“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.”
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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 11th 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.
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.
“What now is called ‘data-driven instruction’ seems to be just a euphemism for ‘get those scores up, by any means necessary,” says Diane Ravitch in a thoughtful and wide-ranging intervew on ednews.org this morning. She continues to press the need for “a far more coherent curriculum than we now have in most schools,” and also makes a connection too few have made between a coherent curriculum and teacher training. “If teachers knew what they were expected to teach,” notes Ravitch, “we might also have far better teacher preparation.”
Ravitch confesses to becoming increasingly critical of No Child Left Behind. “Its relentless focus on basic skills in reading and math has not contributed to better education,” she notes. “It seems, in fact, to have led to dumbing down, since it does not challenge students who have leapt over its low bar. When I look at NAEP data, it is clear that national scores are virtually stagnant since the passage of NCLB and that the increases were greater before NCLB
On testing, Ravitch notes, “I have never been a critic of testing, NCLB has turned me into one. Today, many (if not most) districts are obsessed with raising scores on standardized tests, and they seem to confuse means and ends. Indeed, they seem to have lost sight of ends altogether. With the track we are now on, we might see scores go up while levels of knowledge (and education) collapse under the weight of basic skills testing and test-prep.”
Now that John McCain is the GOP nominee, he can count on all kinds of advice from the education commentariat. First up, Fordham’s Checker Finn and Michael J. Petrilli, who offer the Republican standard bearer some suggestions in the Weekly Standard. Noting that McCain “doesn’t consider education a top presidential priority” and has had little to say on the subject, they sugggest McCain integrate education within his larger platform, which promotes a strong, competitive America.
“Start by playing to your strengths, Senator, fitting education policy within three broad themes of your candidacy and worldview: keeping America confident in the face of Islamic terrorism, strengthening our ability to compete in a globalizing world economy, and fighting wasteful spending,” Finn and Petrilli offer. Give U.S. schoolkids a deep knowledge of U.S. history and America’s role as freedom’s champion. “That means not letting history and civics get squeezed out of the curriculum by NCLB’s obsession with reading and math scores,” they write.
Most intriguingly, Finn and Petrilli argue McCain should urge governors “to develop a set of common, rigorous expectations and assessments for all young Americans from Okeechobee to Walla Walla. And he could push Congress to rewrite NCLB so it focuses not just on academic stragglers but also on our savviest youngsters, too.”
Ed in ‘08 chairman Roy Romer weighs in helpfully (mostly) on the issue of curriculum narrowing and NCLB.
A report from the Center on Educational Policy last year showed 44% of school districts had increased instructional time spent on ELA and/or Math in elementary schools since the passage of No Child Left Behind, cutting time from science, social studies, art and music, physical education, recess, or lunch. According to a followup report this week, districts increasing time for ELA and Math had done so by an average of three hours each week. To make room for the added time, they’ve cut of about two and a half hours each week from one or more other subjects.
“I don’t believe that time should come at the expense of other academic areas like science, history, or the arts,” blogs Romer. “We at ED in ’08 have long advocated for more time for learning in America’s schools. States like Massachusetts have already followed the lead of many other developed nations and put in place a longer school day, and their students are proving all the more successful from it. That extra time is helping to balance out the school agenda so that students all receive the diverse range of subjects – and support – they deserve.”
All well and good, but it would be even more helpful in Governor Romer and others concerned about the narrowing of curriculum would look more closely at the link between content knowledge and reading comprehension, rather than continuing to treat reading as an independent academic subject.
Teaching content IS teaching reading.
Why has the No Child Left Behind law left so many children behind? According to the latest scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the reading achievement of eighth-graders has declined since the law was passed in 2001, and the large reading gap between advantaged and disadvantaged children — “the achievement gap” — has stayed where it was. Today’s eighth-graders had recorded gains in fourth grade, but these have not led to improvements in later grades — when reading scores actually count for a student’s future.
Those in Congress in charge of crafting revisions should understand that the law’s disappointing results owe less to defects in the law than to the methods and ideas schools use in their attempts to fulfill the “adequate yearly progress” mandate for all groups of students; this causes schools, as many complain, to teach to reading tests rather than educate children. But intensive test preparation by schools has resulted in lower reading test scores in later grades. “Teaching to the test” does not effectively teach to the test after all.
Studies of reading comprehension show that knowing something of the topic you’re reading about is the most important variable in comprehension. After a child learns to sound out words, comprehension is mostly knowledge. Many technical studies support the assertion that after students can fluently sound out words, relevant knowledge is the crucial difference between students who are good or poor readers. In light of the relevant science, an analysis of the textbooks and methods used to teach reading and language arts — for three hours a day in many places — indicates some of the reasons for the disappointing later results. These test-prep materials are constructed on the mistaken view that reading comprehension is a skill that can be perfected by practice, as typing can be. This how-to conception of reading has caused schools to spend a lot of unproductive time on trivial content and on drills such as “finding the main idea” and less time on history, science and the arts.
Continue reading ‘The Knowledge Connection’
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