Evaluating NCLB (or any other reform for that matter)

Surely some serious moves toward equalizing the financing of schools are the most obvious route to improving the performance of the lowest-achieving third of schools.

Roy,

Is that supposed to make sense?

as,
I think it is bitter elitism or possibly its opposite.

#3: That’s a very difficult question to answer in one sentence, but…yes, it was supposed to, and does, too, still, I think, in its own baroque and convoluted way.
Were I writing it now something completely different would appear no doubt, but to the same points.
How’s this:
Instead of reaching down to the mass of “lowest achieving third of children” exclusively or even primarily, reach down specifically to those with the most potential. At the same time that you devote resources to the general mass of the underachieving. Concentrate a generous portion of the bureaucratic might of whatever programs you design to replace NCLB on the highest potential in that population.
What’s being lost in that bottom third isn’t just an homogenous lump of so-so disadvantaged future citizens, but a heterogenous mix, including a bunch of kids who have superior potential. Superior defined in parallel to what should be the goals of education. Which are currently a muddle of hypocritical self-interest and vague ideas about general well-being and the status quo ante.
Get away from consumeroid reinforcement as the reason schools exist, and reach toward the best among those currently being left behind. Reach toward all of them, but center on the best.

sk — what, just any stuff? That’s a bit unambitious of you. I’d like them to learn stuff that contributes to their development in line with those 4 goals.

vivian — will reply later.

Speaking as someone who formerly taught math at the Jr- and Sr-high levels, what the students need is old-fashioned drill, drill, drill. The parents need to force their kids to do the homework, the teachers should have the right to assign the appropriate and not inflated grades, as well as the right to expel problem kids from their classrooms. The administration should back the teachers up 100% and ruthlessly stomp on any parent who threatens retaliation, not cave like so many strands of over-cooked spaghetti.

If certain kids need help, there should be a dedicated after-school program to (semi-)tutor them while they do their homework.

Yeah. Like any of that is going to happen. The fact is, most parents, I suspect, don’t mind teaching to the test at all, at least the math part.

Surely some serious moves toward equalizing the financing of schools are the most obvious route to improving the performance of the lowest-achieving third of schools.

No they aren’t.

Poor kids in rich schools perform about as badly as poor kids in poor schools. Any correlation between school funding and educational outcomes is terribly weak. See for example this sad story of the Kansas school district http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html.

Teaching is a complicated business that truly requires professionalism. More money can easily be spent on bright-coloured toys rather than improving learnings.

NCLB was created as a way to discredit public education and especially teacher’s unions. When looked at in this light much of the program becomes clear.

1. Testing is of kids, but the results are not used to screen them so that they can be given appropriate remedial aid, if needed. The kids are tested, but the schools are rated.

2. The kids have no incentive to do well as they suffer no consequences if they do poorly on the test.

3. NCLB requires annual progress. This is mathematically impossible. At some point even the best school is going to reach the limits of performance. It will then be seen as failing to meet the goals. In other words the rules are fixed.

4. Because the schools suffer if they don’t meet the goals they curricula have been perverted (just as predicted) so that they focus is on test taking and teaching to the test. Students are learning less, not more.

5. I heard an anecdotal report yesterday about the performance level of some inner city sixth graders. This is the cohort that has been educated under NCLB for their entire career. They are much more poorly prepared then the previous year which was, in turn, worse then the one before it. What these kids lack is any initiative, an understanding of how to learn on their own and a love of learning. Teaching by rote kills the spirit of the young. This is something that John Dewey explained nearly a century ago. It’s why we went to a “progressive”, hands-on teaching model for the latter half of the 20th Century and gave up on McGuffey’s Reader.

6. Educational outcomes have not improved under NCLB because what is wrong with the educational achievement of the underclasses is not due to the schools, but is due to fundamental problems in society. Schools see students for about 1/6 of the year. Who fixes the problems in the other 5/6 of the time? Schools are asked to fix the problems in society. That’s not their role.

Having been given impossible to meet goals, the next step was to promote federal support of private (usually parochial) education. The wall of separation has been eroded over the years from a complete disconnect to government now providing textbooks, transportation and other services. Since money is fungible, this is a ruse. Money not spent on buses, is available for other uses within the school or can be used to hold down tuition. Vouchers are a similar ruse designed to get around prohibitions on state support of parochial education The current Supreme Court with five Roman Catholics is predisposed to overthrown one of the fundamental basis of American public education.

Being able to point to “failed” public education just makes the transition sound more reasonable.

Jim

1) lots of good useful data. Ask the people who work with it. Lots of bad data too.

3) When experimenting we use a placebo. When treating we choose the best treatment available.

4) The teacher’s unions oppose it now, but AFT supported it at the time. there’s a snese in which you are right — looking back, what happened is what happened. But were there feasible alternative features of NCLB? I’d say yes — States could have been pressured to use value-added scores, the AYP resuirements could have been made sensible (they could hardly have been made less sensible), some of robertdfienman’s worries could have been addressed.

7) NCLB is being discussed in Congress — ther eis no public debate right now, but they have to re-authorise something. Academics who are devoted to thinking about refrom should be trying to think about what should be done at the Federal and the State level, not beating the dead horse of NCLB. As to thinking about what the aims of education should be, yes, we should always be doing that. Its a little unfair of yoou to dismiss a two-line summary of an entire book as too vague — I do go into a great deal more detail in the book….

#12 is right. Kozol’s Savage Inequalities does a good job of illustrating the stark differences within the public school systems.

NCLB led to a near doubling of federal elem. & sec. education funding (Function 501 funding for budget geeks).

Marc, disaggregation is the best thing about NCLB.
Expecting schools to educate subgroups as well as majority groups means that a good school has to consider its data for African Americans or special ed kids or some other subgroup. (The special ed requirements are extremely poorly designed, but disaggregation is still good).

As someone who has watched that data being generated, I just don’t think it’s very good. Test data is much better than ‘serious incident’ or behavior data, but it’s still pretty totally unreliable.

Here’s the last NCLB article I read. A graduation rate variance of 24% is pretty ugly.

I have some trouble with robertfienman’s objections because many of them exist specifically because of teachers unions’ complaints.

Testing is of kids, but the results are not used to screen them so that they can be given appropriate remedial aid, if needed. The kids are tested, but the schools are rated.

The testing was designed this way because the union strongly resisted any kind of testing that could be tracked to individual teachers. Of course it would make much more sense to have value-added, student specific numbers, but that is poltically impossible because of the teachers unions.

The kids have no incentive to do well as they suffer no consequences if they do poorly on the test.

Same as above.

NCLB requires annual progress. This is mathematically impossible. At some point even the best school is going to reach the limits of performance. It will then be seen as failing to meet the goals. In other words the rules are fixed.

This is certainly true, but not as damning as you think because NCLB was always intended as a trial reform, not a permanent generation-spanning reform. It was tried because no one knew what would work, only that the three decades of teacher’s union-dominated efforts have not worked.

Because the schools suffer if they don’t meet the goals they curricula have been perverted (just as predicted) so that they focus is on test taking and teaching to the test. Students are learning less, not more.

This has always been a difficult complaint for me. Since the tests involve basic skills, “teaching for the test” involves mastery of basic skills. If the tests involved useless pseudo-magical phrases I could understand the complaint better. If the tests involved testing some ridiculously narrow subset of a larger discipline (being able to spell words that have ‘w’ as their second letter) I could understand the complaint. But they don’t. So teaching toward the test isn’t dramatically out of line with teaching toward mastery of basic skills.

5 (too long to quote) seems to suffer from the ideal/real problem. Yes rote learning is by definition tedious. But NCLB doesn’t require rote learning. One of the few really good things about it was that it didn’t dictate teaching style, it merely required that whatever teaching style you have, have a good outcome. The main appropriate complaint is that the measured outcome isn’t measuring well enough. That may be true, but that is the area we should focus on. The teacher’s union complaint which essentially boils down to “it is impossible to helpfully test for learning” seems ridiculous to me. It may be difficult to accurately sort subtle gradations, but it isn’t impossible to test and discover if someone has basic literacy or an understanding of math. The problem in the US education system isn’t about the gradations so subtle as to confound testing. Did the NCLB tests do a good job? I don’t know. Is the teacher union correct in its response that such things just can’t be tested and we shouldn’t even try? No.

Educational outcomes have not improved under NCLB because what is wrong with the educational achievement of the underclasses is not due to the schools, but is due to fundamental problems in society.

I’m willing to buy that this is some, or even much of the problem. Does this suggest that schools aren’t worth fixing, or that they couldn’t be doing a dramatically better job even given the problems of the underclass? I’m not convinced. I believe that even children of the underclass can learn how to read and write and do math. I believe that is true even if we can’t fix all the other problems of poverty.

I believe that, in part, because there are lots of poor groups that do very well in school.

One of the few really good things about it was that it didn’t dictate teaching style, it merely required that whatever teaching style you have, have a good outcome. The main appropriate complaint is that the measured outcome isn’t measuring well enough.

Look, I’m in no way advocating for teachers unions. (I’m a union member, but for reasons very particular to my school and situation.) Nor am I arguing against testing, publishing data, or teaching basic skills. But multiple choice tests and short essays, which is what every state uses for its NCLB test, necessarily push curriculum in a specific direction which substantially disrupts other potential efforts to improve students’ life choices. I teach math and English, and I don’t feel that test prep particularly distorts my math curriculum: in fact, it leads to greater emphasis on problem-solving and application than you might otherwise get. But I also teach senior English because I wanted to help prepare seniors for college (a pretty unusual focus in my school, given that less than 20% of our graduating seniors/10% of our entering freshmen go on to college.) Prior to my class, their curriculum has not included full-length novels, primary sources in social studies, or papers above 2 pages in any subject, because the focus is on basic skills. You can address that by revising the tests, or by deemphasizing the tests, or by adding a long-term project-based component (PA has a required senior project that theoretically fills this role), but it is a major problem for students’ life opportunities if they don’t know how to read a variety of types of text and create some analysis that goes beyond a 1-page response.

Basic skills could be taught through or with projects and long papers or whatever, but the incentive is to focus on drill so that, even if it doesn’t work, the connection between your assignments and the state tests is very clear. It takes a pretty awesome principal to stave off that pressure, and it’s not happening.

NCLB is a really crappy law. There’s a lot of unreasonable criticism of it, but that doesn’t make it a good policy.

Harry, let me add one more added benefit of NCLB. Bad test scores are incredibly important politically for people who are interested in equity. If a school in an inner city really bombs some standardized test, the media picks up on it. It’s news. They aren’t going to report that Mrs. C’s third grade class had a very nice portfolio assessment. Reporters need a quick short hand story. Bad test scores, along with drop out rates, make headlines. I want there to be a lot of front page stories about how badly schools in inner areas are faring, especially compared to rich suburban districts. Then we can think about how to fix them. But without a constant stream of bad news in the media, nobody is going to care about inner city schools.

One thing I would like to see preserved in the next education reform is standardized testing.

I understand and agree that for the past few decades, not enough investment has been made into the education of the bottom third achieving students. At the same time, I am worried that the whiplash will create the opposite problem for the next two decades, where we don’t invest enough in the top third of students. It seems to me that from a macroeconomic perpsective, the education of the top third of your workforce is much more important than the bottom third. However, there are other societal benefits (fair elections, educated debate) from having the bottom third artificially raised up.

The real question is: Who do we want to concentrate on in educating, and why? Should we aim for equal achievement at all cost? Equal resource allocation? Or the old system of allocating resources to the able? Equal resource allocation seems like the healthy middle ground, but this is very difficult to police and verify.

1) All students should pass competency tests for a system to be performing well.</i<

2) All subcategories of students should meet arbitrary thresholds. If the 3rd grade special ed cohort falls below some boundary the school is sanctioned. Again, there are obvious reasons why this is problematic.

It’s problematic that a school should try to teach all of its subcategories of students?

Those 3rd grade special ed kids are actual living individuals. They are better off if they learn.

Tracy, looking at your cite, it seems that one of the things DI advocates is good old-fashioned holding kids back if they don’t perform.

I’m emphatically for that.

Schools can teach low-income, disadvantaged kids. Just most of them don’t know how. Or don’t care. That’s the fundamental problem with education, not society.

I think we’ve had this discussion before. If the kids don’t want to learn, and the parents don’t back you up, no program is going to be much better than any other.

My first question would be, are these kids, the ‘low-income disadvantaged kids’ doing their homework? If not, then you really can’t say anything about the efficacy of any program.

Btw, on teachers’ ratings, emphatically disagree that the in-class grades should receive much weighting. That’s not to say teachers shouldn’t be tested and evaluated. The fact of the matter is, by the very nature of what’s being measured, the evaluation will be time-consuming, labor-intensive, and involve the subjective judgment of someone who has made a career of doing one-on-one evaluations.

This comes up in specific fields all the time. Give me some time with a student and a checklist of what you want to measure vis-a-vis mathematical ability, and I think I can give you a pretty good idea of where they stand. But for me to do so would probably take a half-day for each student, minimum. This is not something you’re going to readily discern from a machine-scored multiple-choice test, or even directly from worked problems.

re: equalizing funding – well, that’s a nice interim goal, but think for a bit. If Child A has two wealthy professional-class parents with college+ educations who lavish enrichment and school-related cultural competence/skills upon it (see for example Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods), is – whatever other stresses it faces – well-provided for, well nourished, safe, and (for example) in a home environment where it didn’t get to spend a few years cramming lead-paint chips into its mouth (etc.), while Child B has – however much love, support, and locally/class-specific/etc. vital skills and socialization it gets – none of these mainstream-necessary advantages, all else being equal, Child B’s education needs to be better funded – possibly by a good bit – than Child A’s (or at least dramatically more efficient; of course, it also goes without saying that much of the money has to be at least reasonably well-applied, which . . well, yeah.)

“See for example this sad story of the Kansas school district http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html.”

Of course, cato is going to say what it’s going to say. Now, broken clocks are occasionally right, and ultimately claims have to be stand or fall on the evidence, not the fact of massive ideological bias – and of course, the ‘Kansas City proves that spending more money doesn’t help’ talking point is at best wildly oversimplified and rather misleading.

On a certain simple level, one can argue that Kansas City does demonstrate that yes, almost literally throwing money at a problem is unlikely to fix it, that thing like an “ an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room” is perhaps not the best use of resources when it comes to improving a troubled school system. I’m not sure that too many folks would really disagree with this general idea. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. My understanding is that many of the improvements were, perhaps, primarily aimed not so much at helping the students (thought I’m sure that was a hoped-for effect) as at luring white families back into the system, as part of a desperate (and court-ordered) attempt at desegregation.

Now, Kozol, for example, makes a strong argument for the absolute necessity of integration – and personally, I’ve come to believe that the only thing which will stop society from letting poor, often (but not exclusively) brown kids drown is for (at least relatively) influential and privileged folks to be certain that their own precious and priceless offspring will be on those same leaky and neglected lifeboats. I’m certainly not saying the aim was wrong. It’s just important to realize that much of this effort has very little to do with directly improving education in the Kansas City school district. To a fair degree, it’s less a story about ed funding and more one about desegregation.

But at the same time, it’s also true that some of the funding did get put towards genuine improvements, not just white-family bait, and surely even some of those more eyebrow-raising extravagances (“25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability“) could have had some effect, right? And so we get to the other point. The school district, at this point, had undergone some decades of neglect, underfunding, and general crapitude. Much of the population it served, for most of their time on this continent, would have loved to experience mere neglect, underfunding, and general crapitude, as opposed to slavery, segregation, white supremacist-terrorism, and unrelenting discrimination. (I’m familiar with exactly one despised and oppressed minority group that rapidly achieved mainstream academic success once conditions improved, and that culture was already obsessively stressing education back when most people in Europe weren’t quite sure what those little scratchy little lines on stones or hide were supposed to be).

So given this starting point, what we get is a very few years where funding actually increased even a little above what would be expected at a ‘good’ school, at which point the experiment – as ill-designed and -defined as it was – was scrapped. Now, maybe they do things a lot quicker in Kansas City, but I know that here back East major construction projects – to say nothing of institutional and instructional overhauls – can take a little time. And of course, don’t forget that much of this was mostly nifty-special daydreamy stuff mostly intended to draw white kids back from the suburbs.

So yes, surprise, surprise, a few brief years of decent funding (much of which went to desperate glitz and glitter and/or took years to fully come online) to fix decades of neglect and centuries of oppression didn’t actually manage to work miracles. And of course that failure will be forever used as a club against any attempt (however modest or well-planned) to help get poor, often majority-brown schools funded at a non-shameful level. Of course, the folks who ceaselessly push ‘thowing money at the problem never helps, look at Kansas City!’ (and even quite a few of those who obediently repeat it) work very hard – sometimes making real sacrifices – to ensure that their precious ones are educated in places usually far-better funded, non-leaky, with low student:teacher ratios, history textbooks were most of the 20thC chapters haven’t simply fallen off and been lost from wear and years, and etc., etc.

Tracy, looking at your cite, it seems that one of the things DI advocates is good old-fashioned holding kids back if they don’t perform.

No they don’t. The “old-fashioned holding kids back” is that if a kid has failed one year, then you hold them back and give them that year over again, on the basis that if it didn’t work the first time, let’s try again. Unsurprisingly this is seldom effective.

DI works on the basis that if a kid is having problems learning and is not getting at least 90% of their answers right first time you move them to a slower approach with more review long before a year is up (and vice-versa for kids who already know everything of course). A year is a really long percentage of a school kid’s life. DI kids’ progress is monitored on a daily and weekly basis, not a yearly one.

I think we’ve had this discussion before. If the kids don’t want to learn, and the parents don’t back you up, no program is going to be much better than any other.

This is wrong. Direct Instruction does not depend on parental involvement. See http://www.prichardcommittee.org/Ford%20Study/FordReportJE.pdf
Direct Instruction does depend on getting kids to want to learn by:
– starting when the kids enter school
– providing each child lessons paced so the child learns something every lesson and is never in over their heads as success breeds motivation
– a variety of other motivational techniques, like the teacher-me game where the teacher starts off telling the kids that what she/he is going to teach them is way too hard and they are not going to be able to learn it, and then acting that she/he is totally shocked when they do get the answers right, and sulking, and being a bad learner.

Whether or not children want to learn is down to the programme and the school. If the school doesn’t teach effectively, if it lets kids

On an individual-classroom level, individual teachers vary greatly in how effectively they teach kids. See The Lifelong Impact of a First-Grade Teacher., Pedersen, Eigil, Instructor, v89 n5 p62-63,66 Dec 1979,
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ213015&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ213015, written up in a more accessible way at http://www.societyforqualityeducation.org/newsletter/archives/acorns.pdf.

The key to improving education is to give every teacher the tools that exceptional teachers use apparently without training, and to set up a school that supports those teachers in effective teaching. It’s not easy, there’s no magical bullets, but it is possible. It has been done. I am sick of people who say it can’t be done in the face of all the evidence.

My first question would be, are these kids, the ‘low-income disadvantaged kids’ doing their homework? If not, then you really can’t say anything about the efficacy of any program.

This is weird. If a programme gets great results without homework, I am perfectly capable of saying things about the efficacy of the programme. I strongly suspect that if you gave it a try, you could also say things about the efficacy of any programme. Come on, man, don’t place artifical limits on yourself – give it a try!

So, if an 11-year-old is reading at a third-grade level, they don’t get lumped with third-grade students in this class? Either this is just playing word-games or I’m confused.

As far as I know the research base for DI is from elementary school students. I do not know if this includes 11-year olds in the USA. A programme called Corrective Reading has been developed for students in grades 4 to 12 who struggle with reading. This is a remedial programme and operates on different lines to a basic-teaching-to-read programme. The Gering School district has implemented DI district-wide, with the remedial reading programme in use in their high school. After one year of remediation, the high school’s scores went from a 39% pass rate to a 55% pass rate. See http://geringschools.net/vnews/display.v/ART/2008/04/01/47f24e91df297. I do note however that this is not proper research as there is no control group.

On a more general level, children in a DI programme are placed not by grade level but by lesson, in groups of about 6 to 7 students. Children are placed according to their prior knowledge and how much repetition they need to remember stuff (so a child who arrives at school already knowing their alphabet is placed in a lesson where they don’t need to learn it). Every day each group is directly taught by the teacher for a brief period of time. The other kids in the class may be looked after by aides while they do independent work, I understand that in one school where DI was implemented there was no money for these aides so every adult in the school was roped in to do the reading lessons in the morning.

If a child is having problems learning to read, and it’s not the result of some fixable problem like poor hearing, then they are placed in an earlier lesson in the sequence (if it is a fixable problem, of course it’s fixed). If the child already knows what they are being taught, then they are placed in a later lesson in the sequence. One kid may be at two different stages in reading and in mathematics In this situation, talking about “third-grade students” as a whole isn’t applicable.

My first question would be, are these kids, the ‘low-income disadvantaged kids’ doing their homework? If not, then you really can’t say anything about the efficacy of any program.
…
Finally, to the claim that the “the kids don’t do homework”: Let’s see the SAT/ACT scores that back up your claim that they do just as well.

Now you’ve gotten me confused. You are claiming in one breath that I can’t say anything about the efficacy of any programme if it doesn’t include homework, and then in the next breath you are wanting to see SAT/ACT scores that “back up your claim that they do just as well”. If you really believe that I can’t say anything about the efficiacy of any programme unless “low-income disadvantaged kids are doing their homework” then you’ve set me a task that you believe to be impossible.

You also appear to believe I have claimed some things about homework that I don’t recall claiming. I am not an expert on the US educational system, but I understand SAT/ACT tests are high school tests, not primary schools. The research base I know of for DI is based on elementary schools. It is possible that homework is essential for high school students but not for younger kids. If you want to argue about homework for high school students go and argue with Dy-Dan at http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=133 For a more general view on homework research, see http://www.huffenglish.com/?p=520

It does strike me that if kids don’t do homework, then that limits what a school can teach them compared to kids who do do homework, assuming of course that the school is operating reasonably efficiently in the first place. But, if our starting point is a school where kids don’t do homework, even then different educational programmes should have different levels of effectiveness, depending entirely on their in-school performance. If kids don’t do homework, that does not release teachers from their obligations to make the best use of the kids’ time at school.

I could tell you lots of stories about failing kids whose parents won’t even come into school to discuss the issues.

I could tell you an equal number of stories about failing kids with severe psychological problems whose parents won’t get them treatment (even if it is free).

It’s so easy to blame the teachers. Somehow this usually comes from people with no first hand experience. Why? Do you really think the problem is with the schools? How can you ignore the poverty, the under achievement of the parents, the unequal life opportunities for those at the bottom of the heap?

Do you think denying the problems of our society is a way to fix things? Do you think blaming the teachers will fix things? I just don’t get it. Either some people are living in a bubble or they refuse to admit that in a grossly unequal society directing more at the bottom means directing less at the top. How many of these social critics are actually in the top?

Why are you defending Warren Buffet? Are you worth $10 million or more? Don’t you know that there are only two classes in society – those who have to work to eat and those that don’t. Which class do you belong to?

Just to comment on the whole issue of enrolment – Dan S says:

Now, Kozol, for example, makes a strong argument for the absolute necessity of integration – and personally, I’ve come to believe that the only thing which will stop society from letting poor, often (but not exclusively) brown kids drown is for (at least relatively) influential and privileged folks to be certain that their own precious and priceless offspring will be on those same leaky and neglected lifeboats.”

While I don’t disagree with this view, there are practical difficulties with it – first of all, parental choice is enshrined in human rights conventions. Second parental choice goes hand in hand with the marketisation of education which has consistently afflicted education in both the US and the UK – the view that students are products like sausages or bottles of cola. In response to this, in the UK, some educational authorities are using lottery systems to allocate kids to schools (Brighton & Hove has hit the headlines for this) and it has caused a massive outcry – the mantra is parental choice, and the parent as consumer is coming into direct conflict with achieving some kind of parity of experience for students from all social backgrounds.

The current use of league table data and from other commentators’ views re NCLB data fosters a continuation down the blind-alley of applying market criteria to a non-market sector. Education cannot be reduced to test results and productivity ratings but it seems to me that funding goes towards collecting data to support an agenda rather than collecting data to provide an honest, full and accurate picture of the educational systems operating in either the UK or the US.