A few thoughts about NCLB
A post from guest blogger and Fordham board member Diane Ravitch.
When No Child Left Behind was first passed, I supported it. It seemed to me a good idea to test kids in reading and math from grades 3 through 8; after all, if you don’t have basic skills, you are severely limited in your ability to learn anything else. I could not, at first sight, see why anyone would object to establishing baseline goals for basic skills.
As the full consequences of the law have unfolded, I have begun to have second thoughts. I must say that my views changed very considerably after a daylong session in November 2006 at a conference that Rick Hess and Checker Finn organized at AEI called “Is the NCLB Toolkit Working?” The dozen or so papers presented that day all gave the same answer: No. If I recall correctly, less than 5 percent of eligible children were taking advantage of choice options; less than 20 percent of eligibles were utilizing after-school tutoring. The after-school tutoring seemed to be a swamp of incompetent providers and badly-administered programs, as best I could tell. I must say that the day was mind-changing for me.
I put those findings together with the increasing evidence that states were inflating their test scores to prove that they were well on their way to 100 percent proficiency (a phenomenon a Fordham Institute report called “The Proficiency Illusion”), and I began to recognize that NCLB was having some very ill effects on American education.
Then came the release of 2007 NAEP scores for the states, and I saw that the test score gains in reading and mathematics that predated NCLB (from 2000-2002 or 2000-2003) were larger than the test score gains since the passage of NCLB. Much ado about very little academic progress.
These are the reasons that I have come to believe that NCLB needs radical overhaul, not just tweaking. It is not working, and it has unleashed an unhealthy obsession with standardized testing, has promoted grade inflation by the states, has dumbed down education by its unremitting focus on basic skills and its narrowing of the curriculum. Hey, folks, there are just so many hours in the day and in the week, and if more and more of them are devoted to testing and prepping for tests, then there are fewer available for the study of history, literature, science, the arts, civics, geography, and foreign language.
I don’t want my grandchildren to go to schools whose reputations ride solely on basic skills and not on their capacity to offer a rich and coherent program in the liberal arts and sciences.
If we continue in this mode, we will manage to produce a generation of kids who can pass the tests but are uneducated. We will also destroy American public education at the same time.
Stop defending NCLB. It has proven to be ineffective, harmful for kids, devoid of what matters most in education, hostile to knowledge-acquisition, and downright bad for the future of education.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 15th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Why stop at NCLB? The federal gov’t has proven “harmful” for “kids” (a mythical two legged creature) and so has the state. But, the solutions? Well? Every idea gets attacked with the same “focus group” speak and nothing changes. NCLB has been beat to death and never really even got off the ground. If NCLB were a “kid” then the education industry killed it in the crib.
April 15th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
I also supported NCLB. Our district, at that time, was committed to collaboration, and my prime reason was an attempt to be a team player, but I still respect public figures who change.
I never supported Standards, but in an effort to be a team player I started to teach to Standards, and it made me a better teacher. If I recall correctly, the Tenth Anniversary edition of Teacher Magazine came pretty close to a consensus that the prime weakness of Standards has been in the way people hear its movement’s mesage. When people make careful statements using the word “standards” people hear the words Standardized Test. But that reminds me of my most embarrassing prejudice. I never really read E.D. Hirsch because I viewed his approach through my ideological bias.
So I was ready to do a better job of living up to my ideals as a liberal Democrat when I read a Fordham report a couple of years ago. As I recall, Fordam was the first to articulate the key flaw on NCLB and the reforms it spawned. Progressive supporters of NCLB assumed that the policies that may be effective to IMPROVE student performance in effective schools would be appropriate for TURNING AROUND low performing schools. Now that is becoming the conventional wisdom.
In my year of blogging, I think I’ve been able to read between the lines and deduce what liberal supporters of NCLB accountability knew and what they didn’t know at the time. A lot of good people, it seems to me, didn’t know what they didn’t know.
This time we need some more modesty, as well as bipartisanship.
April 15th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
I observed the “Toolkits” conference and read all of the papers. One theme that stood out for me, that has since been reinforced by Michele Rhee’s experiences in Washington D.C., is that it can be difficult to get parents to respond to offers of help for their children, or even of more information. There seems to be a certain percentage of parents who just don’t care to have their child transported across town to a better school, or spend an afternoon or Saturday morning taking advantage of the offer of Supplemental Educational Services. The need for parental involvement is embedded in NCLB, but the proper response from the parents is lacking.
April 15th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
“I don’t want my grandchildren to go to schools whose reputations ride solely on basic skills and not on their capacity to offer a rich and coherent program in the liberal arts and sciences.” Ravitch
So, why advocate for state-run education? Advocate for private education where you can send you grandchildren to a school that teaches that which you desire.
Instead, you advocate a state solution where your ideal of education are forced on everyone else. I couldn’t disagree more.
April 15th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
[...] Diane Ravitch on the new Fordham blog Flypaper.
April 16th, 2008 at 12:39 am
The inevitable frequent failure of NCLB was explained to AASA members by W. Edwards Deming in 1991. Here’s an alternative:
Education Week Online, September 4, 2002
Richard Maurer, Superintendent
Pearl River Public Schools, Pearl River, N.Y.
“I read with interest your article on the U.S. Department of Education’s Blue Ribbon Schools program. ...
“... I recommend the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Program. This is an award that rigorously connects what a district says it does in leadership, planning, data collection and management, stakeholder needs, curriculum design, and instructional delivery processes to results. The award gives the district affordable feedback from experts on how to improve the district’s processes to gain the results desired. It is based on a model of continuous improvement, or the belief that ‘good enough is not enough.’
“As a member of one of the first school districts to gain this award, I can attest that involvement with the Baldrige standards over time will dramatically improve student achievement. We found that by applying the Baldrige standards, all our processes improved. We were able to link this improvement to the improvement in student achievement.
“I urge readers who wish to become involved in working toward an award and improved results to learn more at the Baldrige Web site, http://www.quality.nist.gov.”
April 16th, 2008 at 3:59 am
The federal takeover of education in the nation is doomed for failure. It is not only constitutionally flawed. It also predictably will not be cost- or time-effective. It is now well-known that there is no predictable relationships between how much the various states spend on education and how much academic skills and knowledge their students acquire. No amount of federal interference will resolve that issue.
April 16th, 2008 at 10:46 am
I am a high school principal in the state of Arkansas, and what you are saying about testing is true. My school is testing 7th and 8th graders all this week (the 7th graders have 5 full days of testing) and we also have two days of tests in Biology today and tomorrow for 10th graders. Next week we will test Algebra I and Geometry students. Two weeks after that the Algebra II students will be tested, and the week after that we will have Advanced Placement classes testing in their particular areas. We have already tested our 11th graders for literacy.
I think that legislators forget that these tests must be monitored by teachers who would normally be teaching classes to the students who are not testing. This means that not only are the students testing missing out on instruction, but so are the students not testing. As you can see from the above schedule, this amounts to a great deal of non-instruction time to cover more curriculum mandated by the state.
I, too, see a lot of good in NCLB, but as Martin Luther said, you need to have “moderation in all things.”