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DEL.ICIO.USWhen Success is an Illusion
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Is the emperor that is NCLB buck naked? A study by the Harvard Civil Rights Project (read the story here) found that many school districts - including more than 100 in Georgia - escaped a failing label simply because the feds approved changes in the criteria.
In Georgia, districts no longer must have all students in various subgroups � including blacks, Hispanics, special education and limited English proficiency categories � meet state testing goals, writes my colleague, Paul Donsky.
Instead, the students in each subgroup are broken into two groups: elementary and middle school; and high school. Districts now receive a failing grade only if both groups fail to meet state standards for two years running.
The stigma of being labeled as failing - even if the official label is the softer “needs improvement” - stings. It can affect whether parents with options go elsewhere, whether teacher candidates interview for vacancies, whether the principal stays or goes.
But the many criteria that go into a school or district getting a label are complicated and vary from state to state, as do the standardized tests used to determine who passes and who does not. Parents who find out that their school didn’t meet standards should of course find out why, but even that information may not be enough to make an informed decision about what it means.
Thoughts?
Comments
Commenting is now closed for this entry.
By Karen Armsby
June 24, 2005 03:29 PM | Link to this
The more organized anything gets: you get more levels of administration with more rules and policies and assessments: you get a variety of interpretations of what the goals and results of the rules, policeies and assessments REALLY means, and all of this ends up creating obfuscation and CYA tactics.
I don’t like NCLB because of all of the above and now this news proves the point. I don’t think the federal government should be in the business of education, either in funding, establishing curriculum and standards, and most of all in requiring an impossible to measure standard of accountability for thousands of school systems spread over our diversely populated states.
By C.R.H.
June 24, 2005 03:36 PM | Link to this
Wow, well said Karen. I don’t know how much longer NCLB will be the measure for the quality of education a school provides. Actually, I don’t know that it ever really did measure quality.
By Karen Armsby
June 24, 2005 03:59 PM | Link to this
Thanks, C.R.H., And I think that we need to cut back the layers of administration at the state and local school system levels, too.
Let’s return to the basics and let teachers focus first on teaching reading, writing, and basic math. Once these areas are mastered the students should begin to learn critical thinking skills, debate, and public speaking. After that they begin to study subject areas such as history, science, social studies, etc. Balance the student’s academic load with the one hour each of the arts and athletics (including sports, exercise and dance).
Focus on teaching the basic skills first and foremost, and they will have the tools needed to either go to work or go to college.
By Dan
June 24, 2005 04:21 PM | Link to this
Your right Karen the federal government should not be in the education biz. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to completely do away with the dept of education. It currently provides about 9% of the school budgets, half of which is probably spent conforming to it’s rules. But I do find a general contradiction in these blogs over the past few weeks. There have been many comments complaining that teachers must “teach to the test” to avoid being labled a failure, the implication being ensuring the school achieves a good rating is a difficult task. Now it seems we have complaints that schools can pass by having the criteria changed, implying that attaining a good rating is not necessarily a sign of quality. So are the tests too hard or too easy? Or a very popular claim of the testing, costing more than the funding.
To the school administrators and pols I say if you don’t the NCLB don’t participate, it is voluntary. Pass up the 8-9% of your budget(you say the tests cost more anyway) and create a system that will show the rest of the country how it should be done. Create a way to ensure high performance by students teachers and administrators and incent and reward them accordingly. That works within the bounds of our financial restraints. I think people would even support paying more if they were confident of results. Although I don’t have confidence a leader will emerge from our ranks of administrators or politicians, I don’t mean this to be sarcastic. This state has a perfect opportunity to be creative, by most accepted measures (rightly or wrongly) GA ranks last or close to it. So there is no where to go but up, and nothing to lose politically.
By em
June 27, 2005 09:36 AM | Link to this
As a high school U.S. History teacher, I have administered the End-Of-Course-Test twice this past year (my school is on block scheduling). After seeing results from the Fall Semester administration, 49% of my 83 students passed with a 90 or better and only 13 made below 70. After the Spring Semester administration, 45% of my 70 students achieved 90 or better and only 16 failed. Although I should have celebrated, I was troubled by these results because of skewed data. An unusually high number of my students who scored 90 or better were either making a “C� in my course or failing my course. After evaluating the data, I discovered that of the 90 questions asked, only 75 are scored (I don’t know which 15 are thrown out). Upon further analysis, I found that a scaled percentage score of 90 translated into an actual percentage score of 68; a scaled score of 91 translated into an actual score of 73; a scaled score of 92 translated into an actual score of 78; a scaled score of 93 translated into an approximate actual score of 85. Only the scores of 94 and 95 (my two highest scores) actually reflected “90 or better.� The actual percentage scores were a truer reflection of student performance in my course. Although the State of Georgia has implemented another round of performance tests, the exams are meaningless because the scores are skewed so much they are not a true measure of what a student has learned.
By Karen Armsby
June 27, 2005 09:51 AM | Link to this
em, In your opinion, which standardized tests (if any) are a good measure of student achievement? How often should standardized tests be adminsistered throughout K-12?
By GC
June 27, 2005 11:26 AM | Link to this
Education is too complex to be judged by tacking a few numbers onto a school’s performance. One of the stupidest things I’ve seen in years was a recent article which ranked the best schools in the nation by only two criteria: percentabe of students who passed AP exams and performed at a certain level in International Baccalaureate. There much, much more to schools and education than those two exams, no matter how much prestige that they have.
NCLB is like judging the health of a person by looking only at his cholesterol and blood sugar. It flatly ignores too many factors that count, and it places too much emphasis on factors that do not necessarily mean trouble. Setting up a set of measurements does not mean that you’re measuring the right thing or measuring correctly. It merely means that you can point fingers, place blame, and tell everyone that you have gotten to the root of the problem. It’s a lie. You haven’t actually separated the sheep from the goats. You’ve just pulled the wool over the eyes of the querulous and the ignorant.