Miller: Fair, Flexible, and Funded — NOT!
House Education Committee Chair George Miller (D-CA) yesterday laid out the changes we can expect in the NCLB reauthorization bill, notably letting states use more than standardized test scores to show progress.
Growth models, multiple measures, better funding, more sensible assessment of English-language learners and special ed students — all good. Not so much: teacher pay based on how students perform.
“The American people have a very strong sense that No Child Left Behind is not fair, it is not flexible and it is not funded. And they are not wrong,” Miller said on Monday.
We’ll see how performance pay shakes out and how much opposition multiple measures has to weather before the vote, which Miller expects in September.
From the Monday news conference: Miller’s statement, plus video courtesy of C-SPAN. MSM login-required coverage: NYTimes, WaPo.
This entry was posted on July 31, 2007 at 11:12 am and is filed under reauthorization. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.
August 1, 2007 at 11:13 am
The theory of assessment to guide the state of education may be correct, but HOW that assessment develops is the questioni. As statisticians “correct” the distributions, as numbers decide the distribution, as students “guessed” responsed count as much as valid responses, the question about the assessments should be how valid and reliable are they. Then there is a follow-up question: Why are students getting these questions/responses wrong? It does not mean that teachers aren’t teaching the content; the real problem, in my 30 years of experience, is that students do not understand and cannot read with comprehension what is asked of them. They answer as best as they can, but no one is adequately teaching them the foundational skills when they eventually become ready to learn them. These skills include oral language (all parts of speech used correctly and with variety in compound and complex sentence structures need to be in place prior to academic instruction), decoding (phonemic awareness, sound-symbol association, syllabication, and digraph/diphthong instruction after their reasoning ability shifts into reversibility), hierarchical importance of information (main ideas, details, context clues and outlining), number system and place value beyond 100 must be in place with comprehension prior to regrouping. Until these are taught at the preschool and primary levels with support into elementary grades, there will be no need to discuss test results. Test scores will not change because what has happened in the system hasn’t changed. The standards presume an intact foundation; when will policy makers and career education staffers realize that the system is broken before students enter school because they do not have what educators presume to be intact skills.
August 4, 2007 at 4:35 pm
The NCLB legislation is an attempt to address symptoms of a problem without acknowledging crucial elements of the cause. When a student comes to school from a home that is ambivelent toward education, with an earbud stuck in his or her ear, and wearing clothing that looks like trash or make the wearer look like trash, how do we expect that student to be prepared to learn?
This is typical of the student who commonly fails the standardized test or barely passes. This is the student that NCLB is supposedly concerned with. Often this student is economically disadvantaged.
Schools are not allowed to group such students without being accused of ‘tracking’. State curricula are designed so that there is not enough time to work with these students effectively. That is, too much material is shoveled at these students and very little time devoted to developing problem solving skills – I am especially refering to mathematics, as that is what I teach.
I believe that the Congress should be much more concerned with restarting our industrial base and establishing the platforms from which the latest technology may be developed and launched into the general economy. (Of course, spending $8 billion a month in Iraq creates funding problems, leaving our citizens to fall into the abyss when proper government led investments are not made in our roads and bridges – to say nothing of our schools)
Congress should put up plenty of money for states to spend on public educational capital (buildings, technology, books, etc.) where need has been appropriately demonstrated, and on classroom teachers (salaries that are far below those in the private sector for comparable training).
If the country develops a vision of the future that is exciting for our nation’s youth (I am thinking of Kennedy’s vision of reaching the moon – or, today, of building a highspeed rail network all over the country including a tunnel under the Bering Straits), our local schools can develop the excitement needed to awaken the desire for education in those for whom it is a requirement not necessity.
August 7, 2007 at 8:18 am
I teach tenth grade English in a school with 85% of the students receiving free and reduced lunches, and a 67% Hispanic population. I have embraced the new technology for which our school has obtained grants; I have incorporated new strategies as per the coaching initiative. How can I be held accountable for what these students have NOT learned before they arrive in my classroom? If I am trying to teach them how to READ effectively, I won’t have time to teach them all there is to know about the literary works for tenth grade.
In addition, are we going to standardize the definitions – NATIONWIDE – for literary terms? When did “theme,” “topic,” and “main idea” become synonymous? Frankly I have come to agree with others, who swear that those who can’t teach go into the government to tell us, who are in the trenches, how it should be done! The tests are flawed, and the students who know the RIGHT answer can’t pick the correct WRONG answer to score better on the test!
Teaching to the test does not require ingenuity, intelligence, or passion. It requires a mentality unworthy of a professional.