacramento’s Will C. Wood Middle School. Last August, most of the school’s students had met benchmarks set by No Child Left Behind. But African American students’ math scores fell far short. “One hundred students were categorized as black when they took the test last spring. But if the school had fewer than 100 students in that group, their low scores wouldn’t count,” the Bee reports. “So Principal Jim Wong reviewed the files of all the students classified as African American on the test, he said, and found that four of them had indicated no race or mixed race on their enrollment paperwork. Wong sent his staff to talk to the four families to ask permission to put the kids in a different racial group.”

“You get a kid that’s half black, half white. What are you going to put him down as?” Wong told the paper. “If one kid makes the difference and I can go white, that gets me out of trouble.”

A pretty extraordinary admission for a principal to make on the record. And quite a job of reporting on the games schools play by the Sacramento Bee, which notes California doesn’t verify whether the changes schools make accurately reflect the students they serve.

Required Reading

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 27, 2008 in Weekly Roundup. 0 Comments

From Core Knowledge

An Epoch-Making Report, But What About the Early Grades?

By E.D. Hirsch, Jr.

In the 25 years since A Nation at Risk was issued, writes Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, Jr., energetic reform efforts have been put forth, to small overall effect. This persistent lack of significant improvement is owing to the unwavering persistence of the very ideas that caused the decline in the first place—the repudiation of a definite academic curriculum in the early grades by the child-centered movement of the early 20th century.

Best of the Blogs

What Should Happen in Our Houses of Learning? — Diane Ravitch in Bridging Differences
“The goal is not the problem. The implementation is. ”

Gering Public Schools: The School District to Watch — D-ed Reckoning
Direct Instruction turns around a Nebraska district

A Closer Look at School Violence in Chicago — Eduwonkette
What do trends in weapon-carrying and fighting among teenagers in Chicago look like?

Nzeyimana can’t use ‘prowl’ in a sentence — Joanne Jacobs
How do you pass No Child Left Behind, when you don’t speak English?

Teaching, Content and Curriculum

Still at Risk
By Frederick M. Hess, American Enterprise Institute,
When it comes to familiarity with major historical events and significant literary accomplishments, America’s seventeen-year-olds fare rather poorly. When it comes to familiarity with the base of knowledge that enables us to engage in conversations about values and policy, our seventeen-year-olds are barely literate.

Report Calls for Moving Away From K-12 Tests and Sanctions
By David J. Hoff, Education Week
Congress and the next president need to offer a new vision for the federal role in K-12 education, creating a sustained effort to increase the quality of teachers, tailoring accountability systems to measure higher-order thinking, and ensuring that all spending is equalized across school districts, a report from a group of educators and researchers says.

Education Policy

‘Nation at Risk’: The best thing or the worst thing for education?
By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
Twenty-five years ago this week, Americans awoke to a forceful little report that, depending on your point of view, either ruined public education or saved it. “A Nation at Risk” kick-started decades of tough talk about public schools and reforms that culminated in 2002’s No Child Left Behind, the Bush administration law that pushes schools to improve students’ basic skills or face ever-tougher sanctions.

Obama’s Real Bill Ayers Problem
By Sol Stern, City Journal
Barack Obama complains that he’s been unfairly attacked for a casual political and social relationship with his neighbor, former Weatherman Bill Ayers. But the more pressing issue is not the damage done by the Weather Underground 40 years ago, but the far greater harm inflicted on the nation’s schoolchildren by the political and educational movement in which Ayers plays a leading role today.

Education Secretary Offers Changes to ‘No Child’ Law
By Sam Dillon, The New York Times
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings used her executive powers on Tuesday to propose a series of ninth-inning regulatory fixes to President Bush’s signature education law, No Child Left Behind, including requiring states to use a single federal formula to calculate and report high school graduation rates. Ms. Spellings also wants to require schools to notify parents of their right to transfer students out of failing schools two weeks before the start of each school year, and to explain more fully to parents the opportunities for federally financed tutoring that are available to students attending troubled schools.

Parenting and Homeschooling

‘America’s Worst Mom?’
By Lenore Skenazy, The New York Sun
When I wrote a column in this paper last week, “Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Take The Subway Alone,” I figured I’d get some emails — pro and con. Two days later I was on the “Today Show,” MSNBC, Fox News, and all manner of talk radio with a new title under my smiling face: “America’s Worst Mom?”

California Court to Reconsider Homeschooling
By Michael Coulter, School Reform News
California’s Second Appellate District Court of Appeals touched off a firestorm when it issued an opinion that parents have no right to homeschool their own children–a firestorm so great that on March 25, a full month after issuing its decision, the court agreed to rehear the case, with a decision expected in June.

Homeschool parents, kids oppose bill
By Michael Brindley, Nashua (NH) Telegraph
For the second time in two weeks, homeschool parents and their children turned out in droves to oppose a bill that would require parents to submit a curriculum plan to the state. The legislature passed a bill in 2006 that eliminated the requirement for parents to submit such a plan on an annual basis.

Homeschooling notification is not an undue burden
Editorial, The Press & Argus Livingston, MI
Parents have every right to homeschool their children, and Lansing needs to be very careful whenever it considers legislation that might inhibit that right. That said, we don’t feel that it’s an undue burden on homeschooling parents to be required to notify their home school district that they’re educating their children at home.

A Wall of Denial

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 24, 2008 in Educational Policy and Testing. 3 Comments

“A perfectly equal school system is not likely to produce equal students,” notes Barron’s Editorial Page Editor Thomas G. Donlan in an unusually strong commentary titled Another Lost Generation. Labeling No Child Left Behind a failure he notes “a proper policy must require that all children have the opportunity to be educated up to their potential.”

“Testing has identified some schools where hope had vanished. It has galvanized a few states to take over administration of a few of their worst schools,” he notes. “But such takeovers also demonstrated how hard it is for even the best-intentioned bureaucrats to overcome years of professional neglect, decades of physical deterioration and generations of parental incapacity.”

Donlan isn’t merely throwing in his lot with NCLB bashers, however. Far from it. “Many teachers and their advocates have retreated behind a wall of denial,” he writes. “Some denounce high-stakes testing, as though conducting tests without providing consequences for failure would be more useful. Others denounce the tests themselves as too difficult, as though anything could be measured by a test that all students pass. And many denounce the tests, easy or hard, for demanding too much rote regurgitation of facts, as though facts were not the first necessary bricks for building an intellectual edifice.”

One wouldn’t expect to read such a strong, clear-eyed take on education in a paper that covers investing and business. But Donlan’s diagnosis hits the bulls-eye.

“Who has been fooling whom? It seems educators and politicians and parents and students have been fooling each other, and fooling themselves,” he concludes. “Public schools that mismeasure themselves are unlikely to produce real educational achievement. And schools that mismeasure student achievement, even on such a simple scale as graduation rate, are unlikely to solve their own problems.”

They Said It

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 15, 2008 in Educational Policy and Opinion. 0 Comments

“Stop defending NCLB. It has proven to be ineffective, harmful for kids, devoid of what matters most in education, hostile to knowledge-acquisition, and downright bad for the future of education.”

–Diane Ravitch

“Let’s stipulate that George Will is right that some liberals hold under-educated Americans in contempt. Isn’t it strange that many of these same liberals defend the very public education system that arguably created the “under-educated” masses? And that resist promising policies that might improve said education system, such as tough-minded accountability, high-quality charter schools, and a more limited role for teachers unions? If these liberals want more Americans to be “thinking people,” why don’t they jump on the education reform bandwagon?”

–Mike Petrilli

Both Ravitch and Petrilli are from Flypaper, an entertaining and extraordinarily energetic new blog from Fordham. Good stuff!

We Can’t Go Back. Can We?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 11, 2008 in Educational Policy. 0 Comments

Sympathetic piece in Newsweek profiles Margaret Spellings as she plays out the string as the Bush Administration’s Education Secretary. Spellings, the mag notes, has “the thankless task of being the primary spokesman for No Child Left Behind.”

“Spellings wants to think that she’s done some good,” Newsweek concludes. “At the very minimum, she hopes the heat and light surrounding No Child Left Behind has focused the attention of America on the shameful achievement gap between middle-class and poor kids, between white kids and kids of color. ‘And things can’t go back the way they used to be—when we didn’t have accountability,’ she implores. ‘When we didn’t care that poor kids were falling behind.’ She pauses. “Can we?”

Fixing Education Policy

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 1, 2008 in Educational Policy and Testing. 0 Comments

I only know two things about UVA law school professor Jim Ryan. He’s a neighbor of Alice Wiggins, Core Knowledge’s Early Childhood Program Director, and he’s got a pretty solid prescription for what ails public education.

Slate is promising a 10-part series of posts from experts “offering detailed policy prescriptions for the next president, whomever that may be.” Ryan’s answers for education include national testing (”No one argues that it would be better to have 50 different AP tests in American history instead of one”) and fewer of them, “perhaps in only fourth, eighth, and 11^th grades.” Agreed, and while we’re at it, let’s take up E.D. Hirsch’s idea to correlate reading tests to the content standards in other subjects. Teachers will teach to the test. Make that a productive use of classroom time as Hirsch’s idea suggests. This would also fit neatly with Ryan’s prescription: “Don’t stop all testing, stop stupid testing.”

Ryan also adds his voice to the growing chorus in favor of national standards . “It’s time to create national standards and tests in at least reading, math, science, and social studies/history,” he writes. “National tests in the past have been nonstarters politically, but they have always polled well, and some politicians are starting to come around. The reality is that the current federal-state compromise isn’t working and doesn’t make sense in a shrinking and flattening world. Why should we expect less of a student in Mississippi than in Massachusetts? Do fractions and algebra matter in North Carolina but not North Dakota?”

Ryan has lots more to say on value-added, preschool and teacher pay. Worth reading.

Four and a Half Myths About NCLB

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 31, 2008 in Educational Policy. 0 Comments

Checker Finn had a think-piece in Sunday’s Washington Post on the “5 Myths About No Child Left Behind,” which is facing an uncertain fate—or at least an uncertain timetable—as it awaits reauthorization this year. Finn points out that NCLB isn’t compulsory since states can opt out, and is merely “another incarnation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965,” part of LBJ’s Great Society initiatives. He dismisses the notion that NCLB in underfunded, and is spot-on in asserting that “instead of demanding more money for No Child Left Behind, critics should ask why states and local communities get such dismal returns on the half-trillion dollars, or nearly $10,000 per student, that they already spend on primary and secondary education every year.”

Finn is on shakier ground labeling as myth that the standardized testing required by No Child Left Behind gets in the way of real learning. “If the test is an honest measure of a solid curriculum,” he writes, “then teaching kids the skills and knowledge they need to pass it is honorable work.” And “if” a frog had wings, it wouldn’t bounce its butt on the ground. As E.D. Hirsch, Jr., has written recently, state standards are notoriously vague and content-free. Finn and Fordham have long done excellent work demonstrating the glaring inconsistencies in standards from state to state.

One can argue ad nauseum about whether the legislation or its feckless implementation are to blame, but without meaningful standards—content standards, not process standards—upon which to base tests, we’re merely spinning our wheels.

Update: Good update on NCLB, the campaign and the disappointments of both in the Economist.

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