Epic Fail: The Student "Success" Act (H.R. 5)

I received a call from the AFT this afternoon asking me to contact my congressman to urge him not to support H.R. 5 The Student Success Act. I declined to be connected directly to my congressman's office, but decided to take a look to see what the fuss was about.

H.R. 5 is an attempt at a reauthorization and overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (more commonly known as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, NCLB), which has desperately been in need of attention for years. Section 1111 of the Act outlines the plans that States have to put together in order to receive Federal funds to support improving education for disadvantaged children. In NCLB, this included stipulations about Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and required sanctions for schools that failed to make AYP for a certain number of consequtive years. Certainly, the accountability portion of sec. 1111 is a big part of what has needed an extreme make-over, but I certainly wasn't expecting what H.R. 5 proposes.

The bill stipulates that States must come up with an accountability system "to ensure that all public school students graduate from high school prepared for postsecondary education or the workforce without the need for remediation." This accountability system must:

• identify the performance of every public school based on both individual student achievement and achievement gaps between groups of students; and
• include a system for school improvement for low-performing public schools that implements interventions designed to address the schools' weaknesses.

And that's about it.

No, really, that's pretty much it. In particular, there are no indications about:

• how rigorous the academic standards must be (other than the vague reference to college/career readiness, and I don't think anyone has agreed on what that means);
• how to identify low-performing schools;
• how to determine whether low-performing schools are improving satisfactorily;
• what to do with schools that are chronically failing to improve; or
• anything else of substance.

Moreover (and here's the kicker!), Sec. 1111(b)(3)(C) explicitly states:

Nothing in this section shall be construed to permit the Secretary to establish any criteria that specifies, defines, or prescribes any aspect of a State's accountability system developed and implemented in accordance with this paragraph.

In other words, States would have completely free reign to do whatever they want and call it "accountability," and the Secretary of Education can't do anything about it.

I suppose the Secretary of Education could simply start rejecting State plans under some vague notion about not ensuring that schools are graduating college/career ready students, but this would hardly be desirable, since the Secretary would be prohibited from providing any guidance to States about what kinds of plans would be accepted.

The short of it is that the AFT is right on this time about the abysmal state H.R. 5 (as reported to the House) would leave educational policy in. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was supposed to bring us closer to equitable educational opportunity, but decades of pumping money through its programs to States did little to shift broad educational inequities. For the first time, NCLB gave ESEA teeth to require that States demonstrate that their use of the funds was getting results. Certainly, the accountability provisions in NCLB had a number of major flaws, but what was needed was some "orthodontics" (not a massive tooth extraction) to straighten out ill advised provisions while keeping a strong stance on demonstrating results.

For more information on the shortcomings of H.R. 5, see the minority committee report, starting on p. 949 of House Report 113-150.

H.R. 5 was debated on the floor of the House this afternoon, but they only got through 20 of the 26 proposed amendments. I presume they'll continue tomorrow. The last amendment, proposed by Rep. George Miller of California, is a complete replacement of the bill (starting on p. 62 of House Report 113-158). I haven't looked at it in detail, but surely it has more reasonable accountability provisions than the current bill.

Narrowing the Curriculum

From oldandrew at Scenes from the Battleground:

We don’t need to consider whether French is more important than Latin, or whether biology is better for children than history for it to be possible to identify a failure in education where large number of those leaving the system are unable to read, write or behave like civilised human beings.

Recent national education reform efforts here in the United States that require school accountability for student outcomes in reading and mathematics have received a considerable amount of push-back, some of which has taken the form of complaints about a narrowing of the curriculum, saying that students need well-rounded educational experiences and that testing only in reading and math forces schools to myopically hammer these skills to the exclusion of other important lessons. I've never found the complaint convincing: Schools that successfully get students to learn to read and do math should have no problems with their students' passing mandatory external assessments, and can go on their merry way teaching as many other subjects as they like; schools that can't even get their students to read have major problems that need to be addressed before we can even begin to consider what kind of well-rounded curriculum students should learn (since they aren't really learning anything at all at this point, after all).

What's really going on behind the outcry against trying to teach students to read and do math? I have a sinking suspicion that much of it has to do with (a) incompetent administrators who respond to national and state reforms by imposing inane requirements on teachers who are otherwise doing a fairly good job and (b) teachers and administrators in failing schools who don't particularly like the fact that there are now consequences for that failure. As for the latter, we've known for half a century that our schools are failing far too many low-income and minority students, and yet have failed to make much progress in correcting the problem. It's about time to expect that students leave school able to read, write, and behave like civilized human beings---if achieving that means teaching fewer subjects in certain schools for the time being, so be it.

Reforming Assessment Practices: Short List

Assessment can be a wonderful tool for gauging how well students are learning key material and how well teachers and schools are fostering learning. But, like any tool, assessment must be handled properly to achieve any benefit. Using a hammer to drive a screw only destroys the screw and damages the wood. The current educational policy climate in the United States has driven the growth of educational assessment, which has the potential to foster powerful cultures of data awareness in order to target interventions for the improvement of an ailing system. Unfortunately, lack of technical capacity and a touch of shortsightedness in places has led to a number of unhelpful, and even at times unintentionally damaging, policies. Below I give my short list of recommendations for purging the dross among assessment practices to allow the beneficial qualities of assessment shine through.

1) Some localities have responded to federal and state assessment requirements by entering a hyper-testing frenzy, in which even a month of instruction over the course of the year can be lost to large-scale, standardized assessment. This is overkill and hinders the primary goal of teaching. Classroom teachers certainly need to be assessing their students continually, formally and informally, in ways that they have been for years, in order to identify students' learning needs and adjust instruction. Likewise, large-scale, standardized assessments also provide a necessary external check of student learning, which can form a piece of evaluations of teacher and school effectiveness and draw out macro-patterns in the educational system as a whole. However, large-scale assessments shouldn't take the place of "light-weight" classroom assessments, nor should they displace significant portions of that which they are attempting to measure, viz instruction. Instead, states should require just a few days of testing both at the beginning and again at the end of each year, leaving the remaining time for teachers to perform their métier.

2) I have heard it claimed that some states and localities have been creating standardized assessments before establishing a strong statement of what they expect students to learn. This is utterly backwards and is largely a waste of time for everyone involved: A number resulting from a measurement of an unknown entity yields very little useful information, and asking teachers and students to perform on what purports to be an evaluation of their progress during the year without first telling them what will be expected is not only unfair, but creates an undue psychological burden on teachers and students alike that can only degrade the learning environment. Instead, any testing authority operating without a clear reference curriculum or with vague or flimsy standards should as soon as possible work out the skills and knowledge they hope students to master (ideally developing the list through a participatory process), publish the standards as widely as possible with accompanying professional development for teachers and local administrators to understand them as well as possible, and then ensure that their assessment is properly aligned with their expectations.

3) No teacher should spend more time teaching test-taking strategies than teaching content. While students do need to have some familiarity with the format of the test (so they spend their time demonstrating their skills instead of decoding the directions), teaching only test-taking skills not only does a huge disservice to the students (after all, one supposes that the students actually need to acquire the knowledge and skills being tested) but violates the spirit and intent of the measurement. For most teachers this is a no-brainer, but there are still
a few rogue teachers out there who, perhaps due to social pressures or out of fear of negative consequences, sacrifice their primary professional responsibility for a better image. These teachers need to be identified for professional development and potentially eventual dismissal if they consistently fail to demonstrate a capacity for improvement.

4) Testing authorities should endeavor to return detail-rich test results to schools and teachers as timely as possible. The primary purpose of large-scale, standardized assessments is to provide an external check on student learning to identify large-scale problems in order to target interventions in the system as a whole (or parts of the system, such as individual districts or schools or sub-populations). Nevertheless, one should not waste the opportunity to provide information that individual teachers could use to target local interventions for individual students. Assessment yields knowledge about students' learning to date--where the competencies are strong, and where they are weaker. Teachers could profit immensely from this knowledge in order to provide targeted instruction to help students improve in their weaker areas more efficiently. This information would be especially helpful if it came in the Fall--to inform instruction through the coming year--and in the late Spring--to help identify students who may need extra help during the summer before beginning the next grade.

5) In the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (No Child Left Behind), the federal government should move away from requirements that (a) compare one cohort of students with the next, and (b) use the percentage of students achieving a passing score to determine progress. The former only adds extra variance to the scores and muddies their interpretability, and the latter yields a measure of progress that isn't comparable between groups. Percentage passing is certainly important, since passing indicates achieving one of the goals of education (namely the mastery of certain skills and knowledge deemed important for students' lives), but the percentage passing isn't suitable for gauging progress since the same level of improvement in absolute scores could yield a large increase in the percentage passing if the cohort's average score is close to the cutoff or a small increase if the cohort's average score is further away. Instead, progress should be measured in terms of growth models comparing students' abilities at the beginning and the end of the year. These models provide a wealth of information about not only student's absolute level of mastery but their rate with a given teacher in a particular school. Under a highly skilled teacher, students who are very far beyond the state's expectations can make phenomenal progress, many times faster than students who are "on track," exhibiting one and a half or more years worth of gain relative to state expectations. These students may still take several years to catch up to their on-track peers, but examining raw passing rates fails to acknowledge their fantastic progress in the interim and masks their teachers' true skill. Looking instead at growth rates within the year shows whether students are likely to make sufficient progress to reach proficiency by the end of their schooling and gives a much better basis for comparing the effectiveness of teachers and the improvement of schools.

Unifying State Standards

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released a report last week aligning scores state assessment scores with the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP). The analysis reveals striking differences in standards from state to state:

For example, an eighth grader in Tennessee can meet that state’s standards for math proficiency with a state test score that is the equivalent of a 230 on the national test. But in Missouri, an eighth grader would need the equivalent of a 311.

And while a Mississippi fourth grader can meet the state’s reading proficiency standard with a state score that corresponds to a 161 on the national test, a Massachusetts fourth grader would need the equivalent of a 234. Such score differences represent a gap of several grade levels. (NY Times)

Since the US Constitution assigns states the responsibility of educating our children, the authors of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), now known as the No child Left Behind Act (NCLB), allowed states to determine curriculum and set standards of achievement, but such wide variation in the resulting expectations for what constitutes an adequate education has prompted some to question whether the current mechanisms for defining academic proficiency are sufficient to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. Although ESEA was intended to improve the quality of education for poor and minority students, NCLB provides little incentive for states to ratchet up the stakes in terms of their definitions of academic adequacy: If many local schools are already having difficulty in getting all of their students to pass the state proficiency examinations with standards such as they are, states are not likely to increase standards and risk even more schools facing negative consequences for failing to make adequate progress toward universal proficiency.

In an attempt to entice states to increase curricular standards, the Senate passed a bill last April that would, among other things, appropriate $100 million to provide grants to states to identify the skills students would need to succeed without remediation in higher education, the work force, and the Armed Services, and to determine the necessary changes to their curriculum to equip high school graduates with these skills (S.761, sec. 3401). While the bill's intention is admirable, the law would do little to ensure that states come to similar conclusions about the rigor of these skills for success.

Another bill before congress goes slightly further toward this goal by charging the NAEP Assessment Board with creating or adopting K-12 content standards that "reflect a common core of what students in the United States should know and be able to do to compete in a global economy" (S.224, H.R.325). These national standards would then be voluntarily adopted by states who accept a grant from the federal government to that end. Grants would be awarded up to $4 million per state over four years. While this bill has the potential to make great strides in directing our educational systems toward unity in academic expectations and would likely increase standards of proficiency, the money available as a carrot for states seems rather meager: $200 million spread over 53 million students gives less than $4/student--barely a dent in what it would cost to revamp a nation's curriculum, in terms of new textbooks, assessments, and professional development. The figure seems even less appealing when compared with the non-financial costs higher standards would levy due to the needs of NCLB.

What, then, can encourage states to raise the bar, not only of 100% proficiency but of proficiency itself? In the absence of a federal takeover of education, which require no less than a constitutional amendment, local citizens will have to petition their state governments, demanding a higher-quality education for our children. NCLB has made great strides in increasing the data available to parents and community members about the performance of every school; now that the NCES has mapped state assessment scales with NAEP, NCLB could be amended in the upcoming reauthorization to requires that schools report scores in terms of both state and national scales. While this reporting by itself wouldn't improve schools, it would give communities an idea of how their schools fare in comparison with the rest of the nation, hopefully fueling grassroots efforts to implement effectual change for educational improvement.

Learning via Skype

Broadband access to the Internet and the proliferation of a diverse set of free communications utilities are beginning to open new opportunities to access education. An article in this week's Economist highlights the language-instruction company Praxis, which is making use of e-mail, podcasts, and the free Voice-over-IP (VoIP) utility Skype to offer a course in Chinese. Students study lessons sent via e-mail, listen to recordings through the daily podcast, and engage in live speaking practice with one of the company's 35 native speakers in Shanghai.

These very readily available, low-cost solutions could prove useful in the public sector of formal education, as they have begun to in the private non-formal sector. Public school districts in particularly large rural regions in America, such as Montana or Alaska, have faced a certain amount of difficulty in meeting the No Child Left Behind standards for Highly Qualified Teachers. Federal regulations require that teachers have content-matter expertise in the subjects they teach--which is quite reasonable since many studies indicate that teachers with content-knowledge in their field are, in general, more effective. But, small class sizes render uneconomical the hiring of teachers in different subjects for each school, and large distances between schools inhibits teachers covering multiple schools.

With off-the-shelf technology--including a number of freely available tools--teachers in one location could serve a pool of students from several different schools. One school may have the English teacher and another the Math teacher, but the classes would learn together, connected via videoconferencing over the Internet. An on-site paraprofessional could monitor students and provide any necessary in-person support. While remote areas sometimes lack access to broadband Internet connections, installing such an infrastructure for the school may , in the end, provide a net savings compared with personnel costs, as well as an increase in the quality of instruction.

Some public schools are already experimenting with the new modes of instruction that advances in telecommunications are permitting. The Chicago Virtual Charter School just completed its first year of providing what amounts to a home-schooling environment with professional teacher support mediated through the Internet and periodic in-school sessions. The school has received a certain amount of opposition: The Chicago teachers union has filed a lawsuit that would shut down the school on the grounds that it violates the Illinois School Code's definition of charter schools as "public, nonsectarian, non-religious, non-home based" (105 ILCS 5/27A-5, emphasis added). On another front, Rep. Monique Davis introduced HB0232 in the Illinois General Assembly, which would ban any form of virtual school. After several amendments, the bill was sent to the Senate in a form that would merely establish a two-year, sixteen-member Task Force on Virtual Education.

Peeling the Onion

A couple of weeks ago, Margaret Spellings, U.S. Secretary of Education, appeared on The Daily Show. In the interview, Spellings gave a great snapshot of the purpose of the accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act:

Here's the deal. These are local decisions. I'm not hiring teachers at the Department of Education, obviously. But, what we've done with this law is peel the onion and bring to bear information about how well are we serving every single kind. And the answer is not well enough--by far, these days. And so what we're causing is anxiety with grown-ups on behalf of kids.

NCLB is merely the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), whose goal in 1965 was to encourage states to improve educational quality for poor and disenfranchised students by providing financial incentives for categorical programs. For years, the Federal government has required testing (mainly through NAEP) in exchange for the carrot to monitor the effectiveness of the funds and gauge progress in the improvement of education.

In the 2001 iteration, Congress went a step further in "peeling the onion" by requiring states who accept Federal funds to do their own measuring and reporting of progress, and attempted to kindle the flame after decades of smoldering educational reform by forcing action in schools that states identify as not making progress toward providing an "adequate" education for all students. Many schools have gone along for years without providing a basic education to all students--NCLB's assessment and reporting provisions attempt to expose this reality and mobilize people for change.