NCLB: Act II

Here's my final post summarizing the contents of the House education committee's NCLB draft. (See Part 1 and Part 2.) I'll focus on students with disabilities and touch on a few other subjects ...

Testing Special Education Children
The draft would keep the Department of Education's 2 percent rule intact. That rule allows 2 percent of students (approximately 20 percent of special education students) to take a modified assessment. Those who are proficient on those modified tests are counted as proficient for accountability purposes. To accommodate districts with high numbers of special education students, the draft would allow districts to apply for a waiver to expand their exception to 3 percent.

The draft would require the Secretary of Education to review the rule and revise it as necessary within three years.

If a child exits the special education program, the bill would allow a school to count his or her scores in the special education category for accountability purposes for three years. Presumably, this would make it easier for schools to make AYP in the special education category.

The bill also would finance efforts to develop "appropriate assessments for students with disabilities," the summary says. If states don't adopt such tests within two years, they'll be penalized with a loss of administrative funds.

In other issues,

Salary Comparability
The draft would close a loophole that's been in Title I for a long time. It's a complicated accounting procedure that critics say shortchanges Title I schools. Here's an important study on the issue, and a story I wrote about the report.

It's a small issue that could be a big hurdle to get this bill out of the House. I've heard Kati Haycock of the Education Trust say closing this loophole is her top priority in this reauthorization, but the teacher unions probably will fight her tooth and nail.

Rigorous Standards
Would provide incentives for states to increase the rigor of their standards so they're tied to the expectations of colleges and the workplace. It also would encourage states to compare their standards to international benchmarks. This probably doesn't go far enough to satisfy advocates of nationals standards, but it does nudge the debate in that direction.

Standards Study
The National Academy of Sciences would conduct a study that would develop methods to compare the rigor of state standards and would require the Secretary of Education to create a scale that compares states' standards using the findings of the study.

High Schools
Would create the Graduation Promise Fund to finance schoolwide efforts to improve high schools with the highest dropout rates. It also would provide money to help middle school students at risk of dropping out.

That's all I've got. Let me know if I missed anything.

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Through the magic of the World Wide Web, you can read my story that will appear in the Sept. 5 issue of Education Week. Check back at edweek.org today for sidebars on English Language Learners and special education students. They should be up Friday afternoon.

One of the subtexts to this story is that it occurred during the last week of August, a week that many Washingtonians reserve for vacation. Over the course of the week, I talked to one person who was at his house on the Chesapeake Bay and another at his second home in Colorado. I heard through the grapevine that one woman didn't respond to my e-mail because she was taking her son to college, and received a voice mail from another who was preparing to leave town for the same reason. When Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings scheduled her trip to Alaska for this week, she probably figured that she wouldn't miss much back home. But eduflack is questioning that call in hindsight.

That's one reason why groups aren't taking definitive stands on the draft. They couldn't get all of their leadership in the same room to decide what they think of everything in all of the 435 pages put out by the House committee. Groups will probably stake out their positions by the middle of next week.

Some groups already have some firm opinions. The Education Trust isn't enamored with the accountability measures, as I point out in the story. This statement on their Web site differs from the one sent out in an e-mail blast on Wednesday. The original statement had Amy Wilkins saying the draft is "flawed, fllimsy, and phony." That's an alliterative response to Rep. George Miller's promise that the current law is "not fair, not flexible, and is not funded."

The Alliance for Excellent Education said House leaders have been "thoughtful and deliberate" in their treatment of high schools. The Knowledge Alliance says the bill is "a step in the right direction for the next generation of reform."

Here are some quotes I collected that never made it into the story:

"We want to make sure the multiple indicators do not adversely impact the current accountability system," said Arthur Rothkopf, the senior vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

"It creates these new strong incentives to overidentify kids [as English Language Learners or in special education], leave them there, and never let them out," said Dan Soifer, the education analyst at the Lexington Institute.

"This working draft is a base that can go either way," said Gary Huggins, the director of the Commission on No Child Left Behind run by the Aspen Institute. "We need to push further to accelerate progress rather than pull back."

Finally, I refer you to this Q&A between Sec. Spelling at the USA Today editorial board. No mention of the House draft so the interview must have happened before the draft came out.

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Just finished my reporting for my story that will appear in the Sept. 5 issue of Education Week. It should be posted on edweek.org soon. I plan to blog a comment or two on it when it's posted.

First here's my summary of the differentiated interventions of the House proposal. Under the current law, schools receive the same menu of interventions if they miss their AYP targets by a little or a lot, in one subgroup or all of them. This section is intended to tailor the intensity of the interventions to the needs of the school. But Michael J. Petrilli calls it the Suburban Schools Relief Act because he believes it would protect suburban schools from making serious changes.

The Basics
The House plan would categorize schools the don't make AYP as either "priority schools" or "high priority schools."

Priority schools would be ones that miss AYP in one or two of the demographic subgroups that NCLB's accountability system tracks. High priority schools would be ones that miss AYP in "most, if not all" subgroups.

Schools in both categories would need to provide professional development and mentoring that is linked to the state's standards and assessments. They also would need to "ensure that students who need the most help are assigned to the teachers best equipped to help them," according to the summary of the draft.

Proven Programs
The bill would create a menu of what it calls "proven interventions" for schools in both categories to use. High priority schools would need to use the first four on the list and could choose more; priority schools would need to choose from at least two on the whole list.

The list is:

1.) Proven instructional programs that are aligned with state standards. High school instruction also would adopt programs that prepare graduates for college and the workplace.

2.) Formative assessments and data-based decision-making that gives teachers information about students' progress through the year.

3.) Parental options for free tutoring and public school choice.

4.) Extended learning time such as after-school programs, summer school, and "other opportunities that go beyond the current typical school day."

5.) Supervised intervention models such as Response to Intervention.

6.) Specialized support and parent and community involvement that find ways to link students' families with counselors, school social workers, and other supports. In high schools, this category could include career academies.

7.) Personalized learning environments that encourage dropouts to return to school, help 9th graders move into 10th grade, or increase interest in schools at all grade levels.

Redesign

Once schools enter the redesign phase, they would continue to be divided into the "priority" and "high priority" categories.

"Priority redesign schools" would need to make "significant revisions" to their leadership and instructional programs as well as offer services to the students who didn't meet their proficiency targets.

"High priority redesign schools" would have to close and reopen with new leadership and staff. They could do this as a traditional school or as a charter school. Under both options, the school would need to re-create its instructional program.

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Many folks out there are looking through the fine print of the 400-page NCLB draft that the House education committee put out yesterday. If you don't have time to do that—or even read the summary—here's a digest of issues related to testing, accountability, and AYP. I'll follow up with issues related to special education and differentiated consequences.

For a summary of issues related to English Language Learners, read this post on Learning the Language, a blog written by my colleague Mary Ann Zehr.

One key point to remember about this proposal is that it retains two significant policies from the current law: the goal that all students will be proficient in reading and math by 2013-14 and the requirement that states assess student progress toward that goal in grades 3-8 and once in high school.

Multiple Measures
States could choose to use several different measures to supplement their statewide test scores. Those indicators are: graduation rates, dropout rates, college enrollment rates, percentage of students passing exit exams for college-prep courses, test scores for academic subjects other than reading and math, and test scores for students at the lowest and highest achievement levels. Under that final category, schools and districts could get credit for moving students from a "below basic" category into "basic" or from "proficient" to "advanced." All multiple measures would need approval from the education secretary.

Even when using additional measures, the reading and math scores would form the basis for accountability systems. States could use these measures to boost the scores of schools or districts. Think of it as extra credit. The bill, though, would cap the amount that these measures could add to the math and reading scores.

Growth Models
All growth models would need to track students' progress toward proficiency by 2013-14. They also could count students as proficient if their test-score growth puts them on the path to proficiency within three years. The growth models also would need to establish separate growth targets for reading and math.

Increasing the Rigor of Standards
Provides incentives for states to revise their standards to ensure that they meet the academic expectations for college and the workforce. These states would have to change their tests to be aligned with those new standards. Those incentives aren't defined in the draft and may be added later based on comments submitted to the committee, I'm told.

'N' sizes, etc.
Would set a maximum 'n' size of 30. Would set a maximum confidence interval of 95 percent and 75 percent for schools in Safe Harbor. Also would prohibit the use of confidence intervals in growth models.

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I'll be posting more on the House draft bill later, but I first I want to call your attention to the current issue of Education Week. As usual, it's full of NCLB news and commentary.

The 39th Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll on attitudes toward public schools is out today and it focuses primarily on NCLB. The headline Poll Finds Rise in Unfavorable Views of NCLB tells the story in a nutshell. Andrew Trotter's story lays out the details, documenting how public support for the law has declined gradually since 2003. NCLB critics say the public attitudes mirror their own complaints about the law. (See here and here.)

On the Reading First beat, Kathleen Kennedy Manzo delivers two reports. Federal Reading Review Overlooks Popular Text explains that the What Works Clearinghouse found that the best-selling reading programs for the early grades did not have the kinds of rigorous studies required to be included in the review.

In Reading Results Hard to Translate, Panel Concludes, Manzo says that researchers on a Reading First advisory panel can't judge the effectiveness of the program based on existing state data. (That's the same data that Bush administration officials put forward earlier this year as proof of the program's effectiveness.)

In Suit Contests 'Loophole' for Alternate Paths, Vaishali Honowar lays out the argument on the teacher quality lawsuit I wrote about here. She includes a "no comment" from a Department of Education spokeswoman.

In the Commentary section, Bruce Fuller's The Democrats' 'No Child' Divide' recounts Democrats' summer of discontent over NCLB. He quotes liberally from leading presidential candidates. He adds, though, that the 42 rookie Democrats also hold the key to reauthorization because they represent the moderate districts Democrats must retain to keep their House majority.

It'll be interesting to hear what those first-termers have to say about yesterday's news.

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Alyson Klein and I have seen a summary of the changes that House education leaders are proposing for Title I, Part A of NCLB. Both Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., and Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, R-Calif., signed onto the draft.

You can read our reporting on the draft and you can look at legislative language at the House Education and Labor Committee's Web site.

We'll be tracking this story with more updates to come.

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Rep. George Miller and his staff have been working hard during August recess. The chairman of the House education committee told Florida educators yesterday that he would be releasing a draft of NCLB bill soon, probably today. I checked the committee's Web site this morning and haven't found anything.

This post from an outspoken NCLB critic suggests that the draft is an attempt to garner support for the bill among educators, parents, and even students.

Stayed tuned to edweek.org and to this blog for updates.

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Rep. George Miller said last month that NCLB "is not fair, not flexible, and is not funded." In response to one question on this PBS Web chat, the chairman of the House education committee lays out three things he wants to change about the law:

1.) Revise assessments "so they measure critical thinking, problem solving, and other important skills." New tests could reduce the amount of test-prep and "drill-and-kill" of "low-level skills," he writes.

2.) Create growth models to "ensure that teachers get credit" for raising test scores across the achievement spectrum, as well as for helping students on the bubble between basic achievement and proficiency.

3.) Spur "more relevant and rigorous" standards by requiring states to ensure their standards are linked to the skills and knowledge students need to succeed in college or the workplace.

In the response to another question, Rep. Miller says science labs are the types of performance measures he would like to see included in the reauthorized NCLB.

See also the answers from Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, R-Calif., the senior Republican on the committee. He agrees that standards should be tied to college and workplace readiness and that AYP should be determined by student growth. But he's silent on Rep. Miller's ideas to assess critical-thinking skills and to include performance-based measures.

Over the next month or two, we'll see if these two can bridge their differences on testing and other issues.

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In 11 years at Education Week, I've covered State of the Union Addresses, visited dozens of schools, and traveled to Antarctica. But I've never interviewed a Hollywood celebrity.

Until today.

Fitness guru Richard Simmons read my item about the House bill he's endorsing to add physical education requirements under NCLB. One of his assistants called to tell me Simmons would like to talk. I left him a message, and he called back five minutes later. You can listen to our 15-minute conversation here. (He does most of the talking.)

He explains that he's taking on this campaign because he wants his legacy to be helping to end childhood obesity. He tells of his failed attempt to get an audience with President Bush. "He's declined to see me. He's busy. The man is busy. There's wars. There's stuff. Sometimes you forget there's a war on obesity in America, which is an epidemic right now."

He did, however, meet with Rep. George Miller, the chairman of the House education committee, and hopes to win the Democrat's support.

Although Simmons says the goal that elementary schools have 150 minutes of PE each week is ambitious, he says it would pay off. "Kids learn more if they're physically active. My big question is: Why is nobody pushing to get PE back in our schools when it's the only answer we have to save our children?"

In the final minute of our conversation, his voice rises to crescendo: "I think we all have to join hands together and say, 'Hey, put physical education in a fun way in the schools and the test scores will go up! Why not even try it? Give it a year, and I promise you the test scores will go up."

Listening to it, I realize I was practically speechless. Wouldn't you have been?

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One thing is almost certain about NCLB's future: The way AYP is calculated will change. Most, including the chairman of the House's education committee, would use students' test-score growth as the key indicator.

In the new issue of Education Next, Harvard researcher Paul E. Peterson is the latest to outline ideas for a growth model. Under his plan, schools would be given letter grades, from 'A' through 'F,' based on the amount of progress their students are making toward the goal of universal proficiency by the end of 2013-14 school year. He compares the current "you made it or you didn't" AYP structure to "pass/fail" grades.

"I have learned from bitter experience that such a grading system both gives students license to do nothing and, ultimately, provides less information to those who rely on grades as a way of ascertaining whether students have learned something," writes Peterson, who is a professor of government at Harvard University.

Peterson also believes that NCLB should hold people (students, teachers, and administrators) accountable for results. Students should not be promoted to the next grade if they don't perform well on tests, he says. Teachers should be rewarded if their students perform well, given help if their students fail, and "dismissed if they remain consistently ineffective classroom teachers," he writes. Likewise, he adds, principals and superintendents should be held accountable for student test results in their schools and districts.

Peterson's ideas are at the crux of two of the most significant issues in NCLB reauthorization. How will the law track student progress: through a statewide test or multiple measures? And what constitutes a highly qualified teacher: someone with credentials or someone whose students perform well on tests?

P.S. Peterson's essay is part of package asking the question: Will NCLB Hit the Wall? You can read the articles here.

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A quick update on the new teacher quality lawsuit:

My colleague Vaishali Honawar has a story with more details here.

Also, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education supports the lawsuit. "The federal government needs to close this loophole that allows unprepared and uncertified teachers to enter the classroom and be called highly qualified," Jane West, the group's vice president for government relations and advocacy, writes in this statement.

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Last week, Karl Rove suggested that Bush administration might flex executive muscle to change NCLB. Today, a coalition of California groups filed a lawsuit saying the administration hasn't been forceful enough in writing the law's highly qualified teacher rules. Read all about it here.

In the suit, Public Advocates asks a federal judge to enforce the law's requirement that teachers be fully certified under state law to be considered highly qualified. The department's rules allow states to declare teachers pursuing alternative certification as highly qualified, according to this statement from Jenny Pearlman, a staff attorney for Public Advocates.

The department's policy "creates a major loophole" that is an "evisceration of Congress’ 'highly qualified' standard," Ms Pearlman's statement says.

In two earlier lawsuits, the San Francisco-based Public Advocates succeeded in requiring California to increase the rigor of its definition of highly qualified teachers. It also was part of the legal team in the Williams case, a federal lawsuit that resulted in better textbooks and course offerings in some of California's most disadvantaged schools.

I've asked for a response from the Education Department and will post it when it arrives.

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I'm back from an NCLB-free vacation. Thanks to Alyson Klein for taking over the blog and to Sean Cavanagh for making a cameo appearance.

I've been playing catch up on NCLB news for the past 48 hours. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit I've found was buried in this AP story about President Bush's plans to assert his executive authority during the remainder of this term.

"We have No Child Left Behind, which we can either do by law or regulation; we want to do it by law," outgoing presidential adviser Karl Rove said.

This adds a new wrinkle to those of us tracking NCLB reauthorization. If Congress fails to get a bill passed, the Bush administration may make changes on its own.

I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering what they have in mind.

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Merit pay for teachers, which has been a subject of debate among lawmakers working towards reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, was a point of discussion in the Democratic presidential debate in Iowa on Sunday. It’s particularly interesting to see how the three candidates who sit on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, which could take up an NCLB reauthorization bill as early as next month, came down on that issue, and on the education law generally.

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., said he would support merit pay as long as teachers “have some buy-in” in determining how their performance is measured. “They can't be judged simply on standardized tests that don't take into account whether children are prepared before they get to school or not,” he said.

Sen. Obama added that the NCLB law needs considerable overhaul, but didn’t have the chance to offer specific proposals on how to accomplish that, other than saying he would make sure that teachers have a voice in shaping the reauthorized version of the law, and that Congress should provide more funding for it.

“I've had a lot of discussions with teachers all throughout Iowa. And they feel betrayed and frustrated by No Child Left Behind,” Sen. Obama said.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said she would support incentive pay for “school-wide performance” but stopped short of proposing extra pay for teachers deemed particularly effective within a school. She said merit pay could be used to help “change the culture within schools and to provide the resources, the training and the support that teachers need to do the job they do want to do.”

Sen. Clinton, who has been critical of the law in the past, expressed similar sentiments during the debate. “You have to reform No Child Left Behind. We're going to try to do that and begin to make it much more in line with the reality of teaching,” she said.

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, D-Conn., the chairman of the subcommittee overseeing K-12 educa-tion, said he’d support extra pay for teachers who are willing to work in under-resourced schools. But he added, “I'm not in favor necessarily of giving more preference for a teacher that's performing some-what better. Measuring that I think is the wrong direction.”

Sen. Dodd also briefly summarized his plans for reauthorization, which includes some proposals that have already garnered broad support in Congress, such as growth models.

“I'm a believer that we need to have fundamental reform of No Child Left Behind, and start measuring growth, not abandoning schools that aren't doing well, and providing far less rigid criteria when it comes to highly qualified teachers,” he said.

None of the senators on the education committee echoed the call during Sunday's debate by Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico to scrap the law completely.

"I also have a one-point plan, like I do on Iraq, on No Child Left Behind: Scrap it. It's a mess; it's a disaster," Gov. Richardson said.

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It’s unclear just how Congress will address the question of how—and whether—to expand parts of the No Child Left Behind Act to high schools. There’s no shortage of proposals out there, though, many of which are endorsed by the Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington-based advocacy organization headed up by former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise, a Democrat.

The group held a briefing on Capitol Hill this morning for congressional staff member, education advocates, and the press. Bethany Little, the group's vice president for policy and federal advocacy, highlighted some of the high school overhaul measures that have been released so far this year.

Some of the proposals are backed by key members of the House and Senate education committees, and could find their way into the broader reauthorization measure, either as amendments, or language in the initial bills of Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., or Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., the chairmen of the education panels.

Here’s a round-up of some of the measures Ms. Little mentioned:

--The Graduation Promise Act, (S. 1185, H.R. 2928), introduced by Sens. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., Richard M. Burr, R-N.C, and Kennedy in the Senate, and Rep. Ruben Hinojosa, D-Texas, in the House. It would authorize $2.5 billion in new funding to improve struggling high schools, which generally don’t receive as much Title I funding as elementary and middle schools.

--Every Student Counts Act, (H.R. 2955) introduced by Rep. Robert C. Scott, D-Va., in the House. The bill would revamp the process for calculating graduation rates and hold schools accountable for increasing graduation rates, including for subgroups, such as racial minorities.

--Striving Readers Act, (S. 958 and H.R. 2289) introduced by Sens. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., in the Senate, Reps. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., and Todd Platts, R-Pa., in the House. It would provide funding to support statewide literacy initiatives for fourth through twelfth graders.

--GRADUATES Act, (S. 1920) introduced by Sens.Harry Reid, D-Nev., Mark Pryor, D-Ark., and Murray. It would create a $500 million incentive fund to help support partnerships between states or school districts and colleges, businesses, nonprofits, or other organizations.

One major question is whether Congress will be willing and able to provide the resources for these proposals. In Ms. Little’s view, the price tags aren’t too steep, considering the needs of schools with high dropout rates. We’ll see if Democratic leaders, who’ve promised to reign in spending, agree. …

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Written by Education Week's Sean Cavanagh

This week, one of the leading voices in the U.S. business lobby, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, offered some specifics on the kinds of changes to the law its leaders will support, with this underlying message: Hold firm.

Arthur J. Rothkopf, a senior vice president at the Chamber, told reporters at an Aug. 15 press event in Washington (link launches RealMedia audio file) that the organization opposes the idea of establishing "multiple measures'' to judge students' academic progress under a reauthorized NCLB unless those measures are as academically demanding as the current law's accountability requirements.

Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., recently said that he supports using so-called multiple measures, in addition to reading and math test scores, to judge whether schools are meeting performance targets.

"We do not favor multiple measures,'' Rothkopf said at the event. "We do not want to dilute the existing system.''

The U.S. Chamber could not take specific positions on alternative accountability measures, he added, because federal lawmakers had not put such proposals in writing yet. Even so, Rothkopf said he has heard rumblings about student attendance, as well as some measure of student problem-solving ability, counting as gauges of student progress.

Both ideas are ill-conceived, he said.

Jacque Johnson, an executive director of education and workforce issues for the Chamber, said it would hold off weighing in on using graduation rates as a measure until it sees more specifics.

Rothkopf took a more positive view of "growth models''—pilot programs permitted by the U.S. Department of Education that give states more flexibility in measuring student academic progress. In addition, he said the U.S. Chamber would support changes to the law to ensure that parents and the public are given more information about options for changing schools, and receiving additional tutoring.

With Congress scheduled to resume work next month, Rothkopf voiced anxiety about the calendar—not the legislative timetable but the 2009 presidential-election calendar. As campaign rhetoric gets louder later this year and next, he said, getting reauthorization legislation through both houses of Congress will become more of a longshot.

"They have to understand that if Congress doesn't act now, or in the near future,'' he said, "it's only going to get worse.''

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The Senate, Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee held a field hearing in Sante Fe, New Mexico on NCLB on August 10, exploring the impact of the law on Native American students, which so far, has been an under-the-radar-issue in the larger reauthorization debate.

Coverage of the event in the Santa Fe New Mexican and the Albequerque Journal mainly focused on criticisms that the law has made it harder for schools to focus on native languages and culture.

Maggie Benally, principal of the Navajo Language Immersion School in Fort Defiance, Ariz., which has made adequate yearly progress the past three years, talked about how her school uses native language as a tool to help students develop higher level thinking skills, according to the local reports. Back in March, Education Week's Mary Ann Zehr wrote a profile of the school.

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been largely silent about the No Child Left Behind Act. But yesterday she told the National Conference of State Legislatures that Congress will make such signficant changes to the law that it will have to be renamed.

NCSL has been sharply critical of much of the NCLB law, particularly its expansion of the federal role in education. But Ms. Pelosi seems to think they'll like the new version, according to this story on stateline.org.

"I believe you will be pleased with the legislation that is gathering strong bipartisan support. The bill will be fair and flexible, responding to legitimate concerns by you and others while fulfilling our promise to improve student performance, increase school accountability and provide students with the resources they need to learn the skills that will be crucial to their future success," she said

But it's too soon to tell just how those ideas will translate into policy. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., is one of Ms. Pelosi's closest confidantes, and some observers say she's likely to largely defer to him during reauthorization.

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Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson is working hard to win over educators in New Hampshire. According to the Associated Press, the governor of New Mexico pledged to a state conference of National Education Association members to completely scrap the No Child Left Behind Act and seek a federal minimum wage for teachers. It’ll be interesting to see whether any of the Democratic front-runners—Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, or former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina— will feel compelled to move towards those positions or flesh out their own education proposals. We might get further indication of how NCLB is playing out in the New Hampshire primary when Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, a member of the Senate education committee, addresses the New Hampshire teachers on Thursday.

More to come on that as it happens.

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Linda Perlstein’s new book Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade has garnered a lot of attention, both online and in print. Ms. Perlstein spent the 2005-06 school year at Tyler Heights Elementary School in Annapolis, Md., chronicling the Title I school’s efforts to maintain its remarkable gains on state standardized tests. Unlike their more ad-vantaged peers at a neighboring elementary school, students at Tyler Heights have little time for creative activities, such as puppet shows and plays, according to Ms. Perlstein. Opponents of NCLB’s testing regime say the book fuels arguments that the federal law narrows curricu-lum. Check out this posting on the widely read liberal blog, the Daily Kos. But author Edward Humes who reviewed the book for the L.A. Times, called it a worthwhile read, but criticized Ms. Perlstein for failing to make a case for or against the federal education law.

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Congress is headed out of town, and so am I.

I'll leave the blog in the capable hands of my colleague, Alyson Klein. Alyson and I work together reporting stories (see here and here) for the Washington section for Education Week.

Although August is traditionally a slow news month in Washington, I'm sure Alyson won't lack for NCLB news. States are starting to release their AYP results, schools are getting ready for to start the 2007-08 year, and tutoring providers soon will start recruiting students. There's never a break from NCLB news.

I'll return on Aug. 20, and I look forward to reading what Alyson writes.

Posted by David J. Hoff, edweek.org at 3:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This academic study will give ammunition to both sides of the NCLB debate.

In it, researchers S. David Brazer and Erin E. Peters of George Mason University tracked policy changes in an anonymous California district. About half of the districts' 13,000 students speak English as a second language, and its schools are struggling to make AYP with that population.

The district's management team decided to require to elementary schools of offer limited English proficient students English literacy instruction 30 minutes a day, four days a week. The instruction was to be done during the 2 1/2 hours a day of language arts instruction.

Supporters of the law will note that NCLB led to direct changes in district policies to benefit ELL students. Here's a particularly telling interchange between a researcher and the district's curriculum director:

Researcher: Wow! So you just stated that in the past there wasn't even instruction happening in [English language development] for English language learners.
Curriculum Director: Right.

But the study's conclusion suggests that requiring NCLB's achievement goals to be met in a short time period is causing problems in the district. Because of the urgent need to act, the district's leaders didn't take time to win support for their policy change and the new rules were "weakly implemented," the report says.

"Despite their best efforts," the study concludes, district leaders "may be no further ahead on meeting state standards and NCLB demands."

Posted by David J. Hoff, edweek.org at 2:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You may have to wait till September to glimpse the future of NCLB, but you'll be able to spend your August vacation imagining the future of math and science education.

Sean Cavanagh reports for Education Week that the House passed a so-called competitiveness bill yesterday. The comprehensive legislation is chock full of math and science education. It has a new math program to get students ready to take algebra and scholarships for undergraduates who promise to teach math and science in high-need schools. Read more here.

The Senate is expected to vote on the bill today and send it to President Bush. No word from the White House on whether the president would sign the bill. Given the 367-57 vote in the House, Congress may be able to override any veto.

UPDATE: The Senate rarely does anything quietly or quickly, but it did in this case. It passed the competitiveness act unanimously. The transcript of the discussion takes up less than a page in the Congressional Record.

Posted by David J. Hoff, edweek.org at 9:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In this video from the Educator Roundtable, you'll hear (over and over) the most common criticism of NCLB: It requires too much testing.

What strikes me is the repeated images of President Bush. As Eduwonk notes, polling shows that respondents support the general concepts of NCLB. But that support fades once they're asked a question that identifies those concepts with NCLB. Because the name is so closely associated with the president, maybe his unpopularity (as shown in polls here and here) will hinder reauthorization.

Posted by David J. Hoff, edweek.org at 9:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Even as Congress prepares for vacation, House members are stating their priorities for NCLB reauthorization.

Today, the Alliance for Excellent Education put out an alert about the Measuring and Evaluating Trends for Reliability, Integrity, and Continued Success Act, or the METRICS Act. It would provide up to $150 million in formula grants for states to create and use new longitudinal data systems. Such systems are vital for developing accurate graduation rates and for helping educators understand how to help students improve their academic performance, data lovers say. Reps. Rush Holt, D-N.J., and Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., are sponsoring the bill.

On the lighter side, three congressmen announced they want to fight childhood obesity by requiring physical education in schools. Under the FIT Kids Act, states would need to demonstrate that their schools are providing enough PE in schools. The bill would give states credit for working towards a goal of 150 minutes per week of PE in elementary schools and 225 minutes in upper grades.

Earlier this year, Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn., won the endorsement of exercise guru Richard Simmons for a bill that would set new standards for physical education and require a national fitness exam by 2009-10. Simmons is promoting this new bill too. The American Heart Association is backing the latest effort, as are Reps. Ron Kind, D-Wis., and Jay Inslee, D-Wash.

These bills are unlikely to go through the legislative process on their own. Will they or some revised version of them be attached in any way to the NCLB reauthorization? We may see in September.

Note: The Congressional Record doesn't have links to these bills yet. I'll provide links when it does.

UPDATE: The METRICS Act is H.R. 3253, and the FIT Kids Act is H.R. 3257. The Congressional Record doesn't have the text either bill yet.

Posted by David J. Hoff, edweek.org at 3:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by David J. Hoff, edweek.org at 10:54 AM | Permalink