Wisconsin NCLB Protest Teacher Gets Reprimand Letter
There's been a recent lull in any real NCLB reauthorization news since Kennedy's folks put out the boring parts of their discussion draft and the rest of the Hill was focused on appropriations. But the AFTies report that Ted Kennedy is back on the march and The Hoff (how come that guy never links to me?) says that the House links have gone dead. Next thing you know, the lights will go out, a door will creak open, and Margaret Spellings -- face lit from below with a flashlight -- will cackle like a witch.
Poor and working class kids have less access to dental care than ever before, and it's showing, according to this NYT article (Boom Times for Dentists, but Not for Teeth). Sometimes the delays and lack of care are serious. Strange that I've seen vision programs at schools but never dental ones.
Bush Declares His Openness To Revising Education Law Washington Post
Under pressure from the right and the left, President Bush said yesterday that he is open to reformulating his signature No Child Left Behind education law but stressed that he remains unwilling to surrender on its core elements of testing and accountability.
Bush Pushes Congress on 'No Child' Law AP
President Bush said Tuesday that he's open to new ideas for changing the "No Child Left Behind" education law but will not accept watered-down standards or rollbacks in accountability.
Everyone says they know how to fix NCLB -- what should be done -- but no one seems to know how to get the politics right to get there. Former New York City education guy Robert Gordon's piece in Slate does much the same, unfortunately. Titled with supreme confidence (How to fix the No Child Left Behind Act), the Gordon piece rehashes the obstacles we all know about and then proposes -- yes -- national standards as a solution. Politically speaking, NCLB proponents need to do something along these lines: buy off the teachers by softening the mandatory merit pay language, win back the testing hawks by dumping local assessments, and make the multiple measures language tight enough that Spellings and the business groups can live with it. Give it a new name, let everyone say that it's not NCLB anymore, and declare victory. Pretty? No. Perfect? No. But that's not what this is really all about. Via Eduwonk.
As September's End Nears, Legislative Action Awaits
It's looking as if Rep. Miller will miss his goal, and Sen. Kennedy still has a chance to meet his.
Edwards Promises NCLB Overhaul
John Edwards' presidential campaign said today that the former senator would "totally overhaul" NCLB.
On Senate Panel, a Different Dynamic for NCLB Renewal
Senator Edward M. Kennedy is hoping to get a bill reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act through Congress before the end of this year. But if that’s going to happen, he has some big stumbling blocks to overcome.
While it's easy to look at this week's NCLB meltdown as the result of teachers union recalcitrance, Bess Keller's piece on the comparability provision (Proposed NCLB Rule on 'Salary Comparability' Draws Scrutiny) raises the possibility that the Miller draft, on the whole, tries to do too much -- not just fixing NCLB's flaws but carving out new ground that is especially difficult to reach under the current circumstances.
NCLB fails our schools USA Today
Bill Richardson: A one-point plan for No Child Left Behind: Scrap it.
Teachers attack education lawSan Mateo Times
The state's largest teachers' union on Monday launched a campaign decrying the 5-year-old No Child Left Behind Act as a failure and criticizing a proposal to renew the plan as only making the situation worse.
What's Good for Children NYT
With Congress gearing up to reauthorize the act, business leaders are rightly raising their voices in an attempt to prevent the teachers’ unions and their political allies from weakening this important law
No Race Left Behind NRO
One part of [the law] has generated surprisingly little debate, but ought to — namely the law’s requirement that schools track the scores of racial subgroups of students, and that each group hit the target pass rate on the tests.
Education Reform Goes From Bad to Worse Conservative Voice
Miller’s proposed changes to No Child Left Behind gut its school-choice provisions.
It might not make much of a difference to Congressman Miller's political calculations, but today's slew of editorial responses to the discussion draft skew against him:
Our view on education: Five ways to improve NCLB USA Today
The appropriate response, however, isn't to scrap the whole act or to water down its emphasis on reading and math.
Really Leaving No Child Behind NYT
Mr. Miller’s draft contains some important reforms that deserve to become law, but much of that good will be undermined if states, schools and teachers are not held accountable for the quality of education they provide.
English learners left behind LA Times
Congress didn't get it all right with NCLB -- but it didn't get it all wrong either. Some simple improvements can make a good law better and more fair for all our students. Via EdNews.org.
In the meantime, this article from the New York Sun reminds us what states are really like, and are likely to do more of under a more open NCLB school rating system:
State Guts Its Test of Reading
The difficulty of a reading test used to judge students across New York State dropped by as many as six grade levels between 2004 and 2005, according to an internal study by the New York City teachers union obtained by The New York Sun.
Feeling a little bit overwhelmed and bored over all this NCLB reauthorization action (already)? Me too. Plus which, I'm too lazy to read everything. So here are some handy-dandy resources to consider, with thanks for all the hard work you've done:
What You Should Think About the New Version of No Child Left Behind TQATE
"A good accountability system is a fragile thing, and making the law more complex also makes it more vulnerable to those who disagree with the principles themselves."
Miller-McKeon draft thoughts Sherman Dorn
"The first page is my attempt to cross-reference common criticisms of NCLB with pages/sections of the discussion draft that may address those criticisms."
Who's saying what about NCLB Reauthorization? ECS
"To better inform the national debate on NCLB reauthorization, ECS collected and analyzed these recommendations and created a one-stop source that allows you to easily find out who’s saying what about revising the law."
Cheat Sheet NCLB Part II
EdWeek's David Hoff dissects the MM draft in three sections (see also Part 1 and Part 2).
Thanks to the Ed Trust, here's a PDF of the Spellings letter to Miller that she promised yesterday, listing problems she and others have with the M&M discussion draft. Speaking of which, Miller said that Title II and the rest would be posted sometime today, which will help us see whether the teacher quality elements of NCLB are going to be strengthened or -- is such a thing possible? -- weakened. (There's a nod to teacher quality in the form of an attempt to close the equitability loophole in Miller's Title I proposal, according to EdWeek's David Hoff, but if they couldn't do that in 2001 they don't seem likely to take care of it now.)
The public mud-slinging between Spellings and Miller is really heating up. Makes you wonder what they say about each other behind closed doors. And, substantively, it bodes poorly for a strengthening of the current NCLB law.
Responding to Spellings' criticisms read to him by USA Today's Greg Toppo at a conference call with reporters today, Chairman Miller said that what he's trying to do with NCLB isn't just "wonkery" (as Spellings describes it) but rather much-needed changes to an imperfect law. "I know she wants to add confusion and doesn't like the debate," said Miller of Spellings. He also repeatedly mocked the "99.9 percent pure" claim Spellings once made (fire the writer who came up with that one), and called claims that multiple measures would muck up accountability "hokum."
Obviously, Miller's got to do what he's got to do, and -- this sentence is already so vague -- is going to go ahead and do it. But still it's sad to hear him denounce the current NCLB system which he created and defended for so long, now using much the same language as his detractors had (ie, a single test on a single day determining AYP). Such is politics. Somewhere, Joel Packer is smiling.
Report, lawsuit question NCLB's effect on teacher quality USA Today
A federal lawsuit and a new report challenge the Bush administration's rules on teacher credentials, saying they fail to ensure that students have a highly qualified teacher.
Coverage of the Miller Proposal:
House Committee Members Propose NCLB ChangesTitle I Monitor
Draft NCLB Bill Intensifies the Discussion Ed Week
Changes Proposed for Education LawNYT
Not that letters from academics usually make much difference, especially when they're on the other side ideologically from the folks making the decisions, but here's a letter from Hoover Institute researcher Erik Hanushek from last week that was sent along to me, in which he tells Chairman Miller what a bad idea multiple measures, writ large, are for school improvement. PDF here. Keep sending those letters and secret memos in.
Gerald Bracey points out in this Huffington Post post (Nothing Will Happen with NCLB) that adding more tests (ie, multiple measures) is no guaranteed solution because it could well overwhelm the testing infrastructure. It's an interesting argument, in part because I hadn't heard it before and mostly because it puts Bracey in the position of arguing against multiple measures.
A letter signed by dozens of civil rights groups -- but not by the Education Trust, Citizen's Commission On Civil Rights -- shows just how divided the broader civil rights community is on whether to include other tests and evidence of performance in the AYP school rating system of NCLB.
"Today's letter -- signed by many more organizations, several with large grassroots membership bases -- demonstrates, among other things, that those two groups [Ed Trust and CCCR] do not represent the views of the broader civil rights community on NCLB," says Bob Schaeffer of the FEA.
There's nothing particularly new about this divide. See below for the press release from the pro-multiple measures umbrella group known as the Forum on Education Accountability. See herefor the Ed Trust's statement, which calls these changes a giant step backwards.
Continue reading "Civil Rights Groups Divided On How To Rate School Performance" »
What happens next with NCLB won't be determined by what position editorial pages take on the issue of multiple measures, but it's interesting to note that several, including at least two more today, have decided that it's worth taking a moment to talk about what direction the law is going to go and warning against a retreat on NCLB:
A Vote for 'No Child' Washington Post
To let states wriggle out of accountability on the basics would betray the mission of No Child Left Behind.
No Retreat From No Child Dallas Morning News
The last thing that students need is for Washington to turn school accountability into the educational equivalent of mashed potatoes.
If there are editorial pages out there coming out in favor of multiple measures, I'd be happy to show them, but so far at least I haven't come across any.
Once in a while, I actually do some reporting, and today I happened to talk Prof. William Sanders, the testing guru whose recent letter to Congressman Miller was leaked to the press and seemed (according to an Ed Daily story) to put Sanders squarely against Miller's proposed use of multiple measures in AYP.
Well, it turns out that Sanders is against the use of portfolios and classroom observations that are often called multiple measures, but not against end of course tests, college entrance tests, and the like that he thinks Miller is talking about. "Those things have a place," says Sanders, who points out that they are already part of the growth model projections that he has developed and are being used in some pilot states.
His main accountability concern, however, is not so much that the current AYP relies on "a single test" (a description he says irks him and ignores the fact that there are three years of tests and hundreds if not thousands of test item responses that go into each year's AYP calculations), but rather that it encourages too much focus on lower-performing kids rather than "early high-achieving kids" who get ignored. He proposes a rating system that evaluates schools not only on reducing the achievement gap but also on helping already-proficient kids do even better -- apparently a part of the Tennessee pilot and perhaps what Nevada is trying to do here.
Over at The Quick And The Ed, Kevin Carey points out that one of the main concerns about multiple measures isn't just that it would take the focus off of core subjects like reading and math but also that it would put accountability back in the hands of schools and teachers whose performance is being measured (and who, previous to NCLB, often declined to publish achievement gaps or rate schools rigorously). Carey also asks "What's the law going to look like if there's one version for each of the nation's 14,000 school districts, or 90,000 schools? A lot like having no accountability at all."
Meanwhile over at The Gadfly, Mike Petrilli has a new post that calls Miller's speech a lurch to the left that could could delay reauthorization.
What no one's figured out -- or said out loud at least -- is how far Miller is going to go with these alternatives, or what it will take (if anything) to get new Democrats on board with a NCLB that is any better than the old one.
Reactions to the Miller speech continue to trickle in, including a story in yesterday's Ed Daily (subscription required) that reiterates Miller's intent to prevent multiple measures from turning into an "escape hatch" (as if there aren't already enough of those) and tensions with ranking member Buck McKeon, who has threatened to block the bill if necessary.
There's also mention of a letter from testing expert Bill Sanders that calls multiple measures into question: “Most of the measures usually advocated under the banner of ‘multiple measures’ have so little reliability that any attempt to use them in summative assessment is certain to provide results so untrustworthy that essentially no distinction among schools can be made."
Will multiple measures turn into a big "do-or-die issue," or will it be worked out in a way that gives the NEA credit for changing NCLB without gutting the already-loose NCLB accountability framework? I don't exactly know. But my guess is that something will get worked out that allows the reauthorization to move forward even if it doesn't really help the functionality of the law.
Not everyone's holding their tongues and waiting to see what the Miller reauthorization bill looks like. This commentary from Scripps News Service is an example: Diluting the No Child law. "As attractive as these indicators might sound, they would dilute the purpose of the law to where ultimately the standards become the usual educational mush."
Perhaps there's some way to thread the needle and come up with a bill that avoids creating mush and gives Congressional Democrats enough of the fig leaf they think they need to get re-elected. After all, many would argue that the growth model idea, which could have created just such a confusing morass, has seemed to have been just such a success. And others would observe that, with all its confidence intervals and subgroup minima and safe harbors and all the rest (attendance and graduation indicators), the current NCLB isn't as clear and simple as it seems on the outside.
But I'm not particularly hopeful, and remain somewhat dismayed and -- perhaps I'm alone -- surprised at this turn of events. After five years of defending NCLB, ducking and weaving all the way, Miller seems to be telling us that multiple measures are to be the price of a Democratic-controlled Congress.
It's easy to forget that parents and the public don't necessarily think the same things about NCLB that you do -- and that their feelings about NCLB may actually be better than their feelings about their local schools or schools nationwide.
JoanneJacobs has more evidence of this, citing a new poll showing that 57 percent of the public back reauthorizing No Child Left Behind "as is or with minimal changes." A lot higher than you thought, I bet. But don't worry, the number goes down to 41 percent for current and former teachers, says Jacobs.
That's roughly the same percentage that give their own public schools an A or B -- a figure that drops to 22 percent for public education nationally. So the public likes NCLB more than their local schools, even, and educators like NCLB about the same as their local schools.
NB: The poll was put out by the generally conservative but pro-NCLB Hoover Institute and will be in Education Next magazine sometime soon. Changes in the wording of these poll questions can often affect their outcome -- an analysis I'll leave to others.
