This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Feb. 3, 2010 - Many educators would be happy to see provisions of No Child Left Behind left behind, but they’re a little wary of what might be taking its place.
The program enacted in 2002 as part of the Bush administration’s education policy has become a fixture in the policy of many schools. They strive to make sure their students make adequate yearly progress as measured by standardized tests and move toward the mandate of having all American children becoming proficient by 2014.
But those goals have also brought criticism. Are the tests really the best way to measure how well students, schools and districts are performing? Do they give parents and taxpayers a true picture of education in their area? Is the gap between American students and their counterparts in other countries closing? Is the 2014 benchmark realistic?
Proposed shifts in education policy released by the Obama administration this week address those concerns directly. The proposed changes would replace the benchmark of adequate yearly progress with a yardstick measuring whether schools are helping their high school graduates get ready for college or the workplace. The 2014 deadline for proficiency would be eliminated.
Increased attention would go to the Department of Education’s competitive emphasis on granting money to schools that can already demonstrate a record of achievement, reform and success.
That process began with the Race to the Top competition, where 40 states have filed applications to win part of $4.35 billion in federal grants. That process places a strong emphasis on using student achievement data in part to evaluate how well teachers are performing.
Devil's in the details
In principle, educators interviewed by the Beacon like the changes. But they are holding back on wholehearted support until they see how the new rules are put into place.
“We’re very pleased there is going to be more flexibility in No Child Left Behind, and also very pleased about multiple measures of school and student achievement,” said Chris Guinther, who is on leave as a teacher from the Francis Howell school district to serve as president of the Missouri unit of the National Education Association.
She said that the union agrees that schools and teachers should be held accountable, but she wants to make sure that how such accountability is measured is fair to everyone involved and is shaped by local standards.
“We need to make sure that teachers, principals and school board members all sit down to see what is best for the schools,” Guinther said. “It needs to be locally determined. It can’t be a state or a federal government deciding what that is going to be.
“You cannot tie a school’s record or a student’s record to one test, nor can you measure a teacher’s effectiveness or a school district’s effectiveness on one test. We want to make sure that whatever is used to measure effectiveness is based on multiple measures. Like with everything else, the devil’s in the details.”
Guinther also wants to make sure that a school district’s resources are taken into account, and she is concerned that when educators have to compete to win government grants, they may not be willing to act in a very collaborative manner.
“If you’re competing,” she said, “you’re not sharing information. There are great ideas out there, and if they work in one state, why not share them with other states?”
Plea for resources
Brent Ghan, spokesman for the Missouri School Boards Association, also expressed concern about a competition model.
“What we’d like to see is additional resources and support that targets those school buildings and school districts that are struggling and need to improve student achievement,” Ghan said.
“For districts that aren’t performing well at this point, there are plenty of incentives in place already for them to improve. It’s not an issue we need to create more financial incentives for. What those districts need are additional resources.”
He is more positive about moving away from the adequate yearly progress model of measuring student achievement.
“That has been a burr in the saddle for a lot of school boards and school districts across the state,” Ghan said. “It’s not an accurate measure of how school districts are performing, and frequently school buildings and districts can get labeled as somehow falling short of what they should be doing when they really are not. It’s a misleading yardstick as far as we are concern.”
What he would like to see is a more longitudinal measure over time, not a snapshot that is based on one test. And he is happy to see the 2014 deadline going away.
“To achieve that 100 percent level is not realistic for a school district,” he said, “so you have to have some other goal to shoot for that would be much more realistic and much more achievable.”
Realistic goals are also something that Kelvin Adams, superintendent of the St. Louis Public Schools, is happy to see in the Obama proposals. A system that rewards reasonable growth, rather than an unattainable benchmark, will help schools make the progress that they need, he said.
“The growth model is so important,” Adams said. “You can’t ask schools to take kids who are performing at a third-grade level and move them to the seventh-grade level in one year. That’s almost impossible to attain, based on where our kids come from.
“There are districts like St. Louis and Kansas City that are being looked at for their test scores, but other districts who are facing accreditation won’t meet that goal either.”
Urban districts need to take into account the social development of their students as well as strict academic standards, Adams said. That is why he welcomes a system that concentrates on positive movement.
“If you take kids where they are and determine how much growth has occurred over a period of time,” he said, “that’s better than fixing a point that they all must reach.”
For Don Senti, superintendent of the Clayton School District, redefining the assessment system is crucial if evaluations of students and teachers are going to be accurate and realistic.
“The assessment system associated with No Child Left Behind has been essentially pass-fail,” he said, “and it didn’t make any sense. In St. Louis County, if you keep going toward the 2014 goal, there will be no districts that will pass.
“The effect of that is people like the parents in our school district will say, ‘That’s stupid. Everyone knows that Clayton High School is a good high school. You can’t tell me it doesn’t meet standards. So it must be a bad system.’”
And evaluating teachers based on how well their students perform is a reasonable way to proceed, Senti added – if it’s done right.
“If a fair system can be put into place, I think teachers should be judged that way. What other profession is not judged by how well they have done with their patients or their clients?
“In education, you have always had problems with how you can pay an honors physics teacher the same amount as you pay a physical education teacher. If you start using student achievement, I don’t know what you would do with the teacher who doesn’t teach in a core academic area. I think it’s about time we figured out how to use student achievement to judge teachers.”