No Curriculum Left Behind

The last time I blogged about the nationalization of American education: a year ago, almost exactly. A year ago, it was ratcheting-up-rhetoric. But words have a way of translating into action:

Maryland and several other states are pushing rapidly toward adoption of new academic standards proposed Wednesday for English and math, adding momentum to the campaign to establish common expectations for public school students across the country.

The District also is on track to adopt the common standards drafted by experts in a project led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. However, it is possible that Virginia will not join the apparent surge toward approval.

I should point out that my home state--the "other" Washington--is part of the effort. And what might it mean?

Widespread adoption of common standards would mark a watershed for schools, triggering consequences for curricula, textbooks, testing and teaching. Some critics say common standards amount to a thinly disguised ruse to establish national standards under federal control -- an allegation that state and federal officials deny.

They don't have to be a "ruse" to have the eventual--and seemingly inevitable--effect of a national curriculum. Unless the feds dismantle NCLB, which simply isn't going to happen, there will always be a reason to federalize.

Added: a blog-neighbor questions the Common Core standards.

Olympia School District tidbits

1. The Olympia School District kicked off another year with its annual Learning Improvement Days, this Monday and Tuesday. Andrea Peterson, 2007 Teacher of the Year, gave an inspirational and humor-filled speech about the necessity of relationships to teaching, and how in the new "Three R's," Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships, the latter gets short shrift despite its foundational importance.

I'd have more detailed comments, but my hard drive was destroyed in a series of frightful noises.

2. We have two new School Board members, if you hadn't already heard: Eileen Thomson and Mark Campeau. They were appointed by the remaining three, in order of seniority: Carolyn Barclift, Frank Wilson, and Allen Miller. Now that "crisis mode" is over, it's time for the District to have a thoroughgoing discussion of our values, goals, and weaknesses.

3. No Child Left Behind has caught up to two district schools, The Olympian reports:

Fifty-seven districts and 628 schools statewide are listed as needing improvement under No Child Left Behind in a preliminary report released Thursday by state Superintendent Terry Bergeson.

North Thurston was the only Thurston County district listed as needing improvement overall, but nearly all of the county's eight districts failed to meet federal benchmarks in at least one area, according to the report....

•Avanti High School: Did not meet target graduation rate.

•Jefferson Middle School: Math for the special-education and low-income groups; reading for the special-education group.

Since our results are tied to the WASL, and since WASL scores dipped in many categories statewide, which Bergeson blamed on "something... happening with the kids," one has to wonder if WASL angst is going to be enough to propel her competition, Randy Dorn, this November.

pouvez-vous enseigner Françaisement?

Ryan thinks a Frenchified educational system--top-down, homogenized math, science, and literacy curricula for all--is "unconstitutional." Pre-NCLB, I might have agreed. Now I'm certain it's not only constitutional, but inevitable.

As for the title, je refuse de faire des excuses.

Frenchification effort gaining steam?

As our curricula become more and more centralized, both in Washington State and around the country, the reason for the ironic development* is worth considering. Studies like The Fordham Institute's provide it:

Last week, the results of a national test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that Washington fourth- and eighth-graders score above average compared to their counterparts in other states.

This week, a new report shows Washington is again above average, this time in how it defines "proficiency" on its own tests, the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, or WASL.

A report released today by the Fordham Institute and the Northwest Evaluation Association says the WASL has a higher passing bar in reading and writing than the average in the 26 states examined. The exceptions were reading in grades 4, 5, and 8, where the WASL passing bar was below the 26-state average.

The report, called "The Proficiency Illusion," underscores the fact that proficiency in one state means something very different than it does in others — and sometimes from grade to grade within the same state.

"America is awash in achievement 'data,' " the report says, "yet the truth about our educational performance is far from transparent and trustworthy."

Even if you can quibble with this particular study's methodology, you have to grant that every state has its own assessment, and with nearly no coordination across states, there's absolutely no mechanism to ensure equity under the provisions of No Child Left Behind.

NCLB makes a national curriculum not only necessary, but inevitable.




*For the irony-deficient: Frenchification is brought to you by the same president who served up Freedom Fries.

districts failing AYP in special ed

In Thurston County, only 3 of 8 districts meet federal Adequate Yearly Progress benchmarks in Special Education--simply because they don't have enough students in that category. Elsewhere, trouble brewing:

"I anticipate we'll have more and more districts have (Adequate Yearly Progress) problems if there's no change in the rules," said Alan Burke, superintendent of Yelm Community Schools.

Most students in special education programs take the same assessments as everyone else in their grade level....

With the large increase in districts that did not meet federal benchmarks, state officials seek assessment alternatives for students in special education programs statewide.

"What we're trying to do is honor the intent of the law, but at the same time, provide alternatives for kids," said Catherine Taylor, director of assessment alternatives at the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. "The dilemma always is that we don't have any power over the alternatives to offer because it's a federal law, and we go by their guidelines."

Have to wonder how a system arose that provides qualitatively different education but expects quantitatively similar results.

is your school on the list?

The Adequate Yearly Progress preliminary results are out. Six schools have moved off the list; I can imagine the back-slapping that'll fill their LIDs next week. Dozens more, though, joined it.

In my county, one district--North Thurston--hasn't met its NCLB-mandated goals.

How about you?

does choice matter? Compton vs. Oakland

I'm empirically minded when it comes to school choice: if vouchers lead to better education for all students, then by golly let's adopt vouchers. (I don't buy arguments that they're inherently going to gut public schools. Maybe--and maybe only in some places--but where I live, the public schools are well-established, quality outfits, as they are across most of the country, apocalypticists be damned. If we had to compete for students, we'd do just fine.)

Early returns haven't been terribly favorable toward vouchers, but a contrast between changes in Oakland and Compton might point in a new direction. Lisa Snell and Shikha Dalmia report:

In short, the two districts have similar student bodies, similar challenges, and—until now—a similar history of failure. But Oakland is beginning to break away from this history, and the reason is the weighted-student-formula program it embraced some years ago and fully implemented last year.

Under this program, kids are not required to attend their neighborhood school, especially if it is failing. Rather, they can pick any regular public or charter school in their district and take their education dollars with them; more students therefore means more revenues for schools. Furthermore, as the name suggests, the revenues are "weighted" based on the difficulty of educating each student, with low-income and special-needs kids commanding more money than smart, well-to-do ones. Schools have to compete for funding, but the upside is that they have total control over it.

Compton has stuck to a completely different approach that does not involve empowering parents—or decentralizing control to schools. Instead, it has tried to fix its failing schools by mandating "classroom inputs." To this end, all Compton schools over the last few years have been ordered to reduce class size by 12 percent, improve teachers' credentials, adopt a tougher curriculum, and even clean up bathrooms.

What are the results so far? Oakland schools have shown a remarkable flexibility in responding to student needs, while Compton has stagnated. In 2003-04, for instance, Oakland's high schools offered 17 Advanced Placement classes. Last year, they increased this total to 91, or about one AP class for every 143 students. By contrast, Compton's AP offerings went up by two that year, to one class for every 218 students. Oakland students also are taking high-level math and science courses more frequently. About 800 high school students studied first-year physics last year—nearly triple the number taking the course in the 2004 school year.

More to the point, of course, are student-performance measures. Oakland kids have shown major improvement on the California High School Exit Examination, which all students must pass in English and math before graduating from high school. Sixty-two percent of high school students passed the English-language-arts portion, compared with 57 percent in 2005—a 5-point gain—and 60 percent passed math, a 6-point jump from the year before. By contrast, Compton showed no gains in English—staying stuck at 58 percent—and posted a 2-percentage-point drop in math, from 50 percent to 48 percent.

Similarly, Oakland's score on the state's Academic Performance Index—a numeric grade that California assigns to its schools based on the performance of their students on standardized tests—went up by 19 points. Compton, in contrast, gained only 13 points. Yet even this overstates Compton's performance, because almost all of its gains came at the elementary level, where students are not so intractable. Compton's middle schools lost an average of 6 points, while Oakland's gained an average of 16 points. Meanwhile, half of Compton's high schools lost points on the API score—including Compton High, where now fewer than 6 percent of males are proficient in reading, and fewer than 1 percent in algebra. Conversely, Oakland high schools gained, on average, 30 points. Even Oakland's economically disadvantaged and limited-English students have shown major improvements. In 2006, its economically disadvantaged students gained 60 percent more on the performance index than Compton's, and its English-language learners gained 120 percent more.

Note that it's not that students can take the money and run to the nearest private school. Public funds stay within the public system, so this isn't a classic voucher system. Maybe that's why it works as well as it does.

There's much more--the whole thing is worth reading--but the description of the changes is compelling. I'm provisionally skeptical, only because such short-term results sometimes confuse statistical noise for useful data, but the article points out that San Francisco has used the modified voucher system for six years now, with positive results.

In the broader context, though, opponents will see the last paragraph as only more fuel for conspiracy charges that NCLB is all about gutting public education:

Nationwide, close to 10,000 schools are considered to be failing under the No Child Left Behind Act, hundreds for more than five years. Yet less than 1 percent of students in these schools manage to transfer to a higher-performing school, even though they have that right under the federal law. Political leaders can change this by building on Oakland and San Francisco's modest experiment in school choice. No student deserves anything less.

Ironically, what Snell and Dalmia miss is that NCLB is acutely centralizing--i.e., Frenchifying--education.

more math? more time?

Today's word: more. (In education, isn't that every day's word?)

More math is on the table for the Olympia School District.

School Board President Rich Nafziger has proposed changing the math-credit requirement for Olympia students starting with those who are in fifth grade and head to middle school this fall. He said he wants Olympia to require high school students to take either algebra II or applied mathematics. The latter is a course that uses a hands-on approach to teach algebra II concepts.

Adding algebra II or applied mathematics wouldn't automatically mean students would have to take a third year of math. But because students often take algebra I as freshmen and geometry as sophomores, the algebra II requirement would make a third year inevitable for many, Olympia educators have said.

Meanwhile, nationwide, schools are thinking about expanding the school day and the calendar.

While Massachusetts is leading in putting in place the longer-day model, lawmakers in Minnesota, New Mexico, New York and Washington, D.C., also have debated whether to lengthen the school day or year.

In addition, individual districts such as Miami-Dade in Florida are experimenting with added hours in some schools.

On average, U.S. students go to school 6.5 hours a day, 180 days a year, fewer than in many other industrialized countries, according to a report by the Education Sector, a Washington-based think tank.

One model traditional that public schools are looking to is the Knowledge is Power Program, which oversees public charter schools nationwide.

Those schools typically serve low-income middle-school students, and their test scores show success. Students generally go from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. during the week and for a few hours every other Saturday. They also go to school for several weeks in the summer.

That amounts to at least 50 percent more instructional time for students in such programs than in traditional public schools, according to the report.

The extended-day schedule costs on average about $1,200 extra per student, program spokesman Stephen Mancini said.

The best part of the plan: it allows the rebirth of electives, which many districts are squashing because of pressure to boost test scores in core areas.

Read both articles, and consider: do we need more math? More time? More?

Update: The Science Goddess says:

I will be interested to see if this idea catches on. It would require a significant amount of community support and state dollars to make it fly; but as we continue to assign greater value in educating the whole child (not just the parts that can read, do math, and think scientifically), perhaps taxpayers may be interested in pursuing this option.

The "we" in "we continue to assign..." being teachers and parents and students. Policymakers, wanna jump on board?

teachers vs. NCLB: the Educator Roundtable

Who might best understand the ways No Child Left Behind fails to truly reform education? Could it be... teachers?

We, the educators, parents, and concerned citizens whose names appear below, reject the misnamed No Child Left Behind Act and call for legislators to vote against its reauthorization. We do so not because we resist accountability, but because the law's simplistic approach to education reform wastes student potential, undermines public education, and threatens the future of our democracy.

Below, briefly stated, are some of the reasons we consider the law too destructive to salvage. In its place we call for formal, state-level dialogues led by working educators rather than by politicians, ideology-bound "think tank" members, or leaders of business and industry who have little or no direct experience in the field of education.

The nascent organization has assembled sixteen major arguments against NCLB. Click through to examine them all, along with the evidence cited. I'll report back when I've studied their stance a little more closely.

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