Sen. Kennedy On NCLB Reauthorization

The Washington Post carries an op-ed by Ted Kennedy on NCLB reauthorization today. While there is very little that is surprising in what Kennedy says, there is a couple of things worth mentioning. Kennedy (or his staff) writes:

But the law still needs major changes to bring out the best in all children. The process for rating troubled schools fails to reward incremental progress made by schools struggling to catch up. Its one-size-fits-all approach encourages "teaching to the test" and discourages innovation in the classroom. We need to encourage local decision makers to use a broader array of information, beyond test scores, to determine which schools need small adjustments and which need extensive reforms.

Kennedy talks of growth models of measurement and I think this is an innovation that should be embraced. Perfection by 2014 is no doubt impossible (but other than pushing the date back there is little than Congress can do politically. A 95% proficiency goal simply will not be tolerated). But so long as schools are making reasonable progress I think people will be accepting. However, it is the definition of reasonable that is important.

Now the whole concept of teaching to the test simply drives me nuts. On the one hand, what gets tested is what gets taught. Time is the one commodity in schools that cannot be negotiated with and when there is not enough time, there are sacrifices that are made. Initially math and reading were all that was tested, now science is being added to the mix and I would hope that soon we would be adding history/social studies as well. That would be once change that could and should be done in NCLB.

Now if teaching to the test is a problem for instructional purposes, the focus on only one or two measurements is a broader failure of NCLB. In essence, while Kennedy notes that local leaders need to be using a broader array of measurements, so long as Title I funding and other punitive measures are focused on only one or two measurements, i.e. Adequate Yearly Progress and attendence, then those are the only measures that will count. If Kennedy wants more measurements to be used, he needs to include them in the law, otherwise his rhetoric is for naught.

Kennedy also writes:

Most of all, the law fails to supply the essential resources that schools desperately need to improve their performance. We can't achieve progress for all students on the cheap. No child should have to attend crumbling schools or learn from an outdated textbook, regardless of where he or she lives. It's disgraceful that President Bush has failed to include adequate funding for school reform in his education budgets. Struggling schools can do only so much on a tin-cup budget.

This kind of statment simply chafes me to no end, because after four decades in Congress, Ted Kennedy should know better. Congress controls the budget and spending process (See Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution), not the President. Each year, the President has to ask for money to operate the government, but it is Congress and Congress alone that controls the purse strings. If funding NCLB has been too stingy, then Congress has the ability to make that change. The fact that the Democratic Congress has failed to do so is a pox on both their houses and more rampantly upon the Democrats.

But by the same token, Ted Kennedy should also know from his years of experience that federal dollars account for only about ten percent of school funding, the rest comes from state and local sources. Given that the housing crunch is going to mean fewer dollars next year for schools (and just about every other state budget category), schools will have to meet the mandates with fewer "essential resources"--to be read only as money.

Of course all of this presumes the the federal government can really make any sort of change in school success. Sure, the law has been successful in getting schools to really measure their success by a wider variety of subgroups--exposing quantitatively the achievement gap. But in reality that is about the best the feds can do. We have a local system of education in this country and absent a constitutional amendment, it is likely to stay that way.

If Congress really wants to make a change, they should consider a radical departure from the current model. But such a radical change means two things, imagination and political courage--two traits that have been sorely lacking on Capitol Hill for pretty much ever. That means change will have to come from teh bottom up because imagination and courage are much more prevelant at the local level than at the national level.

Not Every Education Problem Begins and Ends at NCLB

Over the weekend, Naomi Wolf has an op-ed in the Washington Post talking about how the young people of America seem aloof or indifferent about politics these days.

When I speak on college campuses, I find that students are either baffled by democracy's workings or that they don't see any point in engaging in the democratic process. Sometimes both.

Not long ago, I gave a talk at a major university in the Midwest. "They're going to raze our meadows and put in a shopping mall!" a young woman in the audience wailed. "And there's nothing we can do!" she said, to the nods of young and old alike.

I stared at her in amazement and asked how old she was. When she said 26, I suggested that she run for city council. Then she stared at me-- with complete incomprehension. It took me a long time to convince her and her peers in the audience that what I'd suggested was possible, even if she didn't have money, a major media outlet of her own or a political "machine" behind her.

That young people are not involved in politics is not all that new or surprising. The one group of people with the greatest untapped potential for political activism is and always has been voters age 18-25, which historically have the lowest turnout of any age cohort.

Wolf points out, not incorrectly, that many American high school students are no longer required to take a course in American government or civics and that such a dearth of civic instruction is damaging our young people's perception of politics. But it was this statement that bothered me most:

In recent years, the trend away from teaching democracy to young Americans has been at least partly a consequence of the trend of teaching to the standardized tests introduced by the Bush administration. Mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the tests assess chiefly math and reading comprehension. Basic civics and history have suffered.

I would like to point out to Ms. Wolf that the Bush Administration did not invent standardized tests and while they may be used differently, standardized tests are not necessarily an evil to be dispised at the mere mention of the term. Attacking NCLB as the strawman for all that is wrong with current American curricula ignores the reality that, just as the hapless college student had the power to change her political circumstances, we have the power through local activism to change the curricula in our schools.

I will admit that NCLB may have accelerated the trend away from teaching civics and American government, but it is not the cause of the decreased number of civically illiterate in America. Wolf was speaking to a 26-year-old person and on a college campus. These are students who came of age before NCLB, and so that crutch, that NCLB has undermined civic education, is not available to them or their educators.

The root cause of the lack of civic education in America's students lies in changes in curricula and what was and is deemed important. Curricula change, ebbing and flowing, with what is deemed important by our communities. Certainly, math skills and reading comprehension are important and should be stressed. But one of the things we are starting to learn is that there are many subjects that are important to the development of a liberally (in the classic sense) educated child. It takes math, reading, and science skills, but a well-educated child must also have an exposure to the arts, history, literature, and yes, government and civics, to have that well-rounded, well-prepared status of citizenship before exiting high school. Curricula have evolved away from history, the arts and literature, and civics in favor of an emphasis on reading, math and science. This is not, in itself, a bad thing since the decisions have been made politically. While the consequences of the decisions at all levels of the government may not have been fully considered, they are political decisions.

NCLB did not cause the curricular change, but the emphasis on math and reading has caused America to realize what gets lost when basic skills are not learned in elementary school. Schools have two scare resources to contend with--time and talent. There are only so many hours in a school day and so many schools days in the calendar. While adding hours or days may expand the opportunity to teach reading, math, science and all the other necessary subjects, in the end, there are political and policy decisions to be made. There are only so many teachers available and those teachers have specialitis that may not lend themselves to the teaching of civics or government (although that may be a problem to consider as well).

In Maryland, at least, students must take an exam in Government in order to graduate. Students must take a class before they take an exam. Maryland has made the policy decision that goverment is an important subject to learn and enforced that decision. If civic education is important (and I whole-heartedly agree that it is), then we must treat it as such and make the decision to include it in the curriculum.

We can't blame a law (a political document) for our failings and it is ironic to say the least, that Wolf doesn't understand the politics of education so much as she misunderstands the education of politics.

California Teachers Oppose Draft NCLB Reauthorization

The California Teachers Association, the largest state teacher's union in America is undertaking a rare campaign opposing senior Members of Congress for their state, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Rep. George Miller (D-CA), chair of the House Education & Workforce Committee.

The CTA opposes the current draft of the reauthorization due to the inclusion of various items they claim will violate collective bargaining rights. According to NCLB: Act II:, the CTA is attempting to rally the netroots to oppose the reauthorization by taking a premium ad out on DailyKos.

Despite the fact that the the original NCLB is tied closely to liberal icons Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Miller, the law, at least in the minds of the netroots, is President Bush's bill. Getting them riled up about the law is not hard--mention George W. Bush and they begin salivating like Pavlov's pooches.

But the question to ask is what does the CTA get out of taking Pelosi and Miller and opposing the bill? What can Pelosi and Miller get out of the CTA's opposition? Finally, what will other state teachers' unions say?

More Schools Added to "Needs Improvement" List

As NCLB's performance mandates age, school systems are beginning to bump up agaist the ceiling of making improvements in the "low hanging fruit." The Baltimore Sun carried a story on more schools being added to the watch list because they are not making the annually increasing adequate yearly progress for all their students.

The number of Maryland elementary and middle schools on the state's list of poor performers grew slightly last year -- in part, officials said, because the standards are getting tougher every year.

Statewide, 176 schools are on the list -- including more than 60 in Baltimore City and, for the first time, two in Howard County. A school gets the "needs improvement" label for failing to meet federal standards two years in a row.

Nine more schools made the list this time, or 16 percent of schools overall. Maryland State School Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick played down the increase, saying it masks the fact that a larger number of children are passing reading and math tests required by federal law.

While just about everyone involved with education knows that 100% proficiency is difficult, if not impossible to achieve, I am problably one of the few who have studied this matter to think that we should not abandon the goal. I do however, think we need to reassess our measurements, including looking at growth models of measurement that can keep a school off the "needs improvement" list.

When NCLB was first promulgated, I predicted that the impact of the law would be shortlived, with its lifespan measured by the length of time that schools could consistently improve the bubble kids. Once these "low-hanging fruit" were brought up to level, the life span of NCLB was limited. In part because the law encouraged the attention on the middle of the road kids, those who needed just a little help while ignoring those kids who were are already proficient and those who were deemed a long shot or worse a lost cause.

One of the problems with the approach that schools took, which should not have been surprising, is that the early years of NCLB offered an opportunity--now it turns out, a lost opportunity--to radically rethink the manner in which we educate our kids. I an not just talking about teaching, althought instructional methods and pedagogy are a big part of it, but also school structures, curriculum design, instructional aids, scheduling and presentations. All of these should have been thrown on the table for researchers and school systems to examine in the wake of NCLB's passage. Now five years later, we have done nothing substantive.

With no real educational innovations even being contemplated on a wider scale, it is no wonder that schools and states are going to see the number of schools ending up on the needs improvement list increase--particularly in those "high quality" suburban districts that educators crow about. We simply have not made enough changes to make a difference in those kids who need the most help.

Cynics will say, "well that was Bush's intention--to create a long list of failing schools so that he can privatize the schools." But that clearly could not have been the intent of Rep. George Miller (D-CA) or Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA), who while being supporters of NCLB are also supporters of traditional publich schooling. Rather the failure is of government, and indeed society, look beyond the here and now. Instead of simply decrying the draconian measures of NCLB, why weren't our leading educational thinkers trying new things, new methods and new ideas? Why weren't our teacher education institutions trying to find new pedagogies?

The answer, no doubt is complicated, but it will all boil down, in the end, to laziness and lack of imagination. We have spent the past five plus years since the passage of NCLB arguing about the efficacy or fairness or unfairness of the law instead of taking the window of opportunity we had and trying to reform the education system in our country. Aside from a relatively few innovations in school management, our education system is not all that different than it was 100 years ago. In a country where this year's computer released in April is obsolete by Christmas--the lack of educational innovation is troubling.

Big Business Weighs in on NCLB Reauthorization

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has weigned in on the NCLB Reauthorization and they are not happy about the concept of multiple measures. But they seem to be o.k. with growth models for accountability purposes.

With Congress scheduled to resume work next month, Rothkopf voiced anxiety about the calendar—not the legislative timetable but the 2009[sic] 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.

The Chamber is right, unless Congress can get the reauthorization done before the end of this Congressional session, i.e. the end of the year, it is pretty much unlikely to get done beyond a quick and dirty reauthorization.

I predicted this as well a while back. The politics of the matter are so divisive that it really is unlikely that anything substantive will be done. When Congress returns, there will be a rush to complete the appropriations bills, the whole Iraq report from Gen. Petraeus and associated inquiries, and oh yeah, the investigations that this Congress seems much more adept at performing than actual legislation.

NCLB Mythbusting

I love the Discovery Channel show Mythbusters, it is funny, filled with interesting experiments and some pretty outrageous myths. D-ed Reckoning's Ken DeRosa should be accorded the title of Education Mythbuster. Ken has another take down of yet another NCLB myth, that schools that are actually achieving are still be labeled as failing schools. Ken looks at this article on the NCLB reauthorization from the San Diego Union Tribune, and after some preliminaries, gets down to brass tacks:

Then we get the only evidence cited to support the premise:

Many public school administrators, board members and teachers say the federal system, unlike the state accountability system in California, fails to recognize school progress over time. No Child Left Behind, they say, unfairly labels many schools as failures – no matter how much they are improving from year to year, or how close they are to meeting federal benchmarks.

NCLB does in fact recognize progress. NCLB contains a Safe Harbor provision that permits a school that is, in fact, failing to avoid the "failing label" if it reduces its percentage of students not meeting standards by 10% of the previous year's percentage.

I fail to see how this is unfair. If you are not meeting your state's pass rate and aren't improving sufficiently to fall within the safe harbor, you are failing regardless if you miss that mark by 30% or 0.01%. This isn't horseshoes or hand grenades. Near misses don't count.

So to sum up: NCLB does, in fact, recognize "school progress over time."

One thing that Ken leaves out is that NCLB allows the states to define what is passing and what is not. There is no single national passing standard, there are 51, some of which are almost laughable in their lack of stringency. Fifth grade reading skill is not defined in the same way from state to state, which might mean that fifth grade reading in one state might equate to third grade reading in a more stringent state--which might itself define fifth grade reading the same as the federal governemnt does.

Education Measurements

Kevin Carey talks about the NCLB reauthorization, and the proposal by Rep. George Miller (D-CA), chairman of the House Education & Workforce Committee and principal guide for the bill, to include multiple measures as part of the accountability package.

As this gets discussed in the coming weeks, months, and possibly years, it's important to understand what's at stake. Nearly all the back-and-forth will be about what gets measured. But equally important--perhaps more important--is who does the measuring.

The multiple measures idea stems from one the most common--and correct--criticisms of NCLB: schools are rated almost exclusively based on state assessments in reading and math. This system can be inaccurate and reductive--not only are we limited to one way of measurement, via standardized tests, but we're also limited in what's measured. Subjects like art, music, social studies, etc. are left out, along with the non-academic skills and character traits that schools are charged with teaching students. By expanding school measures beyond once-a-year tests, the thinking goes, we can get a broader, more nuanced, more accurate sense of what schools are really doing for their students.

A worthy goal, to be sure. But here's the problem: in many multiple measure scenarios, it's the schools themselves that will be doing the measuring. And that undermines one of the great virtues of NCLB: the separation of those being held accountable from the process by which they're judged. That independence is based on a rock-solid understanding of human nature: people can't be wholly accountable to themselves.

Carey is completely right, you cannot allow the persons being held accountable to do the measuring. The measurements must be as "third" party as possible. But even now, we are not at a true independent assessment, no matter what model of assessment you choose.

I talked about multiple test format accoutability schemes and the benefits that can be garnered by relying on more than one test as a measurement of education success. But even in my scheme, the idea is that the testing must be done by an outside group. The fact is that even now we don't have a true third party evaluation. The states generally choose the test and administer the test while still having a pretty massive stake in the outcome (states with better schools attract more business and therefore more residents and consequently more tax dollars).

If the who of assessment is so important to objective testing, why are we still allowing the states, let alone the local school systems or even the schools themelves, to do the assessments? If as Carey points out, independent evaluators like outside auditors or tennis judges are important to maintain independence, then the states are not independent enough of an arbiter when it comes to education.

"Bubble Kids" Get Attention

While it is nice to have a hard data study to back up my notion, the effects of NCLB were not hard to predict. The linked study (thanks to David Hoff for the pointer), released by the American Enterprise Institute, focused on the Chicago Public Schools and found that under NCLB, kids in the middle had the greatest improvement under the testing regime. Gifted students and lower peforming students had mixed results or no significant change, respectively, in their test scores.

Not to rain on the author's parade, but duh!!!

The accountability structure of NCLB, with its focus on ever increasing rates of proficiency, meant that schools were not going to focus on the hard case, but on the kids where just a little intervention could make a difference. Essentially, the schools went after the low-hanging fruit-a logical and quite likely forseeable effect.

The problem was that while schools were focused on the low hanging fruit, they were not really looking for ways to go after and help the students who needed more help. Under NCLB, if you consider the intial focus on the "low hangers," the schools had between 2 and four years to really develop a plan to attack those parts of their student body who needed more help. Predictably that didn't happen and we are now stuck with the consequences.

While there are many people who love to point out NCLB's failures, the big failure of the sweeping law was not incentivizing states and localities to begin to really focus on the low achieving students. While the data reporting provisions helped shed real and bright light on the achievement gap, those same provisions are now showing that schools don't have a plan for those kids who aren't the low hanging fruit.

One of the changes to NCLB that should be included in the reauthorization is a provision requiring school districts and states to submit detailed, scientifically supported plans for raising the achievement of their lowest performing students. Failure to provide such a plan would result in loss of Title I funds, loss of other federal support and ultimately, states should threaten accredidation for the schools.

A Case for NCLB Reauthorization

Ronald Brownstein makes a case for the reauthorization of NCLB, with some changes.

There's no doubt the law has minted enemies. But Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a nonpartisan group that advocates for low-income children, has it right when she says the law wasn't designed "to make people happy." It was passed because too many students in too many places were not learning enough. It wouldn't be doing its job if it left in place the practices that produced those unacceptable results. Grumbling, in education as in everything else, is the inevitable price of change.

I have long felt that the true legacy of NCLB is that we as a nation have finally exposed to the harsh light of reality just how states could claim "educational excellence" with a straight face while poor and minority students were falling further and further behind.

No one can rationally argue that NCLB is perfect, but the fact that we as a nation talk about it sooooo much means that we are at least willing to accept the fact that the mere fact of talking about achievement gaps and quality teachers and choices in education means we are on the road to making changes. Education, still one of the most important issues in America, is the last best hope this Congress has of making any sort of postive move.

Bad Polling Leads to Bad Policy

Bad polling leads to bad public policy, and this story is a prime example of how a poorly worded question can lead to massively skewed results.

Opposition is especially high among people most familiar with the law, according to a survey of 1,010 adults conducted by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University.

Controversy about the law has grown in recent months as Congress begins the debate on whether to reauthorize the measure that President Bush has touted is one of the most important achievements of his administration.

But dissent against reauthorization has developed within his own party. Fifty-two Republican House members and five GOP senators are calling for a repeal of the law in favor of a more flexible system of achievement standards to be negotiated between the Department of Education and individual states.

Participants in the poll were told that No Child Left Behind "requires states to test elementary students to determine if schools do a good job teaching. Critics say the law forces teachers to teach to a particular test. From everything you've heard, do you think the No Child Left Behind Act has been good for public schools or not good?"

Only about a third said they think the law has had a positive influence on public education while slightly less than half said it has had a negative impact and a fifth were undecided. (emphasis added)

Note the phrase "teach to the test," which is a buzz phrase that has been bandied about by opponents of NCLB since its inception. Of course, if you say teachers are teaching to the test, people are going to object to the concept.

NCLB has many features that would test far differently if asked. For example, if you asked people about whether having a "highly qualified teacher" in every classroom is a good thing, you would probably get close to 90 or 95 percent saying yes that is a good thing. Or if you asked whether schools should report scores for all groups, not just school wide, you get positive response. Finally, if you asked whether people believe their should be options for parents and students in failing schools to go somewhere else, you get different results.

The question prompt is so toally loaded as to be laugable. A far better question would be to lop of the first couple of sentences and simply ask: "From everything you've heard, do you think the No Child Left Behind Act has been good for public schools or not good?" But such a question does not satisfy the policy aims of the group contracting for the poll and we don't know who that is, all we know is that the poll was conducted by Scripps Howard and Ohio University, but not who commissioned the poll.

NCLB Extension/Renewal A Tough Road for President

As the Baltimore Sun reports, getting NCLB renewed will be a difficult test for the much beleagured President. While the act, which used to be called the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, will be renewed in some format, that question will be what will the renewal contain.

"If I do say so modestly, it is the jewel in the crown of his domestic achievements," said Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who was a White House policy adviser when the law was enacted. "Obviously, he is very committed."

Spellings plotted legislative strategy last week with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Rep. George Miller of California, the Democrats who chair Congress' education committees, and senior Republican lawmakers.

"If you care about resources, this is the time to act. If you care about competitiveness, and high schools, like Bill Gates does and our governors do, this is the time to act," Spellings said in an interview. "I'm very concerned that if we don't act this year, having this sort of thing in play in the middle of a presidential campaign becomes much more difficult."

Spellings is correct, that trying to renew NCLB in a Presidential year will be difficult, but what will be more difficult what will be contained in the bill. Democrats are demanding more money for public schools and while the numbers will certainly be big on teh federal level, at best the federal govenrment will only be able to kick in about 10 percent of school spending (up from the current 8 percent). So that leaves the question of what else will be in the bill.

One thing that may be in jeopardy is the reliance on high stakes testing. But testing in and of itself is not a bad thing. The problem is that testing as it stands now does not match up with what is expected to be taught or if it is, the test cannot completely test what should be taught without the test being monumentally long. Here too is the issue of federal mandates, local curricula and state tests and definitions meeting a cacophony of demands that no one can decipher or implement.

One thing that must not and cannot be removed from the law is the disaggregation of scores. The one good thing that just about everyone can agree on is that NCLB shed a much brighter light on test scores for various demographic groups, preventing schools and school districts from hiding poor performance by some groups behind the excellent performance of a smaller percentage of students. I have not heard any serious proposal that would remove that requirement, but proponents of NCLB must never cave on that item.

History Lost

Ms. Cornelius has a wonderful post about the declining importance of history education in our schools. First she posts some paragraphs of this David McCullough profile in the Salt Lake Tribune:

Those who believe America is facing its darkest and most dangerous time since Sept. 11 are only showing their lack of knowledge of history, according to acclaimed historical writer David McCullough.

"There was no simpler time," he told a sold-out audience at Layton High School as part of Davis County's Davis Reads program. "It's a form of our present-day hubris."

McCullough, who has won two Pulitzer prizes and has written books about the Revolutionary War and influential presidents such as John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman, encouraged people to instill in their children and grandchildren a sense of history.

"History is the exploration of character," he said. "We're not doing a good job of teaching history to our children and grandchildren for the past 25 years, and we've got to do something about it."

While teachers are the "most important people in our society," he said families can not let the teaching burden fall solely on them.

"The problem is us. We have to take part," he said.

He worries that a lack of historical knowledge will result in poor leaders for the future, as the great leaders of the past steeped themselves in history.

Ms. Cornelius then follows with this:

History education is citizenship education. It is greatly troubling that it is being sacrificed, particularly in this time when we talk about a war on terrorism, for just one instance, but our students can have no idea who the terrorists are or where they came from or why they target western countries such as the United States. What is the record of the United States when it comes to supporting democracy in the Middle East? What does democracy mean? Where did it originate? How role has Iran played in world history, both in the distant and the more recent past? What caues impel the growth of terrorism? What military tactics do terrorists use? How has modern technology made fighting terrorism both more difficult and easier?

Or, closer to home: Who was the Baron de Montesquieu, and what impact did his theories have upon the structure of the US government? What does "checks and balances" mean? What are civil liberties? Why is there tension between liberty and security? What is the title of the head of the Department of Justice? What is executive privilege? What is the history of executive privilege? When was the Department of Veteran's Affairs created? What countries in the world have the most untapped reserves of petroleum?

These are all questions that history education should, indeed MUST to create an informed and involved citizenry which can hold government accountable by demanding that it be "of the people, by the people, and for the people." That promise is meaningless if the people are mired in ignorance.

The problem that Ms. Cornelius and many other passionate educators fret about stems from NCLB, but also from other problems as well.

NCLB's laser like focues on reading and math skills is understandable, mostly since those are the easiest, most objective skills to teach and test. But one thing that Congress and most of the public has forgotten is that these skills are designed to aid a student in learning actual knowledge in other areas, for example, history, or science, or the arts. But testing is not designed to measure those, so predicatbly they don't get taught.

Another reason for the focus on skills rather than knowledge is that people look at history and other concepts from a bias, they are somewhat subjective. Of course, facts are facts, like George Washington was Commander in Chief of the Army prior to becoming president and the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4. But the knowledge and leadership of which McCullough speaks is more related to understanding root causes and progressions of events and trends. These are skills and knowledge that calls for a certain amount of judgment, view point and yes, political bias. And heaven forbid if we have "political bias" in our schools!!

But a larger problems stems from school governance struture. The Federal government mandated certain performance goals (whether they are achievable is beside the point in this case). Under the federal law, states get to choose the mode of testing within certain parameters, so the state chooses the test. But school curricula is still largely a matter of local law. You get this massive disconnect between what is being measured and what is supposed to be taught.

It is not at all surprising that what is being taught is what is being tested. Start testing historical knowledge and you will start seeing history taught. But that is actually the wrong way to go about the matter. We must first decide what should be taught and then, and only then, should we designed a curriculum that will provide that teaching and finally tests that will measure the success of learning. But happened with NCLB was a little backward. We decided on a goal, which is fine, but then short-cutted straight to measurement.

Congress now has an opportunity to fix it, but I suspect too many political deals will be done in order to "pass" a reauthorization without any real improvement. David McCullough will not be happy, neither will Ms. Cornelius and nor will I.

Congress Gets Busy with NCLB

On Tuesday, the Senate and House committees overseeing education held a joing hearing on the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, aka Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Here is a link to the Committee's announcement, which also includes links to the testimony offered by the witnesses and a link to the webcast of the hearing.

On the first reading through the testimony, there is nothing particularly shocking about the political spin. I have not had an opportunity to listen to the entire webcast.

What is interesting is the macro politics of the reauthorization. On the surface, both Sen. Kennedy and Rep. Miller can't easily back away from NCLB because they were sponsors of the law when it was first enacted. But at the same time, they are likely more than a little concerned about being tied to President Bush's premier domestic policy win of his first term. That leaves the two liberal lawmakers in a jam as they look to make their mark on the bill in a way unavailable to them in 2001.

As the Washington Post is reporting, many in the President's own party are now opposing many of the provisions of NCLB, reflecting in part a desire to distance themselves from the President politically and a disdain for a Washington centered education bureaucracy. A new bill being put forward by Rep. Peter Hoekstra is seen as an alternative, although it is unlikely to get a hearing or a vote in the House. Hoekstra's bill would essentially gut the main carrot/stick structure of NCLB, allowing the states two methods of opting out of the NCLB regime and still receive federal funds. The states could opt to exempt all education programs, save special ed, from NCLB testing and reporting mandates, making the law nothing more than a "pretty please, states, do this" kind of law with no consequences.

Already, a healthy debate is springing up about the efficacy of a 100% proficiency rate, but other issues that may be in the offering would be expanded choice options, grants and other financial incentives for teacher pay, and some changes to the accountability structure now in the law. The teachers' unions are in full court press mode on the matter as are many other interest groups.

To be blunt, I am not sure whether I like the idea behind Hoekstra's offering. I know that federal funding accounts for about 10 percent or less of education funding. But the testing regime, while it may seem a little over bearing, does ensure that students are taught basic skills. Admittedly, perhaps too much emphasis is put on reading and math skills, but we have to start somewhere. But gutting the bill puts the onus back on teh states, which have not proven particularly adept at anything with NCLB, save for gaming the system. Do we really expect change at the state and local level? No enough time has passed to decalcify the education leviathon and gutting too soon will no serve anyone, least of all the students in most need of help.