Family Matters - A Lot

Michael Winerip writing in the Sunday New York Times links No Child Left Behind to a recent ETS study on family and student achievement – and starts his column by proclaiming that in an “awful lot” of cases, a school’s failure to perform on NCLB tests is not its fault.

Instead, he writes, four factors over which schools have zero control account for most of the large differences among states in NAEP reading scores. 

ETS researchers looked at how family conditions affect development and achievement and how gaps persist throughout life. In a press conference on the report, co-author Rich Coley pointed out that teachers don’t have a “magic wand” to wave to help children catch up. 

Winerip reports:

The ETS researchers took four variables that are beyond the control of schools: The percentage of children living with one parent; the percentage of eighth graders absent from school at least three times a month; the percentage of children 5 or younger whose parents read to them daily, and the percentage of eighth graders who watch five or more hours of TV a day. Using just those four variables, the researchers were able to predict each state’s results on the federal eighth-grade reading test with impressive accuracy.

Winerip properly calls out the single-parent factor and puts some qualifiers around it, lest some are tempted to turn student achievement into a ”family values” problem.

Nonetheless, there’s plenty in this report, and others like it, to give pause to NCLB report card results – and to question whether education reform really needs to begin at home. Testing and then punishing schools is intervention at the wrong point on the continuum.

Or as ETS’s Coley puts it, if we’re serious about closing achievement gaps, “We need to focus as much attention on the starting line as we do on the finish line.” 

Read more about ETS’s “The Family: America’s Smallest School” — full report, summary, news releases, videos.

Steady Diet of Testing Same as Steady Diet of Double Cheeseburgers

As the curriculum gets narrower, kids get wider, claims a forthcoming documentary on the childhood obesity epidemic.

Filmmaker Steven Greenstreet interviewed teachers for his documentary, “Killer at Large,” and the Deseret Morning News reports that he finds a number of school-based reasons for the childhood obesity crisis. School lunches and junk food in school vending machines play a part, but NCLB’s emphasis on what’s tested at the expense of P.E. and health curricula is also to blame, he says.

Luckily, Richard Simmons has already joined the NCLB debate.

No, No, No

The Burlington Free Press editorializestoday that NCLB focuses too much on punishing students and schools when it should be emphasizing improvement.

“No Child Left Behind gets it wrong from the first word, ‘No.’ That word says that failing schools will be punished rather than receive help to become better,” the editorial states.

Inevitably then, the public fixates on whether a school passed or failed under NCLB — a grade that hardly tells the whole story. And then there’s the false hope of the law’s punitive provision that allows parents to send their kids to other schools, which the Free Press calls ”an unrealistic option in much of the state.”

Speaking of the false promise of school choice, we’ve not commented on the recent voucher defeat in Utah, but for your weekend reading, here’s a nice piece from Pat Rusk of Utahns for Public Schools [DailyKos via Utah's Accountability blog]. Looks like Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne is setting his sights on South Carolina next.

Business Schooled

It’s always an exercise in patience to listen to free-market ed reformers toss out examples from the corporate world as easy, off-the-shelf solutions for “the problem” of public education. Bonuses work in the pharmaceutical marketing industry, they should work for teachers! Fire a principal if her school’s test scores don’t improve, just like a mutual fund manager with a sagging portfolio! If they had to compete for students, the bad schools would simply go away! Education reform is easy — we just need a little less John Dewey, a little more Jack Welch.

So it was gratifying to read yesterday’s installment in the LA Times of the week-long achievement gap debate between Russlynn Ali (Education Trust-West) and Richard Rothstein (Economic Policy Institute).

Gratifying because, in arguing that NCLB has perilously narrowed the curriculum, Rothstein invokes examples from the corporate world and trots out B-school lions Drucker and Deming.

“Today, management consultants urge ‘balanced score cards’ that use qualitative judgment to measure corporate success, along with financial indicators,” Rothstein writes. “They recognize that unbalanced score cards, such as the one used by NCLB, stress only easily measured goals and create incentives to downplay others.”

Which has led to the unfortunate overemphasis on math and reading at the expense not only of other subjects, but of all the things schools are supposed to instill — citizenship, self-discipline, getting along with others, etc. And no one has suffered or will continue to suffer the consequences of narrowing more than low-income and minority students, Rothstein argues, refuting Ali’s assertion that NCLB has been a light in the wildnerness for these groups.

But let’s get back to Rothstein’s assertion that a management consultant would recognize the ill-conceived strategy of NCLB. That even stock market investors require accountability that goes beyond simple reporting of numbers (read: test scores).

Perhaps there are lessons to learn from the corporate world after all.

All This NCLB Aggravation Ain’t Satisfactioning Me

The Salt Lake Tribunereports today on a study that says, in gauging teachers, parents are more interested in student satisfaction than achievement. “NCLB might be missing what many parents want most,” the Tribune writes.

The study looked at teacher characteristics in cases where parents could pick their kid’s teacher. Parents were more likely to pick the teacher with a high “satisfaction” rating than a high achievement rating, the Tribune reported.

Are parents really saying they don’t care about school performance, they just want their kids to have fun? Let’s consider a few things.

The study looked at only one school district, parents picked teachers with high satisfaction ratings over high achievement ratings 55 percent of the time, and teacher characteristics were defined by principals. And, no surprise, income had an influence. As in, the lower your income, the more you care about a teacher’s ability to raise test scores, leading the study’s authors to speculate that achievement might be a given in a more affluent school, so richer parents turn to other concerns.

Still, the study is the latest to give credence to parent concerns about NCLB’s overemphasis on testing.

 ”While achievement is important, what we’re trying to produce in schools and what parents want schools to produce is much broader than test score gains,” study co-author and Brigham Young associate professor Lars Lefgren told the Tribune.

Post-Mortem II: It’s a Marketing Problem

Was NCLB reauthorization a victim of poor marketing?

Eduflackseems to think that’s the reason an education reform “that works” got jammed up in Congress. He offers an “early outline of what an NCLB marketing plan needs to focus on” for another try at getting the law revised and renewed — with such steps as goal setting, message development, and audience identification and segmentation.

Eduflack give NEA and AFT props for running the better communications campaign this time around, and advises ED to get some communications professionals in a room for a day to hammer out “a blueprint for selling NCLB across the nation.”

“Just like the law itself, an NCLB communications plan needs goals,” he writes.  “It needs methods of measurement.  It needs feedback loops.  It needs highly qualified professionals.  It needs accountability.”

If it really was just a matter of marketing — and not serious flaws in the law — that foiled reauthorization, then let’s heed Henry Ford, who famously said, ”A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.”

NCLB Reauthorization, the Post-Mortem

Stan Karp at Rethinking Schools (via ZNet)has a thought-provoking piece on our brave new world of a renewed, not reauthorized NCLB. Among his predictions: 

• Thousands more schools will be sanctioned for failing to make adequate yearly progress. The number identified for the law’s more drastic sanctions, including “restructuring” and closure, will far exceed the capacity to respond effectively.
• A host of unproven “interventions” for schools deemed “in need of improvement” will sow chaos, feed privatization schemes, and further erode support for public education.
• Parents will continue to be pitted against teachers in a politicized “blame game” for school and student “failure” that is wrongly defined and inadequately addressed.
• Tens of millions of dollars in public funds will be siphoned off by publishers of standardized tests and curriculum materials, private educational management firms, and barely regulated supplemental educational service providers

The federal education law is just the latest “regressive legislative and regulatory policy framework” aided and abetted by both Democrats and Republicans, Karp writes, concluding that “the train wreck that is NCLB can’t be avoided if the parties in power remain on the same track.”

Thank You for the Music

The latest argument against narrowing the curriculum to the subjects tested under NCLB comes via a Harris Interactive poll, which links studying music in school to success later in life.

The poll found that among individuals making more than $150,000 a year, 83 percent had participated in music in school. The poll also links music education to pursuit of higher ed, nothing that among people with postgraduate degrees, nine out of 10 participated in music.

According to a news release from the music education association that worked with Harris on the poll:

“Research confirms that music education at an early age greatly increases the likelihood that a child will grow up to seek higher education and ultimately earn a higher salary. The sad irony is that ‘No Child Left Behind’ is intended to better prepare our children for the real world, yet it’s leaving music behind despite its proven benefits,” said Dr. John Mahlmann, Executive Director of MENC: The National Association for Music Education. “While music clearly corresponds to higher performing students and adults, student access to music education had dropped about 20 percent in recent years, thanks in large part to the constraints of the No Child Left Behind Act.”

There’s no argument that music education is important and that it’s a shame NCLB has squeezed it out of so many schools. Still, in my more analytical moments I have to wonder if all the correlations add up. I think the most telling finding Harris reports is that the higher the household income, the more likely a person participated in music. “Participation in music” wasn’t defined solely as public school-based music classes or activities, so let’s assume some of these high-earning postgrads who answered the poll came from homes where parents could pay for music lessons or band camp. In fact, it’s so well documented that higher household income is positively correlated to how much a child eventually earns and how far he or she goes in higher education that it’s tempting to wonder if the household income, not the stint in the school chorus, is why a respondent is pulling down $150k now.

But this isn’t to denigrate a poll on a worthy topic, it’s to pose some follow-up questions that need to be asked, and quickly, before NCLB strips the last tuba and music stand from the middle school band room.

The poll also links music education to personal fulfillment, which is an interesting observation. Maybe in a few years we’ll see a study that links NCLB to a lack of personal fulfillment in life.

Enough with the Testing

As we march along toward the end of the year with reauthorization bogged down, let’s not lose sight of some of the critical improvements that NCLB needs to make it through the next round.

For one, the mania for standardized testing. Yes, it’s an easy-to-understand measurement of “success” for the uninitiated, but nearly six years into this law, does anyone not realize the unintended consequences, the shortfalls, the soul-sucking, the ethical issues, the pain for kids, parents, teachers wrought by over-reliance on standardized tests?

For those still in the dark, Dan Brown’s column in the Boston Globe last Saturday is good reading. With examples from his classroom in the Bronx, he shows how NCLB’s emphasis on testing fails a range of students. And he reminds us not to buy into the hype. 

It’s not just the government trumpeting high-stakes testing as the way to get “accountability” from schools. The media have largely gone along for the ride as well, trumpeting minute shifts in test score graphs as headline-worthy successes or failures.

We have taken our eye off the ball on what is most important in schools - students’ needs.

Brown’s hardly saying anything new when he says, “Prepping for the test and getting a well-rounded education are not the same thing, but there is not room in the school day for both tasks.”

But it’s something that needs to be repeated until it’s no longer necessary to say it anymore.

The Special Ed Dilemma

The Chicago Tribune ponders how special ed students should be assessed under NCLB. According to a state report card issued this week, nearly a third of the Illinois schools that failed to make AYP this year — nearly 300 schools – failed solely because of special ed students’ scores.

There’s a microcosm of NCLB issues in the article: the overemphasis on test preparation for these kids, the practicality of holding special ed students to the same proficiency levels as other students, the problems with flunking an otherwise okay school on one subgroup’s scores, the need to assess special ed students’ progress (but maybe just not in this way), the unfair advantage small schools enjoy in subgroup exemptions. 

All of this boils down to comparisons – among groups of students within schools, among schools in a state, among states in a nation. Can we really have a “report card” for parents (read: taxpayers) when this isn’t exactly apples-to-apples?

Most of all, the article demonstrates the punitive, blaming focus of NCLB.

Or, as the Tribune says, “[I]t leaves administrators with a dilemma: They don’t want to appear to blame their special education students for causing the school to fail, but they also have to explain to parents why their school didn’t meet the bar.”