So Minnesota is one of the states that just got waived from having to comply with the no child left behind law.
My son happens to be halfway through kindergarten at a MN public school. It’s a pretty good school in a Minneapolis burb that has a very, very diverse mix of students. White, black, first generation african, Hmong, latino, etc. The principal even stated that there is something like over 20 different languages spoken here.
So will this waiving of NCLB help my kid going forward over the next 6 years? What kind of benefits/negatives would I notice first hand?
For instance does it really free up the schools to help the more advanced kids advance? Free them up from teaching to the test?
I work in statewide assessment, although I do not work on the assessment for your state. (I work on Florida’s assessment.) I’m not exactly sure I can answer your questions, but this is what I think is the result of these waivers. Please keep in mind that I am in no position whatsoever to interpret legislation (or waiver of legislation), nor do I have a very thorough understanding about assessment programs above a certain pay grade. (GEICO translation: I’m just a grunt/drone/worker bee.)
My understanding for Florida was that FL had such a good statewide assessment program, there was no need to impose more requirements or guidelines on the state. Essentially, Florida’s assessment program was already meeting the standards and requirements for NCLB and actually exceeded them in some areas. Therefore, it was stupid to continue to force states to report certain things to the Feds when these states that received waivers were already doing far more than just tracking AYP. I know in Florida, when a school gets a low grade (or doesn’t show much improvement from last year’s scores to this year’s scores), then more state resources are directed toward that school in an effort to help that school do better. There was no need for NCLB to step in and force Florida to direct resources to lower-scoring schools because this state was already doing so. I think it is possible that this might free up the schools to help the advanced kids advance, such as offering IB or AP programs if they don’t already.
According to a press release that came through my email inbox the other day, the Florida Commissioner of Education explains this a little better than I just did:
Because the main HQ for my company is located in your state, (and I don’t know this for sure), I’m going to guess that my company also has your state as a client and therefore, your state is already meeting or exceeding NCLB requirements; therefore, there is no need to hold their feet to the fire.
In other words, whatever statewide assessment and accountability programs your state is doing, is already sufficient given the federal standard. So I am expecting to see no change whatsoever to Florida’s assessment and you probably won’t see much change in yours either.
Now, a little aside in regard to “teaching to the test.” That’s not necessarily the bad thing that media pundits and politicians make it out to be. I’ve posted this many, many times, but still, states do a terrible job of educating parents exactly what this assessment and accountability thing is all about. And then the results of the assessments get politicized and teachers get paid based on student results in some places and, to make a long explanation short, that’s simply the wrong tool (student assessment results) for the job (rewarding teachers).
That said, in Florida, and probably in MN as well (if MN’s tests are developed by the same company, which is contracted by your state), the tests are designed to assess student achievement of the state-adopted benchmarks, or standards. IOW, someone, probably a lot of someones, sat down around a big conference table and made some decisions about what students at each grade level and in each content area should be able to know and do.
For example, Florida’s standards say that third graders should be able to read a small passage and answer questions about the author’s purpose. Or they should be able to add, subtract, multiply and divide two-digit numbers. Or a 10th grader should be able to write a 5-paragraph essay to persuade, to tell a story, or to explain, and that student understands the concepts of focus, organization, support, and conventions in his or her writing process.
Okay? So none of the standards (in my state, I can’t speak for the other 49) seem unreasonable to me. These are things that I want students to learn. I want that high school graduate to have sufficient math skills that they can make change for me at Taco Bell when the computer goes down. The statewide assessment questions are designed to determine how well a student achieved a given benchmark. In my first example, a grade-level-appropriate reading passage is presented and then 4 or 5 questions follow it. The students are allowed to go back to the reading passage as many times as they wish – and the answers are all always found within the passage. If they weren’t, you’d be testing the student’s ability to make shit up in their heads, right? No, we’re assessing the student’s ability to understand and possibly apply something he or she had just finished reading. This is a skill you *want *kids to have, isn’t it?
So the tests are written and developed based on each state’s adopted standards or benchmarks*. If teachers have a thorough understanding of the benchmarks, and they teach material that allows kids to achieve that benchmark, then they are by definition teaching to the test. It’s not like the standards require third-graders to rewire an electric lamp so they spend all day every day tearing apart all the lamps. The standards suggest practical real-world skills that students should have. Teach the standards and the kid should have NO problem whatsoever getting a good score on the test.
The problem with teaching to the test is if teachers don’t understand the benchmarks, so they spend all their time teaching test-taking strategies. That does your kid a huge disservice because the kid isn’t learning the material that the test is based on, and in fact, isn’t really learning anything useful at all. Also, filling in the bubbles is about to become a completely useless, archaic skill, much like using a slide rule. States are beginning to implement computer-based tests now, which only require a kid to click on the correct bubble. I think most modern kids will be completely cool with this.
And there is currently a movement underway to standardize assessment standards nationally, so all states will be assessing the same standards at the same grade levels and in the same content areas. This is known as the “Common Core” standards and there are currently two different consortia, comprised of assessment professionals and educators from all different states to come up with a set of common core standards. Whether states, once common core is adopted, only incorporate those standards into their existing state-specific standards or whether they completely throw out their state standards and only assess common core remains to be seen. The first Common Core assessment is supposed to be ready to administer by 2014, but how well that stays on schedule also remains to be seen.
I have two kids coming out of a diverse minnesota elementary school that was failing. They are both middle schoolers now.
My own kids, and kids in the same social economic and racial grouping, did fine. My daughter did great. Non white kids with one parent whose income was at, below, or just above poverty line, those kids were failing.
The school did a lot of work to avoid having all the teachers fired. The district spends tons of money busing kids between schools to move the population around per the nclb requirement. There was a lot of teaching to the test. It’s hard to retain teachers.
I sent the principal a congratulatory note yesterday.
At the same time, here’s a teacher’s slightly different perspective:
Yes, I want students to be able to read a passage and determine authorial purpose. However, multiple-choice can make that difficult. Yesterday my students read a sample nonfiction test passage about a pet kangaroo who saved his owner’s life. A test question asked what the author’s main purpose for writing the passage was. A student I was working with one-on-one answered, “To tell about an animal who was a hero.” That was an excellent answer, but wasn’t one of the choices: the correct choice was, “To inform the reader about an unusual pet.” My student’s answer was, in my opinion, superior to the one given, so instead of teaching him skills about understanding the author’s purpose, I had to spend time teaching him how to recognize an inferior answer in a multiple-choice setting. That’s the sort of inescapable teaching-to-the-test that must occur when multiple-choice is used for inferential questions.
In another fiction passage, some characters were waiting for an event (I’m being very vague here to avoid any possible infringement issues). A question asked for the word that best described the characters. Heck, I’m paranoid, so I’m going to change the words some. The possible answers were:
a) Angry
b) Impatient
c) Worried
d) Happy
In the story, the word “impatience” was used three times to describe how they waited. But the test considered “angry” to be the correct answer, because of how they were talking to one another. In this case, I was personally unable to distinguish between these two answers to find the one that best described the characters. How can I explain this difference effectively to third graders?
More importantly, why should I? This is not a real-world problem. If, in the real world, you can describe the characters as angry and impatient, who cares which one is slightly better? You’re best off using both adjectives in virtually every case–except the case of answering a multiple-choice question. (For what it’s worth, I showed them the strategy of finding the language that actually appears in the passage in order to determine the correct answer. I just happened to be wrong in this case, according to the test.)
That said, NCLB signifies in its name its concern. It’s not concerned with having every child perform to the best of their capabilities. A student who is performing at a level III (on grade level) is fine, and if they barely coast along, that’s great. A kid at a level IV (above grade level)? You can lock them in a closet all year for all NCLB cares, as long as they’re at a level III at the end of the year. All resources are highly pressured to go toward the levels I and II kids.
I don’t think that’s ethical, fair, or strategically sound policy for a nation.
and as a parent of two above grade level kids, it’s frightening. Here are the parents of bright kids trying to squeeze in AP work and calculus by high school graduation who are being told by teachers and administrators not to worry in third grade because their child is performing at grade level. And from the teachers and administrators point of view, these kids “aren’t counting”. They aren’t worried about them because they have a short term goal of having the third graders pass the test, not my goal of having my kids graduate with AP English and an SAT score good enough for a “selective” school. Grade level is great, but it isn’t sufficient or challenging enough for college bound kids in math and sciences.
Left Hand of Dorkness, you are stomping on my job! It is my job, as an editor, to read these items and make sure they make sense, don’t show bias, are grammatically correct, and that the answer choices all offer plausible options.
That said, you bring up very real concerns. I don’t know what state you’re in (and that would tell me which company develops your test and what the standards are), but it’s possible that… if your state is using Dr. Norman Webb’s theory of cognitive complexity, that particular item (that you were wrong about, and I would have chosen the wrong answer as well, which is why *teachers * in my state also review these items for concerns like yours) was designed to be a higher cognitive complexity level than the simple, straightforward “look in the text and find the answer.” Higher cognitive complexity items require the students to do some thinking on their own and perhaps even draw conclusions that are not text-based.
And I agree with you that some of these standards are difficult, if not impossible, to assess using multiple-choice items. Florida discontinued its use of performance task items, which required students to write short- and longer-essay answers to questions, or show their math calculations, or take several steps to complete. And then they might have to draw some conclusions based on that work in order to get the correct answer. Performance task items are a much better way to assess certain skills, however, scoring those items is problematic because the answers are often subjective. Our content staff – the teachers I work with – used to endure these marathon meetings where they’d look at the ranges of answers possible on performance task items and decide what range comprised “correct” answers. Despite applying rubrics, among other scoring strategies, it’s very difficult to get three different scorers to agree on what the score for a given item should be. It’s also expensive because the state has to pay an army of people to hand-score items, and we’re talking millions of items, each scored by at least two different people. It’s much easier, faster, and cheaper to use scannable bubble answer sheets, have them machine-scored, and then the psychometricians can massage the data as necessary.
Consider that one of Florida’s biology benchmarks requires students to come up with a hypothesis, set up an experiment, conduct the experiment, and then draw conclusions based on the data. There is no way in hell to assess that with a MC item. So Florida just doesn’t assess that benchmark. The curriculum requires teachers to teach all the benchmarks, but teachers who know “this isn’t tested” won’t bother spending a bunch of time on material they know students won’t see on the test. Which, I’m sure you’d agree, totally shortchanges the students who might otherwise get some really valuable lab experience. There are benchmarks in Florida for PE, but we don’t have a PE assessment. So are FL PE teachers actually teaching those standards? No way to know.
The assessment and accountability systems in our country are flawed. I am not here to defend them. I just try to explain what I can explain to help combat misinformation. I don’t disagree that a one-size-fits-all approach is necessarily the most ethical, fair, or strategically sound policy for a nation. I’d like to see a system modeled after the Dutch school system where there are different tracks students can take depending on how they are inclined, college prep vs. vocational, and so forth. I would really like to see this country looking to other progressive 1st world nations and taking some pages from those books, but alas… probably ain’t gonna happen. 'Cause Amerika is teh best! :: rabble rabble rabble rabble rabble ::
I agree with you there, too. I didn’t go to school in this state, but where I went, there were no AP classes and no IB program offered. If you were college-bound, good luck. Figure out how to get enrichment your own damn self.
Puts me in mind of Harrison Bergeron.
But I will say this. In Florida, the 10th grade assessments in Reading and Math are high school graduation requirements. None of the other assessments are required (except 3rd grade reading and math, but only required for promotion to 4th grade). An AP or IB student can totally waive taking this state’s assessment by simply taking the SAT or the ACT. In fact, my state lists on its website a bunch of alternative standard tests that will be accepted in lieu of the state’s standardized test. That doesn’t help the AP/IB kids while they are in school and not being challenged very much. My only point was there are several different paths to graduation/success at the high school level (in this state) and only one of them involves Florida’s statewide assessment. Also, private schools are not required to administer this test either. Charter schools are required because they are technically public schools. There is more than one way to skin this cat, but it’s seriously up to parents to figure out how they’re going to do it. The state, and probably your local district, isn’t going to be about much other than toeing the NCLB line.
Dogzilla’s explanation of student assessment testing is excellent; however, this
indicates a poor understanding of what the waivers – and the NCLB controversy – are all about.
NCLB was not, and is not, about testing. The waivers are not about testing, either. NCLB was about intervening in schools that do not make progress toward 100% student proficiency as measured by a test. The waivers are also about intervening in schools that do not make progress toward 100% student proficiency as measured by a test. The waivers allow states that have a plan to implement that plan instead of the NCLB plan. The tests do not change, because each state developed its own standards and tests in the first place.
The difference is in the interventions. NCLB interventions are punitive and inflexible, and the waivers allow states to come up with their own interventions as long as they comply with certain standards. They’ll still be punitive and inflexible, but hopefully not as bad as NCLB.
For instance, my kids school almost failed NCLB. That would have meant that all teachers and all administrators would have been “reassigned” to other schools and the entire teaching staff would have turned over. Now, because of union contracts, many of the teachers would have merely been moved around from school to school, but new teachers would have been fired and replaced with other new teachers.
In the years coming up to this, students were given the opportunity to move to non-failing schools, but Minnesota already HAS open enrollment, and the non-failing schools didn’t have room for all the students from failing schools. So in reality, the district was moving kids from neighborhood schools and busing the kids 20 miles from one end of the district to the other to scramble up the district.
Now, my kids elementary school is held up as a success story - they didn’t fail and got taken off probation and are now a “successful” school by NCLB standards. But the cost was huge. Class sizes were up to 38 in order to hire specialist. Some kids were spending 5 hours a day in math classes with specialist. Science, Art and Social Studies took a back burner to making sure Math and English scores were good. Kids at the top still got pulled for high potential coursework, not nearly as much as they had when my kids started, but kids in the middle really got shunted aside. Teachers were at school at six am, tutoring kids before school started, and seldom left until six pm because they were tutoring kids. Which shows a lot of dedication from teachers, but twelve hour days at school, plus the grading that happens in the evening, on a teachers salary is not a fair situation for teachers - good teachers were quitting because they didn’t have time with their families.
No, we’re assessing the student’s ability to understand and possibly apply something he or she had just finished reading. This is a skill you *want *kids to have, isn’t it?
It is my job, as an editor, to read these items and make sure they make sense, don’t show bias, are grammatically correct, and that the answer choices all offer plausible options.