Taking a Stand

On Tuesday, Wisconsin teacher David Wasserman refused to administer the state standardized test to his eighth graders, because he morally objects to the No Child Left Behind law.

Threatened with termination, today he’ll be administering the test, the AP reported. But his point is made.

“Wasserman said he believes the test uses questions that are disconnected from what students learn in the classroom,” the AP reported. “And its results, he said, are not used in any meaningful way to improve teaching but instead become the primary way the district and media evaluate the quality of a school.”

The AP reported that, according to FairTest, this is the first known case of a teacher protesting NCLB by refusing to test students.

Will he be the last? Should reauthorization language specify terms for conscientious objectors?

Delta Blues

The Washington Post set out to identify, according to NCLB math and reading test scores, the poorest performing school in the poorest performing state, the school that lands on ”the bottom of the heap.”

But instead of simply awarding the dubious distinction, the Post’s article, “By the Mississippi Delta, A Whole School Left Behind,” takes a head-spinning twist.

See, even with abysmal results, Como still made AYP, the Post reports, because of Mississippi’s low cut scores and because the school’s small size exempted it from some NCLB sub-group reporting requirements.

And by making AYP, Como doesn’t qualify for any of the assistance the law is supposed to provide to improve low-performing schools.

Como is where NCLB’s worthy goals meet reality, not only in a definition of progress that passes small schools in need of help. For instance, there’s the mandate that every child be taught by a highly qualified teacher, and then there’s the reality of a district that can’t pay competitive salaries.

For children at Como and similar schools, how exactly is NCLB helping?

No future entrepreneur left behind

The reauthorization of NCLB certainly has opened the door for all kinds of ideas about how to amend the law, from Richard Simmons’ call for PE as a multiple measure, to a recent suggestion that college degrees replace standardized test scores as the barometer of success.

So let’s add this one to the list: “In a bold, dramatic move to address the entrepreneurship learning deficit in NCLB, Congress should amend the law to fund the certification of high school educators to teach entrepreneurship electives, especially to students most likely to be left behind.”

That suggestion comes from Michael Caslin of the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, and two Richmond professors, writing in Diverse Issues in Higher Education.

They conceive of an entrepreneurial track as a way to spare  “impoverished, low-performing” students who aren’t going to college from dead-end jobs, unemployment, or the military. These students would be prepared for “success in the marketplace via success in the classroom.”

An entrepreneurial curriculum would “complement the rote learning taking place day after day in classrooms across the country in order to meet minimum NCLB benchmarks—an approach that leaves most students bored and many teachers demoralized.”

Hmm, wonder how AYP would be calculated under such a plan. Percentage of students securing angel investors? Amount of venture capital raised?

Fantastic Voyage

Over at Teaching in the 408, there’s an interesting blog post and string of comments on NCLB, the value of testing, triaging students, and what exactly is meant by basic skills.

 In “Rules for the Voyage,” blogger TMAO writes

NCLB says test kids, report what happens, and if you blow, feel the pressure to pick it up. If that makes educators stressed or sad, that level of stress is nothing compared to the stress of being a young person without the skills to be successful.

A commenter counters:

I think you have accepted the frame that the proponents of NCLB have been selling and that is that we NEVER KNEW we were failing kids. Wrong.

The tests have never revealed anything to me - or other professional educators - that which we did not already know about our students. I know who needs help and I know who I feel equipped to help and who I struggle to help. (Where do I start with an eleventh grader reading on the second grade level? Help him/her? Or help the other 27?)  What I need is HELP in helping those students and not a test to show me who is failing at the very important task of literacy.

Neverending Accountability

Forget standardized test scores. In Monday’s San Francisco Chronicle, Bob Lenz, chief education officer and founder of Envision Schools, calls for college diplomas as a better measure of school performance under NCLB. Lenz says:

Designing educational policy to leave no child behind is the equivalent of driving forward by looking in the rear view mirror. If our policymakers want to move America’s children along the road to success, they should make earning a college degree a defining goal and remake “No Child Left Behind” into “A College Diploma in Every Hand.”

How exactly would this work? Lenz provides no details. Would associate degrees count the same as bachelor’s degrees? Part-time attendance the same as full-time? With tuition going nowhere but up, would a public school be accountable for its students’ ability to save and pay for college? Would taking other post-high-school paths – oh, let’s just say military service to be especially contrary – mean students and their schools would be NCLB failures?

And when, exactly, would you take the measurement? If a class graduates from high school one spring and you count heads and degrees four years later, all you’ve done is assess a very specific slice of the college population. Not every eventual graduate is a traditional student.

Lenz is on firmer ground when he describes his idea of a revamped curriculum. Academic rigor and an emphasis on critical thinking skills are good not only for the college-bound.  

But Lenz’s proposal assumes that college-prep in school naturally leads to college attendance, which then, if public schools are doing their jobs, leads to college graduation. For many kids this is indeed a straight line.

For many other young people, the decision and the ability to attend and finish college require a convergence of factors that public schools have no control over.

Because at some point, we are talking about adults here, adults who make adult decisions based on complicated adult lives. Grading public K-12 schools on college diplomas means grappling with how to assess a student who attends college part-time for eight years while supporting a family as much as it means figuring out how to hold a school accountable when a college student sleeps through an 8 a.m. class.

Bachelor’s degree completion hasn’t changed that much since at least the 1980s, yet the world certainly has, and sure, college degrees are a good thing. And there’s no argument that kids should arrive at college prepared. But shifting accountability from preparation to degree completion — whew, that’s a leap. 

Separate but ELL

The Greensboro News-Record reports on an interesting solution to the challenge of quickly getting English language learners up to speed and passing standardized tests: an all-ELL school.

After trouble making AYP the last few years, Guilford County Schools spent $2.4 million to develop the Newcomers School, which offers a special one-year curriculum, class sizes of 15 students, and support services for families, such as Saturday adult literacy classes.

The News-Record paints a hopeful picture of students being well-served, and this  experiment bears watching, for the issues it raises as much as its outcomes. You can imagine it would prick up the ears of those who disapprove of more flexibility for ELL and special ed assessment. Let it, because with only 110 students, the Newcomers School is a good example of how resource-intensive meeting NCLB’s requirements can be – and how much the law’s funding needs to match its mandates.

But, shudder to think, can’t you just hear someone taking the idea to its absurd nth degree and calling for separate schools for each NCLB subgroup? You know, just till they catch up?

Body oil, tank tops, and NCLB

Richard Simmons was on Letterman last night, and after taking some customary ribbing about his oil-n-spangles uniform, called for adding physical education as an optional multiple measure in NCLB reauthorization.

Well, okay, he wasn’t that wonky. He stood on a chair and led the studio audience in a chant of “P.E. in schools! That’s the Golden Rule!”

Maybe this is what the reauthorization debate needs instead of another policy paper —  more sequins and jumping up and down. Like a lot of subjects, P.E. is getting squeezed out of schools to make time for more test prep, we’re facing a childhood obesity epidemic that won’t be solved by swapping water for soda in school vending machines, and the late night talk show has become the go-to political launch pad.

Simmons’ web site has more on his effort to get P.E. included in the reauthorization, with links to advocacy letters you can send to Kennedy and Miller. You’ll have to provide your own spangles. 

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before

Last week, the New York Times published an article about a rise in dental problems among Americans at the same time that dentists’ fees have hit record levels.

Today, the Times has a letter to the editor from Steven Lauridsen of Geneva, IL, with a modest proposal for improving the nation’s choppers.

If you’ve been following No Child Left Behind, the proposal will be familiar to you — it’s a very condensed version of “No Dentist Left Behind,” a parody that has been around nearly as long as the law itself, attributed to former school superintendent John Taylor.

Apparently, the Times hadn’t heard this one before.

Hey, if it helps point out the problems with NCLB, we’ll listen to an old joke again!

The 100 percent delusion?

Earlier this week, President Bush was adamant that there will be no compromise on  100% proficiency in NCLB reauthorization.

Frederick Hess and Chester Finn of the Fordham Foundation call that basic principle the law’s biggest problem. ”A sense of urgency and outsized aspirations is commendable, but there’s a world of difference between determination and delusion,” they write.

Tackling 100% proficiency is tricky; it leads to accusations that you don’t care if some children are left behind, and Bush and Spellings are quick to play that card. But as Finn and Hess argue, the trade-off for keeping the “100%” part of the equation is that “proficiency” becomes meaningless. State assessment systems that are working get broken, and eventually education reform isn’t about reforming anything anymore.

Hess and Finn call the 100% goal a “noble yet naïve promise,” but:

…[N]o educator in America believes that universal proficiency will, in fact, be attained by 2014, not, at least, by any reasonable definition of proficiency. Only politicians promise such things. The inevitable result is cynicism and frustration among educators and a “compliance” mentality among state and local officials.

At its heart, today’s NCLB amounts to a civil rights manifesto dressed up as an accountability system. This provides an untenable basis for serious reform, as if Congress declared that every last molecule of water or air pollution would vanish by 2014, or that all American cities would be crime-free by that date.

Can we have it all? Can we hit the 100%-by-2014 target and still say “at grade level” with our heads held high? Or, as Finn and Hess argue, will we find ourselves with “a compliance-driven regimen that recreates the very pathologies it was intended to solve”?

When is a compromise a compromise?

President Bush’s Rose Garden speech on NCLB on Tuesday had the mainstream media reporting an openness to compromise on the law’s requirements, as long as there’s no watering down of  standards and accountability. (The amount of compromising Bush committed to varied a bit, with the Washington Post hearing more than the Associated Press.)

But NYC Educator and Jim Horn at Schools Matter aren’t buying any of it.