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Schools face day of reckoning as No Child deadlines near
TweetSchools face day of reckoning as No Child deadlines near
When it comes to demanding quantifiable success from public school students and accountability from teachers and administrators, Ohio just can’t seem to get it right.
A report by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy released this week shows that Ohio is among a group of states that chose to go easy on themselves in the earlier years of compliance with the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
All the states knew that their students had to be able to pass standard tests by the 2013-14 school year. About half the states set steady annual goals for increasing the passage rates of their students. The other half set less stringent demands in the early years of compliance knowing that they would have to show even greater progress as the deadline came near.
Ohio and Pennsylvania are among the latter group ,and over the next five years, they are going to have to make up for lost time.
And, as the deadline approaches, Ohio and its school districts will find it more expensive to do the remedial work that is necessary to get their students to pass the tests.
The state is not unlike a mortgage holder who opted for a variable rate mortgage. It looked like a good deal at the beginning, but now the interest rates are rising.
The consequences for failing to reach benchmarks will become more severe, with some teachers and administrators who have not been able to reach the established goals in danger of losing their jobs.
Of course, the easiest thing for failing states to do will be to lobby Congress for a change in the law. Expect that to happen, and, unfortunately, they may be successful.
Accountability is a plus
No Child Left Behind was not a perfect plan, and the constant complaint was that it was a largely unfunded mandate on the states. But accountability is a good thing, and while no test is perfect, there is no way to hold school districts to account for failure without testing.
The states are split almost equally by number in those that opted for steady performance goals and those that gambled on back-loaded goals. But the latter group contains most of the states with larger congressional delegations — California, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. New York and Texas are among the heavy hitters in the other group. Florida pursued a blended program.
Look for states in danger of failing to lobby vociferously for changes in No Child Left Behind. States that took the harder road might be inclined to see No Child Left Behind through, but partisan politics will also be a factor. Democrats are generally less enamored of standardized tests than Republicans.
It would be better if Congress took a bipartisan approach and told all the states that they will be held to meeting the 2013-14 goals.
We are reminded of an earlier effort in Ohio to demand accountability. It was called the fourth-grade guarantee. Every school district in the state knew in advance that the kindergarten pupils they enrolled in 1997 would be required to read at a fourth-grade level five years later or they would be held back a grade. As the deadline approached and it became obvious that tens of thousands of students could not read at grade level and would be held back, the General Assembly folded.
It amended the law to eliminate the guarantee and instituted new testing protocols.
Congress shouldn’t retreat. The goals were established. Every school board and educator in the land knew what was at stake.
Comments
This is an absolutely rediculous position. As a NYC high school teacher, I have witnessed the minimal positives and multiple negatives of the NCLB policy over the years.
What these states did was strategic. They figured they would do what they needed to do and placed their bets on the fact that somewhere down the line the law would be ammended in order to *fully fund* its mandates.
As it stands right now, all of the monetary requirements of NCLB come out of the district and state budgets. The Title One money that meeting AYP gets a district was not increased in order to pay for the extra services required by the law and that money is spent for the same services years after year. There is no way to pay for twice the services with the same amount of money.
The goals of NCLB are admirable but the way the law is constructed is fatally flawed.
First of all I would invite all Ohioians to take a look at New York's standardized exams available online. Our exams make Ohio's tests look like child's play. That inequity alone is a flaw. Leaving the construction of the exams up to the inividual states translates into extremely dumbed down exams being held equal to very difficult exams.
Second, consider the following scenario. My school, 90% free /reduced lunch (a government measure of poverty) 100% minority with many recent Spanish-speaking immigrants, for three years did not make AYP only because the passage rates for our ESL (English as a Second Language) population could not pass the English Regents exam in higher and higher numbers as the law requires. This means we were passing all other subjects - with a 90% poverty rate but still were labeled a "failing school" because of a very small population that was new to the country failing an ENGLISH TEST! Meanwhile, my father-in-law's school in PA was also labeled a failing school. Why? Because they could not get there 10% free and reduced lunch kids to pass their math or English exams.
Get my point? Both schools labeled failing when we, in NYC were able to get kids to pass exams harder than those in PA in a school with 90% poverty. But we were held on the same level as a school who could not even move along it's few students in the poverty bracket. Does that make any sense?
The goals of NCLB are spot on but this law needs to be overhauled and then fully funded.
First, allow me to congratulate Maggie in the success of her school.
Next, please allow me to disagree with this being an unfunded mandate. This was a bi-partisan program with heavy involvement of Ted Kennedy and the Democrats. It required accountability for direct and indirect Federal education funds that were and are being spent by the states and individual school districts already.
Put another way, NCLB is a demand for accountability of funds already being spent. Just because some schools/states used current Federal funds to hirer unneeded or over compensated staff instead of enhancing their educational mission in the basic skills area does not make this an unfunded mandate. Quite the contrary, this has for decades been a prefunded program with no accountability mandated.
My school district has passed all requirements of the program from day one. This is at a cost per pupil many thousands of dollars less then the nearby city school. Our school district has always had high academic standards, eschewed social promotion and encouraged community involvement in the schools enrichment and other programs.
With the greater per-pupil funds (to the tune of $4 to $6 thousand dollars per year per student) the city schools have hired a phalanx of administrative staff and supposedly educational staff several times (on a per-pupil basis) those of other cities in the state. They have created an infrastructure that benefits the school employees and local politicos with available patronage positions, not a program that benefits the students.
Some of the local city community “leaders” and substitute teachers have even complained about their teachers ‘from the suburbs’ that were not ‘sensitive to the culture’ of the students and therefore did not tolerate fist fights among the students. Using this as justification for demanding reeducation camps (diversity and sensitivity training) for those offending teachers from the suburbs. This, while the school passed only a tiny fraction of the program requirements.
In summary, NCLB is and was a prefunded program that only now is demanding accountability.
Yes, Kennedy originally cosponsored the bill but has since admitted that it needs significant revisions and it was unfunded.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-bro...