NCLB: Starting with fractions

No Child Left Behind: Starting with fractions.

    The No Child Left Behind Act is like the final draft of a great novel; the problem is the rough draft and outline were never written or presented in the first place. The lack of appropriate preparation seems to be where the pulse of the throbbing wound is located. With so many issues to cover and so many goals to achieve it is no wonder allot of people including teachers and parents get overwhelmed and frustrated. NCLB certainly isn’t the first act of its kind. Since the 1950s allot of sincere time and effort has been put into school reform. In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson declared “war on poverty” with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Since then, many administrations have taken their shot at refining and building on this initial act. In 1981, the National Commission on Excellence in Education was chartered to,  “review and synthesize the data and scholarly literature on the quality of learning and teaching in the nation’s schools, colleges, and universities, both public and private, with special concern for educational experience of teen-age youth” (U.S. Department of Education, 1983a). In 1994 the Goals 2000: Educate America Act was signed into law on March 31. The Act provides resources to states and communities to ensure that all students reach their full potential. “Goals 2000 establishes a framework in which to identify world-class academic standards, to measure student progress, and to provide the support that students may need to meet the standards.” (web) 

    Starting here in the mid-nineties the majority of our schools began an enormous swing towards standards based education and testing. “During the period from 1994 to 2000, most states had instituted content standards, performance standards, collection of longitudinal data, and use of secure test forms each year. They also recognized the importance of quick test results reporting” (Jorgensen). Signed into law on January 8, 2002 was the No Child Left Behind Act coauthored by Representatives John Boehner (R-OH) and George Miller (D-CA) and Senators Judd Gregg (R-NH) and Edward Kennedy (D-MA), and signed by President George W. Bush. NCLB officially tied funding directly to accountability and expectations. In order to receive funding schools were to ensure that ALL students were learning at grade level as defined by the state. As declared by Rod Paige, U.S. Secretary of Education, the stated focus of NCLB “is to see every child in America-regardless of ethnicity, income, or background-achieve high standards” (U.S. Dept. of Ed., 2003a). To ensure this happens and to punctuate the tie between funds and performance Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP was implemented. Under NCLB, AYP is used to determine if schools are successfully educating their students. NCLB requires states to use a single accountability system for public schools to determine whether all students, as well as individual subgroups of students, are making progress toward meeting state academic content standards. The problem here lies within the term “single”. In regards to AYP, just as learning needs to be more individualized so does learning tracking. Blanket testing causes conflict and so does blanket assessment. No wonder funds are being misappropriated when we’re basing the money that schools receive on one single assessment that’s meant to report on a wide spectrum of students not one single student or student type. In order to make any sense out of these well intentioned plans we need to figure out how to individualize on a larger scale.

    Even in all my research I found it hard to find a comprehensive report that summed up the nation’s progress or standing as a whole which, to me, seems odd considering this one set of standards is meant to spread across an entire nation of students. The reason there is such a lack of information on the big picture is because although we are trying to raise our standards as a country we continue to isolate each state when it comes to running our schools; which leaves a fundamental sense of unity lacking.  “In 2004, 22 percent of all Massachusetts schools (384) had failed to make AYP for two years or more. By 2014, Moscovitch found: 3 out of 4 schools (1,286 out of 1,731 schools for which AYP reports are produced, or 74 percent) will fail to make AYP for two or more years, Of schools failing to make AYP, 8 out of 10 (79 percent) will fall short based on aggregate school scores, not just for subgroups, 59 percent of the schools serving the most affluent students, and 86 percent of those serving the poorest students, will fail to reach the AYP standards”(web, National Education Association) sadly, reports are similar throughout the country. “Many people are unaware that the responsibility for educating Americans is not even mentioned in the constitution. Under the Tenth Amendment, any area not specifically stated in the constitution as a federal responsibility is automatically assigned to the states,” (Sadker, Zittleman).  There are several theories as to the lack of concern on education at the onset of our country; the most substantial being that since the individual colonies had already established disparate educational systems, the framers of the constitution did not want to create dissension by forcing the states to accept a single educational system. They felt that it would infringe on freedom and be reflective of European traditions and while they were probably right at the time, since then we’ve established an entire nation that includes over 120,000 schools in over 14,000 school districts. The number of students now, compared to then; along with the goals we have set for ourselves in education as a nation can easily make you wonder why a plan put into place so long ago under such different circumstances has not been changed. It is a dangerous way to run a school system. We have established one distorted path to success, while paving many clear roads to failure. One example of this is the “Ephraim Curtis Middle School in Sudbury, whose grade 7 students were in the top two percent on the ELA test and grade 8 students were in the top nine percent on the mathematics test. The school failed to make AYP because the special needs subgroup did not meet test-score requirements in math.” (web, National Education Association) There are many examples like this to be found with other problems being that reports are not longitunal which makes it hard for these studies to have any consistencies. One year a student that raised or lowered scores may be transferred the next. That is not an indication of a school’s AYP over any consecutive period of time; if we continue to measure schools like this more and more otherwise successful schools will not succeed in making AYP. As a result, many schools will face sanctions. Those sanctions will expand in scope and severity if rising AYP standards are not met in the future. According to the law, after several years schools will face some form of "restructuring." This we simply cannot afford: we cannot afford to let another generation go by before we figure out that this is not working.

    One of the first steps to change is observance; find the patterns, what is not working and change it. Observe we have done; there a literally mountains of stats to confirm what we know and what we know is that even the steps we take to observe and measure are flawed so what can that say about the education system itself. In over 3 decades and with piles of reports it is still unclear how we’re doing in educating all of our children.

         Maybe instead of focusing on what we are seeing on theses assessments we should be more focused on what we are not seeing; for example in the case of Ephraim Curtis Middle School mentioned above, the only visible problem is the way students were reported, if the whole school was made up of special needs students it would have been portrayed accurately, but since the entire school was grouped together it was framed within a small percentage of it’s student body. Statistically speaking this will occur for several more years in which time drastic measures will be taken to fix a problem that may not even exist; precious time and money lost. These same trends happen on the opposite end of the spectrum also, leaving us blind to some schools in dire need of attention. If we could formulate a way to determine categories and sub categories of students we could more effectively assess where we are with each group, set goals and standards, and eventually get an adequate way to check our progress.  Unity is one of the only clear ways to solve this problem. Two options come to mind immediately one being a complete over haul of attitude and perspective, the other being a way to ease us in slowly.

         Option number 1 gives us a chance to hold on to some of our ideals and things that may be working while continually revising and implementing new strategies. Representatives from each district would meet with the state superintendent to pinpoint problems with school testing and assessment, define student groups, and propose solutions. The State superintendent would then meet with the other states and the Secretary of Education to hammer out a policy for our nation to adhere to as one. The focal point here would be very narrow; a coming together in time of crisis without abandoning each state’s independence, “…we need to refine our accountability and assessment systems to be sure test results have a significant impact on teaching and learning…” (Web, Deborah S. Delisle, Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ohio Department of Education). Option number two would have the exact same democratic approach as the first, but would be considered the beginning of a complete reform. Instead of representatives coming together to change testing and assessment policies they would be coming together to start the process of breaking down the separation and putting together a system that brings our nation and all it’s resources together. The first option seems to be the better approach, there are reasons, good and bad to explain why we’ve held on to our initial way of doing things. Option number two may cause people to shy away from such big changes while option number one allows people to see how needed and beneficial they are with out too much at once. We cannot experiment any longer; we need to jump in and find what really works. Let’s start small with testing and assessment and make it clearer where our starting point is.



















                                                                     
Works Cited
U.S.Department of Education. 1983, 2003, 2009. 24 Apr. 2009.
      http://www.ed.gov/index.jhtml
      key word: NCLB, AYP
Sadker, David Miller, and Karen R. Zittleman. Teachers, Schools, and Society 2nd ed.
         New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009.
National Educaion Association. 2009. NEA. 24 April 2009. http://www.nea.org/
    key word: NCLB
Delisle, Deborah S. Superintendent of Public Instruction. 27 April 2009. Ohio 
Department of Education. 27 April 2009.       
         http://www.ode.state.oh.us/GD/Templates/Pages/ODE/ODEDefaultPage.aspx?page=1