Get Congress Out of the Classroom: "No Child Left Behind" is "fundamentally flawed"

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT op-ed: Get Congress Out of the Classroom
By DIANE RAVITCH
Published: October 3, 2007

DESPITE the rosy claims of the Bush administration, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 is fundamentally flawed. The latest national tests, released last week, show that academic gains since 2003 have been modest, less even than those posted in the years before the law was put in place. In eighth-grade reading, there have been no gains at all since 1998.

The main goal of the law — that all children in the United States will be proficient in reading and mathematics by 2014 — is simply unattainable. The primary strategy — to test all children in those subjects in grades three through eight every year — has unleashed an unhealthy obsession with standardized testing that has reduced the time available for teaching other important subjects. Furthermore, the law completely fractures the traditional limits on federal interference in the operation of local schools.

Unfortunately, the Congressional leaders in both parties seem determined to renew the law, probably after next year’s presidential election, with only minor changes. But No Child Left Behind should be radically overhauled, not just tweaked....

***

...under current law, state education departments have an incentive to show that schools and students are making steady progress, even if they are not. So the results of state tests, which are administered every year, are almost everywhere better than the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the benchmark federal test that is administered every other year....Under current law, Congress now decides precisely which sanctions and penalties are needed to reform schools, which is way beyond its competence. The leaders of the House and Senate Education Committees are fine men, but they do not know how to fix the nation’s schools.

The obvious solution is to reverse roles. Washington should supply unbiased information about student academic performance to states and local districts. It should then be the responsibility of states and local districts to improve performance....

(Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University, was the assistant secretary of education for research from 1991 to 1993.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/03/opinion/03ravitch.html

[The_Casual_Observer]

1. Was there ever any doubt that it was totally bogus?

Fundamentally, if jr supports it,it's bad news no matter what it it is. Since when did taking/ preparing for a standardized test teach you anything?

[Igel]

2. Way back in the Middle Ages they instituted a standardized test

in my county school system. Spring '75 or spring '76. Maybe it was statewide, I don't know. I just remember the teacher coming in, pissed, saying that for the next 2 (3?) weeks we had to prep for a new standardized test. She was the English teacher, I forget if it was 9th or 10th grades.

She said that she didn't think it would be a problem, the practice test was simple enough. My school tracked students, we were 'high tracked'. She handed out a practice test, said if we did well enough we would simply continue with our usual curriculum.

The practice test was ludicrously simple. It was a practical reading test looking at the kinds of basic tasks you need reading for. Recipes, instructions for OTC drugs, maps, completing basic forms.

We flunked. The test format was the same we'd had for years. A majority of students in my class couldn't make the 50% mark on answering questions about how much salt goes into a soup in a given recipe, how to get from point A to point B on a map, or how many teaspoons of cough syrup to take. So that's all we did in class until the test came around. Turns out that at no point was anything quite like that covered in school, and for some reason the kids never actually had to do most of those things at home--or if they did, they had so much help that they didn't learn how to do it. Odd to think of a bunch of working class kids like that, but so it went.

Half-way through the prepping, we had a second practice test. We did better. And we felt like idiots looking at maps of Baltimore and Baltimore County and following directions (or producing them for others to follow).

We scored reasonably high on the standardized test--at about average, which was bad for the county but good for my school. The actual test was no harder and no easier than the practice test. Oddly, most of the lower tracked classes did no worse (the bottom tracked did poorly), but that's to be expected, I think.

In other words, in preparing for a standardized test those of us who had no practice reading a map, extracting useful info from recipes or OTC medicine labels, etc., etc., developed the skills that presumably would keep them from ruining the meatloaf. Two weeks better spent than dealing with Steinbeck's "The Pearl", IMHO.

My point: Given a task-based curriculum in which competence levels are clearly and explicitly defined, and in which a written test is appropriate, a standardized test is no worse than any other grading system for students that don't suffer from some special disadvantage--testing anxiety, dyslexia, etc.

This doesn't mean I agree with Kennedy and * about NCLB. I do think that the goal is unattainable, even if you put an additional $50 billion into public education in the next 3 years. But I think some standardized tests and the work for prepping for them are perfectly fine in some cases.