I am told that this is an un- or underfunded mandate that is placing a huge burden on the states and I don’t know that it has improved the education of children. However, I don’t have enough facts to form a good opinion about it. I just hear everyone I know connected to education excoriate it. Does it do any good?
Rob
It requires scientifically grounded education methods, rather than “we’ve always done it this way!” It also led to vastly increased transparency in school quality.
Promoting kids to a higher grade when they do the work from the lower grade is never a good idea. Education should be based on performance. When the kids learn the material, they get promoted. When they don’t learn it, they don’t. Period.
NCLB is a huge, massively complicated piece of legislation. It has many provisions affecting all areas of public education, too many to discuss here. I’ll focus on the biggest one.
NCLB required all the states to create their own system of standardized testing. Every child is required to be tested every year. (There were exceptions for the youngest children, mentally challenged children, etc…) The results of these tests were required to be publically available, and there were required to be consequences for schools that repeatedly had low test scores. In theory, if a school’s scores were too low, parents whose kids attended that school had to be offered an option to move their children out, whether through vouchers to a private school, transwer to a different public school, or something else.
In practice, things have turned out differently. The legislation was written with so much wiggle room that many schools and districts have found ways around the requirements. As of last year, almost half of all public schools in the country were officially “failing”, yet few parents had actually been given the option to move their children to better schools. Meanwhile, there’s quite a bit of evidence that the state-level tests that are used are not accurate measures of how students are doing, and of course the system has lead to an obsessive focus on test scores. Academic areas and extracurriculars that don’t contribute to test scores are getting the shaft.
As for “vastly increased transparency in school quality”, it is true that schools must publish their test scores. One could argue that’s better than nothing, and nothing is precisely what was available to many parents before NCLB. However, as I explained in this blog post, it’s still hard to get real, useful information about the quality of public schools.
I am not sure how transparent or opaque schools were in the old days. What were they like versus today? Also what teaching methods have fallen by the wayside due to NCLB? I hear a lot of complaining that teachers are simply teaching to the test. I have never been able to ascertain whether the test is a good metric of whether or not the child is learning anything. I know that in Texas, we are using a new test this year.
Rob
My questions seem to have been Ninja’ed somewhat by ITR Champion, but feel free to elaborate.
What ITR said: before NCLB, the only way you’d know if a school was any good (or bad) was word of mouth. Median SAT/ACT scores were better than nothing, but those tests are designed to assess aptitude, not knowledge. In other words, average SAT scores tell you whether a school has good pupils rather than good teachers.
Whether current standardized testing is really all that useful is a subject of some debate.
It’s certainly worked a resurgence of testing company profits…
Back before alzheimers made my mom go crackers we had a discussion about it. She opined that the old classical one room school house which effectively had no real solidly drawn class lines were optimal for something like this. Small class size, fairly personal attention and the ‘slow kids’ didn’t get passed along to the next teacher up the totem pole. If someone couldn’t pass well enough to get pegged into the next class, the teacher would work more closely with them the next year as they stayed in the same class until they know the subject, or the parents took the kid out of school and put them to work somehow. Her baby brother GA [George] had what would probably best be described now as dyslexia is a perfect example of this - he had issues with reading comprehension. He could do math as good as anybody else, he just couldn’t read. He kept lagging behind with the same reader for several years until he would manage to work through it. Mom remembered that when he was 16 he was still in the reading class with kids 5 or so years younger than he was. [He left school at 16 as that was the latest the law kept kids in school. His inability to read at much higher levels war hit while he was rumspringa and he ended up in the Army as a hospital corpsman [orderly, he schlepped people to and from surgery and rehab stuff.]
Granted this was seriously small town early depression era Iowa and it wouldn’t really be a functional school profile today other than perhaps in some of the real hard core tiny farming type communities - it would be more like home schooling than not.
Even before passage of the No Child Left Behind act, I’ve long been of the opinion that you never leave a child behind. It was one of the first things we learned in the child marines.
Child Marines? I learned it from the movie Raising Arizona.
DISCLAIMER: I work for one of the major test publishing companies. I work on the Florida assessment, but my company (which is located in San Antonio & Austin) also handles the Texas assessment.
If you want to know if the Texas assessment is a good metric, then go to the Texas Department of Education website and look for the Texas-adopted standards. The tests that my company develops are based on each state’s individual standards.
Florida standards are here.
The test is designed to assess how well students achieved mastery of those standards. It is NOT an IQ test, it doesn’t assess knowledge or critical thinking skills. What it assesses is how well the student knows the skill in that standard.
Example: Let’s say there’s a standard that suggests third graders should be able to add and subtract two- and three-digit numbers. There will be a few items on the test that require the student to add or subtract two- or three-digit numbers. Psychometric data are collected, post-administration, and statistics are calculated so that states can be able to say, “In our state 98% of all third graders were able to correctly add or subtract two- and three-digit numbers.” Now if a teacher is teaching third graders how to add and subtract two-digit numbers JUST so they can pass the test, then I don’t really have any problem with “teaching to the test.” It depends on what you mean by that phrase. Teaching to the test isn’t necessarily a bad thing unless it means excluding any useful and necessary content because it isn’t tested. Right now most states are not assessing science, social studies or civics (Florida is… for now.) – NCLB only requires reporting for math and reading. However, there are standards for foreign languages and PE (in Florida; I can’t speak about other states)… but there is no assessment for those particular standards, so your kid still may not be getting gym class. I would agree with anyone who says that isn’t doing students any favors.
In my state, failing schools get additional funds from the state to beef up their programs, hire new teachers, build more classrooms, whatever it is they need to do. In other states, failing school grades = vouchers, charter schools, and closing up shop to bus kids to other, better schools.
The thing is, the state-by-state testing thing is going away. There are two different consortia, comprised of many states working together, that are trying to develop one set of national standards and come up with a test that assess student performance with respect to academic standards that any kid anywhere in the country should be able to achieve. (Like, third graders should be able to add and subtract two-digit numbers. Fifth graders should be able to write a 5-paragraph essay. Et cetera.) This is called the “Common Core” standards.
Because Common Core assessments are being developed, this is why some states have gotten a waiver from reporting annual yearly progress to the feds to satisfy NCLB. I believe the idea is that some states are implementing widescale assessments in more effective ways than other states are, so it would be in the country’s best interests if kids didn’t get screwed academically by, say, starting out their education in Massachusetts (very good schools in New England) and then dad takes a job transfer and they move to Mississippi (not so good). We should have the same academic expectations for students regardless of where they live and what kind of tax base the schools have to operate from.
I have my doubts about how well this can be pulled off because of the last part of my last sentence. Every state has a wildly different budget and access to resources (teachers, facilities, funding, etc.) so I’m not quite sure how Common Core is supposed to be the magic bullet. And, on a personal note, yes this means Florida’s state assessment is going away and my company will not have a new contract and yes, I am looking for a new gig, if anyone needs an editor.
You can check out the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) web site for reports about how assessment in general has tracked academic progress nationally. That’s the organization that collects data from state to state and reports improvements in reading and math. That’s probably the best answer to the OP’s question. I haven’t read the report myself (I worked on one, editing, a few years ago) so I have no idea if gains are being made or what. It kind of doesn’t matter because Common Core should be making NCLB sort of pointlessly redundant, if it works the way it’s intended to.
ETA: I didn’t disagree with a thing that ITR Champion posted. I am not trying to defend testing; I just want people to have an accurate understanding of what statewide testing really does or doesn’t do. It does not assess aptitude, intelligence, or ability to learn. All the statewide tests do at this point in time is assess how well a student achieved a given standard. (Low achieving might be a student adds or subtracts 2-digit numbers correctly 30% of the time, and high achieving students can add or subtract 2-digit numbers correctly 90% of the time. That is a very different statement from saying your kid isn’t smart, or can’t add, or whatever.)
I would think investing at least as much time into educating the parents of these kids on how to support their child through school would have more effect than judging the teachers. The resposibility for a childs education should rest on the parents assuming they have good access to education.
Which is a most excellent point that no test anywhere can assess.
Dogzilla – how do you come up with the reading stuff? At least in Arizona, the reading portion was completely asinine. They would do stuff that I consider “short answer questions” by multiple choice. They would ask questions like “what is the tone of this passage?” which is not something that, IMO, can be reduced to a preset answer. I always wished I could write in an argument in defense of my choice of tone, or how which of the choice you pick depends on your interpretation of some of the words or phrases, or how depending on your frame of reference going into the passage you may interpret it as A or C. (I don’t want to give the impression that I did terribly on my tests, I did perfectly well, it just bugged me).
The math portion was… okay, but IMO a bit too reliant on certain bits of memorization. I can’t recall the specifics, but I think log and trig identities were on there. Those are useful, but I’ve had at least 3-4 professors and grad students in math heavy fields tell me straight up that they just look those up if they need them, so having them on the standard seems silly. For the most part it was okay, they even gave you most of the formulas, but there was some stuff I’m really not convinced should have been on there.
That said, I’m still not sold on the testing thing. The ability to use reference materials and interpret them is probably one of the best skills school can teach you. You’re going to forget a lot of skills and facts you learned in school, and the trick is being able to relearn them, or at least be able to recognize the type of problem and realize the general type of thing you need to look up to solve it. Not to mention some people are just plain bad test takers. Reasons can range from anxiety to just personal quirks. Some people can solve really difficult problems given free time to think about them, but are unable to reliable solve moderate problems under test constraints. Some people can spout off the answers to test questions, but completely lack the ability to apply the skills. Which isn’t to say all good test takers fail at solving hard problems, or that all bad test takers are geniuses, of course, just that I don’t feel it’s really indicative of anything.
I wouldn’t call it useless, per se, but perhaps biased a tad in a way I’m not totally behind.
I have never been clear on the difference between the two. Is it different curricula? Is it higher socioeconomic status of the students?
Rob
Yes and yes. Also, let’s say Mass. spends twice as much per student as Miss. That might be because Mass. requires teachers to have a Master’s degree and therefore, pay higher salaries to teachers. Good teachers go where the good money is, so Mississippi students get hosed. Which is not to say that all teachers in Mississippi are horrible. It’s just that in New England, taxes tend to be higher and more resources go into public education than in some of the southern states.
I was under the impression that master’s degrees did not strongly correlate with student outcomes.
Rob
One thing I notice about my sons’ school is the high level of parental involvement, something which I understand is severely lacking in poorer areas. Is that another factor?
Rob
Yes.
Before the mandate that every teacher was highly qualified, you would have people that didn’t know their subject teaching students. I worked with middle school teachers whose entire higher mathematical background was some business (read accounting) classes in college. In fact, in many states it was possible to get a teaching credential in a secondary subject just by having a college degree. In California you also had the onerous burden of passing the CBEST which was quite literally 8th grade math and language arts. We had people getting credentials that had to take the math section 3,4 even 5 times but once they did they could teach math at middle school once they learned general pedagogy.
I think a good example of this was elementary teacher. They have the impossible job of having to have subject knowledge in every content field and to be honest most simply do not have the math/science knowledge* to teach it. At least now because of NCLB they have to pass a test that shows they have a certain level of knowledge in all four core areas.
Note: I don’t disagree with your opinions, but I’m only going to address the question you asked me in the first paragraph.
Florida’s contract requires my company to hire professional test item writers. These are usually educators or academics in a given field who do not live in Florida. You can pay Florida teachers to write Florida test items = conflict of interest.
So my company hires 20 reading teachers from anywhere but Florida. We fly them in and hand them the state’s standards and a document called Test Item Specifications. For reading, the actual passages may already be written and the item writer only has to make test questions out of it. Sometimes the item writers can write the passage and the questions.
Sounds to me like the item you referred to is what I would call “a crap item.” But let’s assume there is a standard in AZ with regard to tone. Students should be able to figure out tone from context clues or whatever else. I am not a reading teacher, so I’m not sure exactly how you teach kids how to figure out what the tone is, but in this state, we don’t accept questions like that because of the reasons you cite. We might have a tone-based item, but it would be text-based. For example, “How does the Author of ‘The Giving Tree’ convey tone? A. Through imagery. B. Through language. C. Through characters’ actions. D. Through setting.”
If you download a PDF from the page I linked to above, you can get an idea how Florida instructs item writers to develop test items that are text-based and grounded in the standards adopted by the state. I have no idea if your state is one of my company’s clients – we develop assessments for about 35 of the states, so it’s likely. And I have no idea to what degree your state requires rigor in the items.
After the items are developed, they are collected together and Florida convenes teams of actual Florida teachers, who sit in a room reviewing items. If they see one that doesn’t really assess the benchmark intended, they throw it out. If they see bias (racial, gender, religious, political, geographical, etc.) they throw it out. If they see issues relating to senstivity, they throw it out. For example, Florida does not accept test questions that are about hurricanes because that could upset a kid who’s been through one or four, distract her from concentration and she blows her performance on the test. All items in Florida go through two years of different committees reviewing them before they ever see the light of day. If the item is assessing something that is not ever taught on the ground in real schools, the educators will alert the test developers and that item gets thrown out. All states have different processes for item and test development with varying degrees of rigor, which is why we should all be glad to see Common Core standards being adopted and assessments developed for them. In theory, it should level the playing field for everyone so that Arizona students get test items that are as good or better than Florida’s. (Not saying Florida’s is awesome and perfect, just using our two states as examples.)