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What's next for NCLB?
Some educators want the next incarnation of No Child Left Behind to scrap the use of standardized tests to judge school performance. Besides tests there could be other measures, such as attendance, teacher retention, college-going rates, suspension rates, etc. What indicators should be used to judge schools? Should different types of school--for instance, urban schools or those that serve primarily low-income children--be judged differently?
A battle is brewing over the upcoming reauthorization of ESEA (No Child Left Behind) and it's important that we all get involved and have our voices heard. NCLB has been a disaster for public education and school reform. The Forum for Education and Democracy has been playing an important role in developing an alternative approach to NCLB. Recently Forum Conveners George Wood and Pedro Noguera offered this perspective on reauthorization. I offer it as my contribution to this current Catalyst Caucus discussion and look forward to hearing your comments and suggestions.
Reauthorization of ESEA, Our Perspective
February 08, 2010 — The Forum
by Forum Conveners George Wood and Pedro Noguera
After the President’s State of the Union speech, speculation has begun about what will happen with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), most recently renamed No Child Left Behind. Reports in the national press cite sources that the Obama administration is ready to address some of the most grievous problems in the current law. That will be a good start, but we want to encourage the Administration and Congress to do more than fix a bad law – we want them to invest in public schools in ways that prepare every young person to use his or her mind well.
In a few weeks, we will be releasing a detailed set of recommendations for ESEA. For now, however, we wanted to share our key principles, in the hopes that we might generate a dialogue amongst the public of what they hope for their schools and communities. Since there is no one-size-fits-all plan for improving and supporting public schools, it is the conversations in our neighborhoods and communities that are most important. You, your neighbors, the teachers in your town or city – you are the people who can best design school reform strategies that work for your children, and create, nurture, and support high quality schools across the country.
The Conveners of The Forum believe that every community is entitled to receive from our federal government the supports that make an equitable, high quality education possible for all children. While it is fundamentally the role of states and locales to support schools, the role the federal government can play is crucial. It should not, however, be the role that has been played over the past decade—that of dictating classroom practices, micromanaging curricular and teaching decisions, and dictating assessment practices.
The legitimate federal role in public education is to insure that all of our children have equal access to public schooling. As with voting rights and rights to non-discrimination in employment and housing, the federal government protects all citizens by ensuring equal access to those things that enable us to enjoy the fruits of our Constitutional form of government. A high-quality education is one of those rights. Thus, while the federal government provides less than 10% of the national education budget, it can leverage that funding to ensure equitable access to a quality education for all children.
To that end, we recommend that any reconsideration of ESEA include the following:
A National Commitment to High Quality and Well Supported Teachers in Every Classroom:
Over 25 years ago the words of Ted Sizer are still the truest every spoken about public education: “Without good teachers, strategically deployed, schooling is hardly worth the effort.” The provision of good teachers, and the supports they need to do their job, is one of the major civil rights agendas of the decade. Providing every child with talented teachers, providing for those teachers the leadership and conditions that allow them to practice their craft, and allowing those teachers to exercise their professional judgment is the base upon which a just and equitable system of education is based. Convener Linda Darling-Hammond and her colleague from the Center for Teacher Quality, Barnett Berry, long ago outlined a Marshall Plan for Teaching that would take America down the road to this type of commitment to teaching. Not only doable, it is affordable, costing less than one month’s involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Other nations long ago learned that if they invest in teaching, they do not have to try and micro-manage schools through curriculum and testing mandates. It is time that this nation invested in the human capital that would make our schools again the envy of the world.
Invest in the Research and Development of Assessments of Student Achievement that Focus on Higher Order Thinking Skills rather than Rote Memory:
Major research and development work has always been something for which we turn to our national government. To date we have relied on the lowest common denominator when it comes to looking at school effectiveness, that being standardized, machine scored tests. Even members of the current Department of Education as well as the President and First Lady have pointed out that these scores tell us little about our children. Further, they seem to have limited predictive validity when it comes to assessing students’ potential success in college or work.
Many nations have gone to more performance based assessments, which include teacher assessments, course embedded work, and nation-wide reviews. Such could be the case in our nation, but it will take the commitment of the federal government to push this agenda forward.
An approach to accountability that holds states responsible for the conditions to learn while holding communities responsible for equity and achievement:
The current federal policy framework holds schools to unreasonable targets, using narrow assessment tools, with punishments that do little to improve school performance. Ignoring decades of research on engaging, challenging learning environments, the strategies for school improvement mandated under current federal law show little promise of helping children learn. Instead, the new vision for ESEA should hold everyone accountable to just one thing: Providing the most engaging, challenging, and equitable learning environment for each child.
The federal government can do this by supporting states in building capacity to help schools with targeted, proven tools to help schools learn. And states should be held accountable for providing every child with the equitable opportunity to learn; perhaps through requiring they meet federal opportunity to learn indexes or through tying federal funding to equitable funding in the states. With such support, it would then make sense to hold districts and communities responsible for the wise use of resources to insure every child has the education our democracy requires.
None of this will be easy; but all of it is necessary. We applaud the efforts by the Department to bring together leaders from both parties to find ways to correct the problems with the current federal approach to education. We also applaud the Secretary of Education’s intent to pull back from the unrealistic timelines and the punishments invoked on schools in current federal policy. We encourage our friends in Washington to rethink their current approach to educational policy—with the federal government attempting to do what it is uniquely unsuited to do as in mandating teaching practices and curricular approaches, while leaving the heavy lifting of teacher supply, research, and equity to the states. Reversing this equation is not only proper, given the responsibility of states and communities for schools, it will also be more effective.
The Forum’s Conveners stand ready and willing to assist both the Department and Congress in rethinking NCLB, as are many educators across the nation. It is time for a change we can believe in.
I would also commend the efforts by the Department of Education to bring together leaders from both parties to find ways to guide and improve our federal leadership’s
approach to education. Revamping NCLB is long overdue. A change we can believe in would include:
• critical academic and social emotional supports for all students (In our urban school settings, students face many many challenges that make success difficult, at best if not impossible)
• Equity in funding regardless of the school/community location
• Reasonable targets and diverse assessments tools
• Ensure a world class education for every child
• Staff development, and support for hiring the best and the brightest to teach our children
• Develop a focus on outcomes, and data systems that tracks students over time to assess progress
The highlights above are but a few “must haves” to change the path of education in America. Now is the time to think boldly about our future. We must ensure that all of our children are prepared to compete in a global economy.
My fear is that partisan politics will continue to stymie progress in rewriting NCLB. Given the current climate in Washington, I expect, unfortunately, that attempts to bring together leaders from both parties will result in nothing more than posturing, sniping, blaming and public hand-wringing. Still, my observation is that there is a relatively short list of measurable indicators that determine whether a school is performing well or not, including student attendance, teacher attendance, college-going rates, parent and student satisfaction, freshman on-track rates and test score growth (not static scores). Other indicators are important but tougher to quantify, like quality of school leadership and rigor of the curricula. NCLB should ensure that there is equity in opportunity and set forth some clear measures for results.
Its funny, I've been in Chicago now for two + years and I almost never hear folks talk about NCLB. Why is this? One reason I think is that the mechanisms for identifying schools under the law are weakly linked to our local experiences of schools. So schools that are making progress get grouped with those that have a much longer history of problems under the banner of "needs improvement" or "restructuring" and we just shrug. So yes, if the goal is to make NCLB a more useful tool for cities like Chicago than I agree some changes are in order. So what kinds of changes? Speaking personally, I agree with many of the ideas Mike Klonsky linked to in his post. Beyond this, I would encourage federal policy to move in two specific directions.
First, the law needs to better differentiate between schools, and focus policy attention on those schools that have a long history of poor performance, call it failure if you like. People, cannot focus on hundreds of schools, even if all need to get better, instead we need attention and resources devoted to a more targeted group. Can this be done? Sure. In Chicago, you can look at ten years of data and clearly see a cluster of around 20 high schools that are consistent low performers on a range of indicators, including reading and math test scores, graduation rates and college-going rates. These are the schools the federal law should focus its urgency and attention on. Yet, quick question, how many Chicago high schools are in School Improvement Status under NCLB? Try over 60. Overall, 55% of Chicago schools did not make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) last year. Such a blunt instrument breeds both a hopelessness and cynicism and ultimately leads to apathy about the law.
Second and related, we need broader measures, over longer periods of time, to understand how schools are doing and to target the lowest performers. How many other indicators, weighted how? This is not an easy issue and many thoughtful people in DC are grappling with this very question as they plan for reauthorization. For high schools, we probably want graduation rates and test scores, and college enrollment rates. We might also want something on college readiness and college retention though these are more difficult to develop indicators for. Whatever the mix of indicators, the goal should be to provide a common set of metrics for everyone—the feds, schools, educators and parents, to see how schools are doing and whether they are improving. For the majority of schools, the federal role should simply be to make sure this information is a fair, accurate and representative view of performance, so folks locally have information they can act upon. For the weakest schools, the federal role may need to be more hands on and even prescriptive, though in all cases, the focus of the law should be on helping local communities improve their own schools, and in providing the resources and the urgency to work on the toughest most challenging cases.
In cities like Chicago, a sense of urgency is critical for education reform. It is important to look beyond standardized tests to measure school performance.
Specifically, the new NCLB legislation must include provisions that support implementation of updated social & emotional learning standards. While these standards are strong in Illinois, that is not the case everywhere. The new NCLB should require stricter implementation of a common set of standards and hold states and districts more accountable for teaching students about self-management, social awareness, interpersonal skills, decision-making and responsible behavior.
Ideally, a revised NCLB will empower states and districts to teach students how to resolve conflict peacefully. Schools should be providing positive school discipline strategies and plans for teaching these skills just as do they in traditional lessons, and also require assessments of the subsequent results of these strategies – the same way it is done with math, science, reading and writing.
Lastly, the next incarnation of NCLB must be well funded. The long-term success of this updated legislation hinges in large part on whether there are the means for sustainable tools and resources that support the diverse needs of local districts.
I think everyone has made some very good points that i would have a difficult time adding to. The only thing I'd like to mention is the idea of an "educational debt" that is owed to students in marginalized communities that have been historically underfunded.
At this stage it is not enough to guarantee equal funding but to mitigate the overwhelming advantages wealthier districts have accrued because of their superior school funding formulas.