The goal set by Congress of 100 percent proficiency by 2014 is an aspiration; it is akin to a declaration of belief. Yes, we do believe that all children can learn and should learn. But as a goal, it is utterly out of reach. No one truly expects that all students will be proficient by the year 2014, although NCLB’s most fervent supporters often claimed that it was feasible.10 Such a goal has never been reached by any state or nation. In their book about NCLB, Finn and Hess acknowledge that no educator believes this goal is attainable; they write, “Only politicians promise such things.” The law, they say, is comparable to Congress declaring “that every last molecule of water or air pollution would vanish by 2014, or that all American cities would be crime-free by that date.”11 I would add that there is an important difference. If pollution does not utterly vanish, or if all cities are not crime-free, no public official will be punished. No state or municipal environmental protection agencies will be shuttered, no police officers will be reprimanded or fired, no police department will be handed over to private managers. But if all students are not on track to be proficient by 2014, then schools will be closed, teachers will be fired, principals will lose their jobs, and some—perhaps many—public schools will be privatized. All because they were not able to achieve the impossible.
The consequence of mandating an unattainable goal, Finn and Hess say, is to undermine states that have been doing a reasonably good job of improving their schools and to produce “a compliance-driven regimen that recreates the very pathologies it was intended to solve.”12 It makes little sense to impose remedies that have never been effective and to assume that they will produce better than reasonably good results.
But the most dangerous potential effect of the 2014 goal is that it is a timetable for the demolition of public education in the United States. The goal of 100 percent proficiency placed thousands of public schools at risk of being privatized, turned into charters, or closed. And indeed, scores of schools in New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other districts were closed because they were unable to meet the unreasonable demands of NCLB. Superintendents in those districts boasted of how many schools they had closed, as if it were a badge of honor rather than an admission of defeat.
As 2014 draws nearer, growing numbers of schools across the nation are approaching an abyss. Because NCLB requires states to promise that they will reach an impossible goal, the states have adopted timetables agreeing to do what they can’t do, no matter how hard teachers and principals try. Most have stretched out the timetable—putting off the biggest gains for the future—to stave off their inevitable failure. The school officials who wrote the timetables in the early years of implementation must have hoped or expected that they would be retired and gone long before 2014 arrived. With every passing year that brought the target date closer, more and more public schools failed to make AYP and were labeled as “failing.” Even though some states lowered the cut scores (or passing marks) on their tests to make it easier for schools to meet their target, many still failed to make AYP toward 100 percent proficiency for every subgroup. And in states that maintained high standards and did not lower the cut scores, even more schools fell behind.
In the school year 2006-2007, 25,000 schools did not make AYP. In 2007-2008, the number grew to nearly 30,000, or 35.6 percent of all public schools. That number included more than half the public schools in Massachusetts, whose students scored highest in the nation on the rigorous tests of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.13 As the clock ticks toward 2014, ever larger numbers of public schools will be forced to close or become charter schools, relinquish control to state authorities, become privately managed, or undergo some other major restructuring.
To date, there is no substantial body of evidence that demonstrates that low-performing schools can be turned around by any of the remedies prescribed in the law. Converting a “failing” school to a charter school or handing it over to private management offers no certainty that the school will be transformed into a successful school. Numerous districts have hired “turnaround specialists,” but most of their efforts have been unavailing. In 2008, the federal government’s education research division issued a report with four recommendations for “turning around chronically low-performing schools,” but the report acknowledged that every one of its recommendations had “low” evidence to support it.14 It seems that the only guaranteed strategy is to change the student population, replacing low-performing students with higher-performing students. Sometimes this happens with bells and whistles, as the old “failing” school is closed and then reopened with a new name, a new theme, and new students. But such a strategy is meaningless because it evades the original school’s responsibility to its students. Rather than “leaving no child behind,” this strategy plays a shell game with low-performing students, moving them out and dispersing them, pretending they don’t exist.
Studies conducted by the Center on Education Policy (CEP) in Washington, D.C., concluded that “restructuring,” the final sanction of the law, was ineffective. In the spring of 2008, according to one CEP study, California contained more than 1,000 schools that were restructuring. The study found that “federal restructuring strategies have very rarely helped schools improve student achievement enough to make AYP or exit restructuring.” No matter which strategy the state or school district applied, the “failing” schools were seldom able to improve their status.15
In 2007-2008, according to another CEP study, more than 3,500 public schools across the nation were in the planning or implementation stage of restructuring, an increase of more than 50 percent over the previous year. In the five states covered by the study, very few schools chose to convert to a charter school or private management. Somewhere between 86 percent and 96 percent chose the ambiguous “any-other” (i.e., “do something”) clause in the law, so as not to abandon their status as a regular public school. Even though few schools chose the most drastic penalties, “none of the five federal restructuring options were associated with a greater likelihood of a school making AYP overall or in reading or math alone. In other words, there is no statistical reason to suspect that any one of the federal restructuring options is more effective than another in helping schools make AYP” (italics added). None of the few successful schools was able to identify a single strategy that was essential to improving its achievement. And even the schools that had improved enough to exit restructuring worried about failing yet again to make adequate yearly progress, as the date grew nearer in which they would be expected to meet the impossible goal of 100 percent proficiency.16
California gambled that the provisions of the law would be eased over time, so state officials agreed that its schools would increase the proportion of students expected to meet standards by 2.2 percent each year from 2002 to 2007. After 2007, they projected an impossible increase of 11 percentage points per year to reach full proficiency by 2014. Twenty-two other states followed a similar pattern, choosing a low rate of anticipated academic score gains in the early years of implementation, then predicting a sharp annual growth rate between 2008 and 2014.17 With the sudden and steep raising of the bar, more and more schools began to fail. In 2008, a team of researchers funded by the National Science Foundation predicted that by 2014, nearly 100 percent of California’s elementary schools would fail to make adequate yearly progress. Richard Cardullo, a biologist from the University of California at Riverside, observed, “To use an analogy from the housing world, the balloon payment is about to hit.” Because of disaggregation of the scores by subgroups, Cardullo said, “the lowest-performing subgroup will ultimately determine the proficiency of a school, district, or state.”18
Most states devised ways to pretend to meet the impossible goal. Since the law granted each state the power to establish its own standards, choose its own tests, and define proficiency as it wished, most states reported heartening progress almost every year. Mississippi claimed that 89 percent of its fourth graders were at or above proficiency in reading, but
according to NAEP, only 18 percent were. Only a handful of states maintained high standards that were comparable to the federal tests: Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, South Carolina, and Wyoming. G. Gage Kingsbury of the Northwest Evaluation Association told the New York Times that states that set their proficiency standards prior to passage of NCLB tended to set high standards, thinking “that we needed to be competitive with nations like Hong Kong and Singapore. But our research shows that since NCLB took effect, states have set lower standards.”19
Some policymakers complained that it wasn’t fair to compare state test scores to NAEP, since the former “counts,” and the latter does not. Presumably students try harder on the tests that count than on those that don’t. Only states and a few urban districts get NAEP scores; no school or student ever learns how they did on NAEP, which is considered a “low-stakes” or “no-stakes” exam. To shed light on this problem, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute commissioned the Northwest Evaluation Association to compare state test scores based on a computerized assessment used by twenty-six states. The resulting study, The Proficiency Illusion, found that the definition of proficiency “varies wildly from state to state, with ‘passing scores’ ranging from the 6th percentile to the 77th.”20 A student in Colorado might pass the state tests with ease, but if the family moved to New Mexico or Massachusetts, the same student might be in academic difficulty.
Among the states with the lowest expectations for proficiency, according to this study, were Colorado, Wisconsin, Michigan, New Jersey, Delaware, North Dakota, Illinois, and Ohio. In the foreword to the study, Chester E. Finn Jr. and Michael J. Petrilli concluded that “the testing enterprise is unbelievably slipshod. It’s not just that results vary, but that they vary almost randomly, erratically, from place to place and grade to grade and year to year in ways that have little or nothing to do with true differences in pupil achievement. . . . The testing infrastructure on which so many school reform efforts rest, and in which so much confidence has been vested, is unreliable—at best.”21
And yet, despite the “slipshod” nature of the tests, despite the random variability among them, despite the fact that they diverge dramatically in quality, the lives of students, teachers, and principals —and the fate of schools—are to be based on them.
One of the unintended consequences of NCLB was the shrinkage of time available to teach anything other than reading and math. Other subjects, including history, science, the arts, geography, even recess, were curtailed in many schools. Reading and mathematics were the only subjects that counted in calculating a school’s adequate yearly progress, and even in these subjects, instruction gave way to intensive test preparation. Test scores became an obsession. Many school districts invested heavily in test-preparation materials and activities. Test-taking skills and strategies took precedence over knowledge. Teachers used the tests from previous years to prepare their students, and many of the questions appeared in precisely the same format every year; sometimes the exact same questions reappeared on the state tests. In urban schools, where there are many low-performing students, drill and practice became a significant part of the daily routine.
In New York City, teachers told a journalist that they eliminated social studies, art, and science for a month before the state reading and mathematics tests to concentrate on test-prep activities. One teacher said her students don’t know who the president was during the Civil War, “but they can tell you how to eliminate answers on a multiple-choice test. And as long as our test scores are up, everyone will be happy.” Her principal directed her to “forget about everything except test prep.” Another teacher said that the principals are partially evaluated on test scores, so “naturally they want the scores up, [and] that’s our priority. Actual education is second.”22
In Texas, which was the model for No Child Left Behind, students became better and better at answering multiple-choice questions on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, known as TAKS; the passing rates on the ninth-, tenth-, and eleventh-grade tests steadily increased. But when eleventh-grade students were asked to write a short answer about a text they were given to read, half of them were stumped. Whether in low-performing districts or high-achieving ones, students were unable to write a thoughtful response to a question that asked them to present evidence from what they read. They had mastered the art of filling in the bubbles on multiple-choice tests, but they could not express themselves, particularly when a question required them to think about and explain what they had just read.23
The Center on Education Policy conducted studies of “curriculum narrowing.” In 2007, CEP surveyed a nationally representative group of school districts and found that 62 percent had increased the time devoted to reading and mathematics in elementary schools, while 44 percent reported that they had reduced the amount of time spent on science, social studies, and the arts.24 There are just so many hours and minutes in the school day, and if more time is devoted to testing and test preparation, then less time will be available to teach subjects that will not be on the state tests. Yet lack of attention to history, science, and the arts detracts from the quality of education, the quality of children’s lives, the quality of daily life in school, and even performance on the tests. Ironically, test prep is not always the best preparation for taking tests. Children expand their vocabulary and improve their reading skills when they learn history, science, and literature, just as they may sharpen their mathematics skills while learning science and geography. And the arts may motivate students to love learning.
Linda Perlstein’s Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade describes the year she spent in an elementary school in Annapolis, Maryland, where the children were lower-income, African American, and Hispanic. The school and its staff were obsessed with the state test scores. The children were carefully taught how to answer questions that were likely to appear on the state test. But they knew little or nothing about their nation, state, or city. They knew nothing about history, geography, or current affairs. They guessed at math questions. Their general knowledge about science was appallingly low. Their teachers worked conscientiously to get the children ready for the state tests; consequently, they did well on the state tests, which consumed everyone’s energy all year, but they lacked the vocabulary and general knowledge to succeed in high school. In Perlstein’s narrative, earnest, hardworking teachers and a dedicated principal did their best to meet the requirements of state and federal law. They succeeded, but the children were being trained, not educated.25
Did NCLB work? It could never “work,” in that its goal of 100 percent proficiency by 2014 was out of reach, unless states deliberately dumbed down the meaning of proficiency. This goal has negative consequences for thousands of schools, whose teachers are struggling valiantly each day to do what no nation has ever done before. Furthermore, its simpleminded and singular focus on test scores distorts and degrades the meaning and practice of education.
As it happened, NCLB did not even bring about rapidly improving test scores. To the contrary, test score gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress—the only national yardstick for this period—were modest or nonexistent in the four years after the adoption of the law. In fourth-grade reading, NAEP scores went up by 3 points from 2003 to 2007, less than the 5-point gain from 2000 to 2003, before NCLB took effect. In eighth-grade reading, there were no gains at all from 1998 to 2007. In mathematics, the 5-point gain by fourth-grade students from 2003 to 2007 did not match their 9-point gain from 2000 to 2003. In eighth-grade mathematics, the story was the same: The gain from 2000 to 2003 (5 points) was larger than the gain from 2003 to 2007 (3 points).26 Scores were higher after the implementation of NCLB, but the rate of improvement slowed. Even if one insists on starting the clock on the day the law was signed in January 2002, well before the nation’s schools understood what the law required, the gains have been modest at best.
Similarly, the achievement gaps between black and white students narrowed more before the imp
lementation of NCLB than in the years afterward. Black fourth-grade students had a 13-point gain in mathematics from 2000 to 2003, but only a 6-point gain from 2003 to 2007; white fourth-grade students had a 10-point gain from 2000 to 2003, but only a 5-point gain from 2003 to 2007. In fourth-grade reading, black student scores were up by 8 points from 2000 to 2003 but increased only 6 points from 2003 to 2007. White scores in the same grade were up by 4 points from 2000 to 2003 and by 3 points from 2003 to 2007. In eighth-grade reading, white and black scores were virtually unchanged over the past decade.27
For the lowest-performing students, those who scored in the bottom 10th percentile, the gains registered after NCLB took effect were smaller than in preceding years. In fourth-grade reading, the bottom 10th percentile saw a gain of 6 points from 1998 to 2003; these students gained 5 points from 2003 to 2007. Low-performing students in eighth grade saw no improvement in their reading scores: From 1998 to 2003, their scores went up by 1 point, and from 2003 to 2007, they were unchanged. In mathematics, the scores of low-performing students in fourth grade soared by 13 points from 2000 to 2003; they went up by 5 points from 2003 to 2007. In eighth-grade mathematics, the story was similar: Scores rose by 7 points from 2000 to 2003, and by 5 points from 2003 to 2007.28
The Death and Life of the Great American School System Page 14
