Tag Archive for ‘NCLB’ at The Core Knowledge Blog

Tag Archive for 'NCLB'

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 Assessment and Testing and Educational Policy. 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 Assessment and Testing and Educational Policy. 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.

Diane Ravitch on Data, NCLB, Testing and More

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 20, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and Educational Policy. 0 Comments

“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.”

Groundhog’s Day

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 7, 2008 in Curriculum. 2 Comments

Here we go again with curriculum narrowing. It’s happening…it’s not happening…it’s happening, but the problem is overstated. The edusphere erupts over whether a reported 16% of schools cutting art for more reading and math can be characterized as “many schools,” or whether narrowing under NCLB happens “often” or only sometimes. Still to come, whether “many,” “some,” “a handful” or “just a few” angels can dance on the head of a pin, or whether angels dancing on pins is a troublesome, but overstated trend.

The important point continues to go undiscussed: Given that a broad, content-rich education is the key to reading comprehension—hence raising test scores—narrowing the curriculum in any form is not just unacceptable but counterproductive and foolish. If you want to see test scores up, start arguing for curriculum reform. This is the common ground that ought to unite friends and foes of NCLB alike.

Everything else is angels dancing on the heads of pins.

School is in, Senator McCain

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 6, 2008 in Educational Policy. 0 Comments

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.”

Romer on Curriculum Narrowing

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 25, 2008 in Curriculum. 1 Comment

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.

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