NCLB: A False Promise

When Congress passed the No Child Left Behind law ten years ago it was just another example of  a "Mission Accomplished" moment. That is; proclaiming that our government could create educational success for all children by edict just as they thought the U.S. could win a quick, clean victory in Afghanistan and Iraq. Neither goal has been accomplished because they were based on false assumptions and unrealistic expectations.

Education Secretary Duncan is now scrambling around trying to get Congress to revise the NCLB so that it will not continue to punish schools that are addressing the needs of our most at-risk students. More and more schools are failing to meet "Adequate Yearly Progress" as the states are required to accelerate school performance toward the elusive goal of proficiency for all by 2014. Such schools are then required to undergo radical restructuring in order to maintain their federal funds. Duncan testified recently before Congress that up to 82% of all public schools could fail to meet "Adequate Yearly Progress" this year and would begin to be punished by federal guidelines. It is not clear how Duncan plans to reverse this collision course with insanely unscientific and unrealistic standards, because he has not yet admitted that Congress was wrong.

The same is true at our State Department of Education here in Louisiana. The first Superintendent of the Louisiana Recovery District has left the state just in time to avoid taking the blame for numerous unacceptable schools in the RSD. The new Superintendent is continuing to resort to using distorted data to continue to claim success for the RSD. See the recent analysis by Charles Hatfield  of Research on Reforms which shows that such claims are bogus.

BESE has chosen to abdicate its duty to be an independent governing body over education and instead has adopted policies dictated by Superintendent Pastorek to perpetuate the control of RSD over an increasing number of schools. BESE policy now allows charter schools that perform at an acceptable level to remain independent of their original school board as long as they choose to do so. For RSD schools that continue to perform below acceptable levels, the result is basically the same. School boards are now told they will have to apply to BESE to recapture schools that were taken from them but which continue to be classified as "failing".

When the Recovery District was created it was explained to the public that the purpose was to improve struggling schools and return them to the local school systems. Charter schools were supposed to be opportunities to try new approaches to improving schools and then sharing best practices with regular public schools. The RSD and the charter schools were not supposed to be the enemies of local school systems.

Accountability in Louisiana has come down to mindless requirements that force schools to focus most of their energies toward teaching the (LEAP) test. In the social sciences, there is an oft-repeated aphorism called Campbell’s Law, named after Donald Campbell, the psychologist who pioneered the study of human creativity: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” In short, incentives corrupt. Daniel Koretz, the Harvard education professor recognized as the country’s leading expert on academic testing, writes in his book Measuring Up that Campbell’s Law is especially applicable to education; there is a preponderance of evidence showing that high-stakes tests lead to a narrowed curriculum, score inflation, and even outright cheating among those tasked with scoring exams.

Diane Ravitch points out in her recent column the following:
The National Research Council of the National Academies of Science just released a major report about the value of test-based accountability and incentives. It appeared right before the Memorial Day weekend. It says that the train is on the wrong track.

The report contains two major conclusions: First, "Test-based incentive programs, as designed and implemented in the programs that have been carefully studied, have not increased student achievement enough to bring the United States close to the levels of the highest-achieving countries. When evaluated using relevant low-stakes tests, which are less likely to be inflated by the incentives themselves, the overall effects on achievement tend to be small and are effectively zero for a number of programs."


Referring to No Child Left Behind, now in effect for nine years, the committee held that there were some school-level effects, "but the measured effects to date tend to be concentrated in elementary grade mathematics, and the effects are small compared to the improvements the nation hopes to achieve."

The second major conclusion of the report is that high school exit examinations, as currently implemented in the United States, "decrease the rate of high school graduation without increasing achievement."

Why do I say that No Child Left Behind is a false promise? Because as the Louisiana Education system moves to more privatization, more vouchers, letter grading of schools, and Value Added Models of teacher evaluation, the most at-risk students will have less of a chance than ever at closing the gap. The following are happening now:

Charter schools are becoming increasingly exclusive of problem students as is demonstrated by a recent report by Dr Barbara Ferguson of Research on Reforms. Such "undesirable" students are dumped into direct run or regular public schools. Private schools will soon learn to be selective of the best and most motivated students for voucher awards. The most experienced and effective teachers will be pushed out of the most challenging schools by the stigma caused by the new letter grade rating of schools and the VAM evaluation.

The most at risk students will increasingly be left behind in so called failing schools. This is the opposite of what No Child Left Behind was supposed to accomplish.

Coalition Member's letter to Senate Finance

Special Update (June 17): House Bill 1, the state budget bill is now going to the full Senate and then back to the full House for final votes. The Coalition for Louisiana Public Education is requesting that all educators contact their Senators and then their Representatives and ask that the special appropriations for: (1) 8.5 million dollars for building insurance for the Recovery District in New Orleans be deleted and instead be used to help all public school systems and (2) that the 11 million dollars for voucher programs in New Orleans be removed and instead be used to help fund all public school systems. These special appropriations cannot be justified. They are a blatant move to grant extra support to favored schools at the expense of regular public schools that have suffered from 3 years of funding freezes as mandated costs have increased tremendously.

The following is a reprint of a letter to the Senate Finance Committee by Brett Bonnin, school board member for the Orleans Parish School Board. Mr Bonnin is expressing the position of the Coalition for Louisiana Public Education. Readers of this blog are urged to communicate similar concerns to their Senators.

To Senate Finance,

NO MONEY FOR K12, BUT EXTRA $18.6 MILLION FOR FAILED PRIVATE VOUCHERS AND INSURANCE EARMARKS?

While everyone proclaims K12 education to be a priority, the State has frozen what is supposed to be an automatic 2.75% MFP increase for K12 education for THREE YEARS IN A ROW saying there is no money. However, when it comes to funding private education vouchers and extra money for the Recovery school district, some believe that the State has an extra $18.6 million dollars to give away this year alone. These policies hurt public DIRECT RUN and CHARTER schools!

In the last three years of frozen MFP, probably close to $50 million dollars has gone to to vouchers and EXTRA insurance proceeds to just one school district, the New Orleans Recovery School District. The Orleans Parish School Board has lots of destroyed and land banked properties from Katrina, but the State is not giving it any extra money to help with their insurance costs. Instead, the MFP has been frozen for three years and they have had to lay off employees like many other districts across the State. Our public direct run and charters are hurting and it keeps getting worse with more and more unfunded mandates - State has shifted private school busing, national board certified teacher stipends, and increases in retirement costs to districts.

If funding is so tight that the all the school districts in the State must suffer three years of frozen MFP increases, then we should not be dolling out money for vouchers which even Leslie Jacobs says are not working - see her article below which you can find at http://educatenow.net/2010/06/25/school-voucher-program-rsd-schools-outperform-voucher-program/

Please tune in - Many Coalition leaders should be on WWL Channel 4 in New Orleans tonight at 5pm raising further concern!

Brett A. Bonin's (Member of Coalition for Louisiana Public Education)
Vice President
LOUISIANA SCHOOL BOARD ASSOCIATION

School Letter Grade Suspension Defeated

The Senate Education Committee deferred action Thursday on SB 201 by Senator Perry that would have suspended the BESE approved school grading policy for two years. This action effectively kills the bill. The bill would also have required BESE to form a task force to come up with a new grading policy which proponents hoped would be fairer than the BESE policy scheduled to go into effeict this fall.

The Governor's office, BESE member Chas Roemer and business interests said that the public needed to get the "truth" about their public schools. Supposedly this letter grading system will tell parents the truth about the education opportunities their children are getting in a particular school. The two Senators supporting the measure, Senator Dorsey of Baton Rouge, and Senator Perry from Kaplan, pointed out that the new letter grade system may not correctly inform parents about the quality of the teachers, and may only reflect the disadvantages or level of poverty of the students.

The author of this blog and representatives of LAE, LFT, School Boards Association and school administrators supplied the Committee with data and charts showing that the level of poverty at a school was the overwhelmingly dominant factor in determining school performance scores.  Several speakers for the bill pointed out that the new grading scale would drive effective and experienced teachers away from the most challenging schools. Also the new grading system will make it difficult to attract positive parental involvement in a school assigned a "D" or "F" grade by this over simplified system.

Proponents of the new grading system suggested that when a school gets a low grade, parents may finally demand improved education for their children. Many public school advocates believe this grading system will not produce the positive changes educators are seeking, such as students who attend school every day prepared to learn. Instead it will add fuel to the drive for more privatization and vouchers.

Correction: An earlier post on this blog incorrectly stated that the BESE policy would add a minus to the school grade for a school that did not succeed in meeting the state mandated SPS growth for a particular year. The policy states that the minus would only be assigned if the school had a decline in SPS from the previous year.