The most toxic flaw in NCLB was its legislative command that all students in every school must be proficient in reading and mathematics by 2014. By that magical date, every single student must achieve proficiency, including students with special needs, students whose native language is not English, students who are homeless and lacking in any societal advantage, and students who have every societal advantage but are not interested in their schoolwork. All will be proficient by 2014, or so the law mandates. And if they are not, then their schools and teachers will suffer the consequences.
The term “proficiency”—which is the goal of the law—is not the same as “minimal literacy.” The term “proficiency” has been used since the early 1990s by the federal testing program, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, where it connotes a very high level of academic achievement. The federal assessment refers to four levels of achievement. The lowest is “below basic,” which means a student who is unable to meet the standards for his or her grade. The next level is “basic,” which means that a student has partially mastered the expectations for the grade. Then comes “proficient,” indicating that a student has fully mastered the standards for the grade. And at the very top of the performance levels is “advanced,” which represents truly superior achievement. On the 2007 NAEP for fourth-grade reading, 33 percent of the nation’s students were below basic; 34 percent were basic; 25 percent scored proficient; and 8 percent were advanced. Now, in a nation where only one-third of students meet the federal standard for proficiency, we are expected to believe that fully 100 percent will meet that standard by 2014. It will not happen. Unless, that is, the term “proficiency” is redefined to mean functional literacy, minimal literacy, or something akin to a low passing mark (say, a 60 on a test with a 100-point scale, a score that once would have merited a D, at best).
The goal set by Congress of 100 percent proficiency by 2014 is an aspiration; it is akin to a declaration of belief. Yes, we do believe all children can learn and should learn. But as a goal, it is utterly out of reach. No one truly expects that all students will be proficient by the year 2014, although NCLB’s most fervent supporters often claimed that it was feasible.* Such a goal has never been reached by any state or nation. In their book about NCLB [No Remedy Left Behind], [Chester E.] Finn [Jr.] and [Frederick M.] Hess acknowledge that no educator believes this goal is attainable; they write “Only politicians promise such things.” The law, they say, is comparable to Congress declaring “that every last molecule of water or air pollution would vanish by 2014, or that all American cities would be crime-free by that date.” I would add that there is an important difference. If pollution does not utterly vanish, or if all cities are not crime-free, no public official will be punished. No state or municipal environmental protection agencies will be shuttered, no police officers will be reprimanded or fired, no police department will be handed over to private managers. But if all students are not on track to be proficient by 2014, then schools will be closed, teachers will be fired, principals will lose their jobs, and some—perhaps many—public schools will be privatized. All because they were not able to achieve the impossible.
* including Margaret Spellings in a Forbes editorial.
Ravitch, Diane. The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. New York: Basic, 2010. 102-103. Print.
The Committee on Appropriate Test Use of the National Research Council stated in an authoritative report in 1999 that “tests are not perfect” and “a test score is not an accurate measure of a student’s knowledge or skills.” Because test scores are not an infallible measure, the committee warned, “an educational decision that will have a major impact on a test taker should not be made solely or automatically on the basis of a single test score.” ….
Psychometricians are less enthusiastic than elected officials about using tests to make consequential judgments, because they know that test scores may vary in unpredictable ways. Year-to-year changes in test scores for individuals or entire classes may be due to random variation. Student performance may be affected by the weather, the student’s state of mind, distractions outside the classroom, or conditions inside the classroom. Tests may also become invalid if too much time is spent preparing students to take them.
Robert Linn of the University of Colorado, a leading psychometrician, maintains there are many reasons why one school might get better test scores than another. NCLB, he says, assumes that if school A gets better results than school B, it must be due to differences in school quality. But school A may have students who were higher achieving in earlier years than those in the other school. Or school A might have fewer students who are English-language learners or fewer students with disabilities than school B. School A, which is presumably more successful, may have a homogeneous student body, while the less successful school B may have a diverse student body with several subgroups, each of which must meet a proficiency target. Linn concludes, “The fact that the school that has fewer challenges makes AYP [adequate yearly progress] while the school with greater challenges fails to make AYP does not justify the conclusion that the first school is more effective than the second school. The first school might very well fail to make AYP if it had a student body that was comparable to the one in the second school.”
State testing systems usually test only once each year, which increases the possibility of random variation. It would help, Linn says, to administer tests at the start of the school year and then again at the end of the school year, to identify the effectiveness of the school. Even then, there would be confounding variables: “For example, the students at the school with the higher scores on the state assessment might have received more educational support at home than students at school B. The student bodies attending different schools can differ in many ways that are related to performance on tests, including language background, socioeconomic status, and prior achievement.” The professional organizations that set the standards for testing—such as the American Psychological Association and the American Educational Research Association—agree that test results reflect not only what happens in school, but also the characteristics of those tested, including such elusive factors as student motivation and parental engagement. Because there are so many variables that cannot be measured, even attempts to match schools by the demographic profile of their student body do not suffice to eliminate random variation.
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Ravitch. Diane. The Death and Life of the Great American School System. New York: Basic/Perseus, 2010: 153-4.
[See D-I-S-R-E-S-P-E-C-T for a teeny slice of background.]
In the national debate on educational accountability, the people who know the most about what goes on in classrooms have the least say. … The national [teacher's] unions are supposedly the teachers’ mouthpieces, but their opposition to [NCLB], which mirrored that of other education associations, has always been dismissed as a case of teachers wanting less work for more pay.
…
[Principal of Tyler Heights Elementary School, Annapolis, MD] Tina [McKnight]‘s attempts to question higher-ups or skirt rules were generally met with some version of “This is the way it’s done” or “That’s not county policy.” Besides, she figured, the prevailing sentiment would be, look at the scores—something must be working.”You can get yourself in a lot of hot water” by being anything other than compliant, Tina said. “You carry out the programs and policy of the Anne Arundel County Public Schools—that’s your job.” Would attorneys be so discounted in a debate on the future of their industry? Would doctors? Why would the same people who call Tina McKnight a hero [for rising test scores] not want her honest assessment?
Time and again, the message comes across loud and clear that the opinions of educators do not matter in this discussion. “One of the things important to NCLB was to push the envelope—getting something out there that was not fully embraced by the practitioner community,” someone who helped write the law told me. As Frederick Hess, an education analyst for a Washington think tank, wrote in a book called Tough Love for Schools, “We will not force painful improvement by convincing those who bear the costs of change that it really is a good idea. We must leave them no choice in the matter.”
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Hess also wrote, “The choice is between an imperfect accountability system and none at all”—-a common view among politicians and policymakers. But better-than-nothing is not good enough, when the education of millions of children is at stake.
And when the view is a logical fallacy, the either-or/all-or-nothing fallacy.
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Perlstein, Linda. Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade. Henry Holt, 2007: 202-3.
photo courtesy of lastyearsgirl, used under this Creative Commons license
Under No Child Left Behind, average daily attendance below 94 percent would mean a failure to make adequate progress, no matter what the test scores were.
Perlstein, Linda. Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade. Henry Holt, 2007: 60.
