Failures of Our Public Education System

The following commentary was sent to me by Pete Speer the Finance Guy and fellow education reformer. The piece below his commentary appears in Education Week.

Cathy

The Article below provides additional documentation to what I believe is the foundation of the smoke and mirrors being foisted on the public by the Education establishment. It is one other reason why the system can not be fixed from within.

Everybody who has a child in school, everyone who is or should be concerned about school performance should bookmark, print out and distribute the following article written by a professor at the Harvard School of Education.

The core measure of school performance comes from standardized testing prepared by the State Boards of Education. The ability to inflate scores by this body responsible for controlling and evaluating the true quality of education conceals the true performance of the students, their instructors and the school districts from the parents, the taxpayers and even the likely complicit legislators who appropriate huge sums in the professed hope that the schools are educating and graduating students who are able to contribute to the betterment of society and to enable the country to compete in the 21st Century World Economy.

Inflation of test scores is the primary method by which the Education establishment can bamboozle the parents and justify the teaching as well as the performance of the School Board. Perversely it can also be expensive to those Districts which have apparently raised the grade level performance of the ir students. This increased student grade level ranking can cause the District to lose State and Federal money. That means that to nmaintain and continue the improvement program the District must pay for it from its own funds. Perhaps your District is unaware of this result.

Pete Speer



Published Online: April 27, 2009
Published in Print: April 29, 2009
Commentary

What's Missing in Obama's Education Plan?

By Daniel M. Koret

President Obama recently announced the broad outlines of a new education plan. ("Rigor, Rewards, Quality: Obama's Education Aims," March 18 and "Obama Echoes Bush on Education Ideas," April 8, 2009.) This plan has much to praise but also three critically important omissions.

The new approach, like the No Child Left Behind Act and many of its precursors, relies on holding educators accountable for student performance on achievement tests. Indeed, it would make this element of education policy even more important—for example, by encouraging pay-for-performance plans. But the effects of the previous accountability programs have been disappointing: relatively small improvements on trustworthy indicators of performance, and many serious side effects. Why should we expect more of the president’s proposed variation on this familiar theme?

To avoid replicating past mistakes, the president’s accountability program will have to follow three principles:
Make it broad. An assumption underlying the No Child Left Behind law was that if we initially focused accountability on just a couple of the critically important goals of education—math and reading achievement—the rest would hold steady and wait for us to turn to them later. Abundant evidence shows this assumption to be wrong. The activities and outcomes that do not count for accountability deteriorate, sometimes seriously, as schools shift resources from them to those few things that do count.
Many areas can suffer, including untested subjects, untested aspects of the subjects used in the accountability system, performing arts, student-initiated work, and physical activity. This should be no surprise. It is just common sense, and the same problem has been found in many other fields and in private firms as well as the public sector.

Confront score inflation. Commenting on the low performance standards currently set by some states, the New York Times columnist David Brooks quoted U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan as saying: “States are lying to children. They are lying to parents. They’re ignoring failure.” Indeed. But there is another reason that the public has been misled: bogus increases in scores. Many schools have responded to test-based accountability in ways that inflate scores, increasing them more than actual gains in achievement warrant. This does not require cheating. Scores can be inflated by many honest—although undesirable—forms of test preparation.

While not ubiquitous, score inflation is common and sometimes very large, and it is likely to hurt the most disadvantaged students the most. This too should not be surprising, because similar problems have been found in many other fields. Yet policymakers continue to ignore this inconvenient fact and use inflated scores to support exaggerated claims of success.
We should admit that our ideas for a better educational accountability system, however thoughtful, are partly unproven, need evaluation, and may require midcourse corrections.

If we fail to confront the problem of score inflation, we will be left, once again, with an illusion of effective accountability. Dealing with inflation effectively will require numerous steps. We will need frequent auditing of score gains to ensure that improvements on the tests used for accountability are trustworthy indicators of improved learning. We have had a small number of audits over the past two decades, but these have been the exception rather than the rule because neither federal nor state reform programs have established an expectation, let alone a requirement, that this type of evaluation be conducted.
We need to monitor how educators prepare students for the accountability tests—whether they improve their instruction or resort to inappropriate forms of test preparation. We also need to evaluate new approaches to test design tailored to lessening inflation. The Obama administration’s goal of developing tests that focus more on higher-order skills is laudable, but it will not address the problem of score inflation.

Experiment and evaluate. This nation has tried numerous approaches to test-based accountability over the past several decades, but all of them have shared one essential trait: None has been based on sufficient evidence. They have been designed without enough hard information about their likely effectiveness and side effects. Once implemented, they have not been adequately evaluated. Scores on the accountability tests usually increase, and for a time we are greeted with claims of success. Eventually, less-encouraging data catch up with us—for example, scores on other tests less vulnerable to inflation, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress and international comparative studies. A crisis is declared, we make up a new accountability system, and the cycle begins anew.

This failure to rely on hard evidence hinders the improvement of policy and schooling, and the failure to monitor effects on children is unacceptable. We do not tolerate this in other policy areas (think of Vioxx). The administration should avoid the temptation to say, once again, that we have it right this time. We should admit that our ideas for a better educational accountability system, however thoughtful, are partly unproven, need evaluation, and may require midcourse corrections.
The upcoming reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind law should institute routine and rigorous evaluation of the program’s effects—evaluations that do not rely on potentially inflated test scores. It should also encourage states and large districts to experiment with innovative approaches to accountability, but with a price: evaluations that will tell the rest of us whether their systems should be terminated, modified, or emulated.

There is room to argue about how best to address these three principles. But a failure to address them will give us more of the same: a narrowed educational system, bogus claims of success, and children left behind.
Daniel M. Koretz is the Henry Lee Shattuck professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the author of Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us.
Vol. 28, Issue 30, Pages 32,36

Link to AYP Reports

For those parents and taxpayers who are interested in the AYP Reports here is the link to said reports.

Cathy
Spelling and grammar errors as well as typos are left as an exercise for my readers.

The Majority of Newport Schools Show Improvement

The following article appears in the Eagle Times. The majority of schools in Newport showed improvement over last year. The paper is reporting that Croydon "maintained its perfect slate in both reading and math, goals it also reached in 2008."

I look forward to reading the actual reports, to see the actual numbers of students meeting or exceeding goals. It was refreshing to see Newport schools improve over last year.

Cathy
Spelling and grammar errors as well as typos are left as an exercise for my readers.

Some school make progress under NCLB
Claremont schools do poorly
By ARCHIE MOUNTAIN,Staff Writer
Monday, April 06, 2009 11:24 PM

CONCORD -- Led by strong performances by Fall Mountain, Newport and Sunapee, the 2009 Adequate Yearly Progress Reports for Sullivan County schools inched up slightly over 2008.

The annual report card for all New Hampshire schools was issued Monday afternoon by the New Hampshire Department of Education.

To achieve AYP under the federal No Child Left Behind act, schools or districts must have met reading and mathematics targets. They must also have met state participation, attendance and graduation goals.

If schools don't meet adequate progress for two years in a row, they are added to a list of schools in need of improvement.

Claremont schools continued to struggle, according to the report. Only Bluff School met the 2009 reading goal while Maple Avenue School was the only school to meet the 2009 math goal. In 2008, none of the five Claremont schools met the reading goal and only Bluff School achieved that level for math.

For the middle school it marked the fourth time it has come up short in reading and the fifth time in math.

Failing to meet the Adequate Yearly Progress goals signifies that schools need to do more planning, have more accountability and more effort and receive more support and oversight from the New Hampshire Department of Education, according to Jacqueline Guillette, SAU 6 Superintendent of Schools.

In SAU 60, covering the Fall Mountain area, only the Alstead Primary School, Charlestown Primary School and Walpole Middle School failed to meet the 2009 reading goal. Five of the 11 SAU 60 schools came up short for the math goal. They were Alstead Primary School, Charlestown Middle School, Charlestown Primary School, Fall Mountain Regional High School and Walpole Middle School.

It marked the second year that Charlestown Primary School had missed the grade in both reading and math and the third year for Fall Mountain Regional High School in math.
In Newport, Richards Elementary School did not meet the reading goal. Newport Middle High School, Newport Middle School and Towle Elementary School all had a passing grade in reading. All four schools made the grade in math.

The biggest improvement was made by Newport Middle School. It failed to meet the goal in both reading and math in 2008 and prior to 2009 had a failing grade for three years in reading and four years in math. Prior to this year, Towle didn't meet the reading goal for three years.

Sunapee Central School and Sunapee Senior High School continued to meet the standards for both reading and math while Sunapee Middle High School made the grade in reading but not in math.
Cornish Elementary School got a passing grade in reading but not in math. In 2008 it came up short in both areas.

Croydon Village School maintained its perfect slate in both reading and math, goals it also reached in 2008.

Goshen-Lempster Cooperative School did not make the goal in both curriculums. A year earlier it passed in reading.

Grantham missed the mark in reading but was successful in math.

Unity made the grade in reading but not in math. It failed to reach either goal in 2008.

Plainfield Elementary School reached the passing progress level in both subjects as it did in 2008.

Crisis in Newport

Jim wrote the following piece in response to the meeting he attended on September 24 at the Newport High School.

Crisis in Newport

These days, when one thinks of "self regulation gone amok", banking institutions come to mind. Yet with Newport's chronic educational failure, it seems the bankers have nothing on Newport's education system.

NMHS is now in its sixth year of failing to make "Adequate Yearly Progress", or "AYP" in math. Also revealed at their math AYP meeting, NMHS is also in its third year of failing "Literacy". That seems to cover just about all of the "Three Rs". Just exactly where is Newport NOT failing?

The No Child Left Behind law demands increasingly aggressive corrective action beginning after two years of AYP failure. As required by law, NMHS held a public meeting in the cafeteria on September 24th to discuss how to deal with this problem. This meeting should have taken place five years ago, and as best I can tell, no such meetings are planned to address the "Literacy" situation. (Apparently three years of failure is unworthy of corrective action.) This meeting exposed the both gravity of the situation, and the district's complete inability to cope.

The best example of the reality disconnect in Newport came from Virginia Irwin when she said "This is not an indictment". Yes Virginia, this IS an indictment. It is the biggest indictment a public school can get!

Staff members in attendance clung to a similar disbelief bolstered by an impressive array of empty excuses. Some blamed demographics, some blamed bad parents, others vilified the "moving target" (progress) required of NCLB. My favorite excuse, "we need more money" also made its mandatory appearance.

Not once did I hear district staff accept personal responsibility for failure. Oh how I wish I could spin these excuses into gold. The cafeteria would have resembled Scrooge McDuck's basement! We spend far too much money to listen to any excuses.

Denying the magnitude of the problem followed by scapegoat hunting is hardly a fast track towards resolution. This problem has festered for six years and shows no signs of abatement. Newport cannot and will not fix itself. Contrary to verbal assurances, it is evident that the Newport leadership has already excluded most of the drastic remedies available under NCLB. This is inexcusable.

The Captains of Education in Newport are clueless. Not only didn't they see the iceberg, they never felt the collision, refuse to acknowledge water on the promenade deck, and still call their ship "unsinkable". The crew isn't doing much better.

Its high time the passengers - parents and taxpayers - took over the ship. Its our childrens' futures now clouded in doubt, our money squandered on ineffective
education fads, and our position in world affairs at stake.

How many children must we leave behind before we learn not to entrust their future to this failed system?

Jim Peschke

Fixing No Child Left Behind

The following piece appeared in the Wall Street Journal.


Fixing No Child Left Behind

WSJ Editorial: March 6, 2007; Page A18

The No Child Left Behind education law is up for renewal this year, and an independent commission recently released some recommendations for improvement. Not to be outdone, the White House has also put out its own "blueprint" for strengthening the law. The legislation could use a serious reworking, but any fixes won't go far enough unless they do more to expand public and private school choice.

NCLB's political bargain was that, in return for a big increase in federal education spending, the government would hold schools more accountable for results in the classroom. Six years later, taxpayers have done their part. Since 2001 overall NCLB funding has risen by 34%, and federal spending on Title I schools serving low-income students has gone up 45%.

NCLB and the Bush Administration also deserve some credit for shifting the terms of the education debate. The law has focused attention on learning gaps between students of different races and economic backgrounds that persist even at some of the nation's best public schools. The law's requirement that schools test annually in grades 3-8, and report both averages and the results of racial and economic subgroups, has made it much more difficult for administrators to hide the fact that all students aren't learning.

NCLB has been much less successful in bringing pressure to bear on states and school districts that fail to implement the law. That's especially true of the school choice provisions, which are the best way to get the attention of the education bureaucracy. Unfortunately, the Bush Administration abandoned its voucher proposal very early in the 2001 negotiations. What passed was a watered-down version of public school choice, which in theory allows a child in a failing school to transfer to a better public school or get free after-school tutoring from private providers.

* * *

In practice, however, the Education Department has too often allowed school districts to skirt even these limited choice provisions, either by granting exemptions or looking the other way. It took a formal complaint from the Alliance for School Choice before Secretary Margaret Spellings did anything about Los Angeles failing to notify parents of their transfer rights as required under the law. So far she's sent the district a sternly worded letter.

And the Chicago public school system, which has been repeatedly labeled "in need of improvement" and thus should be banned under NCLB from offering its own after-school tutoring, has been given a waiver to do exactly that. So while it would be nice if the Bush Administration enforced its own law, the larger lesson is that school choice "lite" turns out to be no substitute for the real thing.

To be fair, some of these problems are structural. Even if more school districts were implementing NCLB's transfer provisions, there often isn't enough room in decent schools to handle all the children who qualify for a transfer. And many of the private after-school tutoring services allowed under the law are simply employing the same teachers from the local public school system who are failing the kids during regular school hours.

There's also the problem of allowing each state to develop its own standards and tests to determine proficiency in reading and math. The Administration was deferring to federalist principles on an issue that's traditionally been handled at the state and local level. But the reality has been a "race to the bottom," with some states constructing easy tests to avoid federal penalties.

"If you're in Oklahoma right now, you're told that 95% or 96% of your schools are doing fine," says Frederick Hess, who follows education at the American Enterprise Institute. "And if you're in Massachusetts, you're told that 40% to 45% of your schools are doing fine. But if you look at the actual achievement data, it suggests that kids in Massachusetts are doing far better than kids in Oklahoma."

Some education reformers are now calling for "national standards" to address this problem. But we tried national history standards in the 1990s, and the politicized results weren't pretty -- unless, of course, you favor a history curriculum that downgrades the Founding Fathers while playing up the working experiences of midwives in 19th-century Nebraska.

Rather than force a national test on states, the best compromise here may be to require them to benchmark their own assessments against the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), a federal standardized test that already exists and that most educators agree is fairly rigorous. "So people at least have a common metric by which to judge the rigor of the state assessment," says Mr. Hess.

It's worth considering, and we wish we could say the same about the Commission on No Child Left Behind, which was funded by private foundations and co-chaired by former Governors Tommy Thompson and Roy Barnes. But the panel's report is more interested in tinkering than fundamental change, and its 75 recommendations don't include the one that would make the biggest difference: school vouchers.

* * *

The Administration's proposed fixes are bolder and potentially more consequential. President Bush's 2008 budget sets aside $250 million for "promise scholarships" for low-income students in schools that have consistently underperformed for five years. The scholarships would average about $4,000 and "the money would follow the child to the public, charter or private school of his or her choice."

Them's fightin' words for the Democrats who now control Congress. But Mr. Bush has the bully pulpit, as well as the moral authority from five years of evidence on failing schools. We hope his Administration uses them to explain why real school choice is essential to any reform in K-12 education.

'No Child Left Behind' put to the voters

No Child Left Behind first and foremost is about accountability one thing educrats truly hate. They truly do not want to be accountable for spending our dollars wisely and they truly do not want to be accountable for educating our children. They rather would spend willy nilly and ask (or sue) for more dollars than live within their means and spend at the rate of inflation as well as appreciation. No Child Left Behind would never have been necessary if public schools across the country were educating our children in the first place.

In the article below, School Board Chairman Graham Chynoweth said "It all comes down to local taxpayers funding federal law." The district does have a choice they can refuse federal tax dollars and not follow the No Child Left Behind Law. If teachers are not capable of teaching and improving student performance the district should be able to hire more capable teachers. But sadly tenure and job protection far exceeds the right of parents, students and taxpayers, school districts are not allowed to seek out the best educators possible because of tenure and the requirement of hiring people with empty teaching degrees.

Mr. Chynoweth does make a point the federal government should not be involved in education and neither should the state. Both are large bureaucratic organizations that take dollars away from the local level and away from the child and our used to pay bureaucrats. Public education is government education and is plagued with waste, mediocrity and corruption.

Dismantling the federal Department of Education (created in the Carter administration) and passing universal school choice would decrease the cost of education and improve the quality of education our children would receive.

This line " But it has come under fire from teachers and school officials, who say it forces them to teach to the test and pressures schools by setting unrealistic goals for student achievement" kills me. In short NCLB is about getting our children to perform at grade appropriate levels, that by all means is not an unrealistic goal for student achievement. No parent should be forced to send their child to a school district who believes that is an unrealistic goal.

The following piece appeared in the Concord Monitor.

No Child Left Behind' put to the voters

By KATE DAVIDSON
Monitor staff
February 15. 2007

The Shaker Regional School District has a request for the federal government: Fix and fund the No Child Left Behind Act, or repeal it. District officials also want state legislators to know they expect a collaborative and comprehensive solution to New Hampshire's education funding crisis.
Superintendent Michael Cozort said he doesn't know whether lawmakers are listening, but it can't hurt to be the squeaky wheel. The school district will put the two issues before voters at the school district meeting on March 9 in the form of nonbinding resolutions, asking voters to support their positions, even if they don't have an immediate effect.

The articles were crafted by the district's public policy committee, which was formed three years ago to debate education legislation, draft position statements and meet with local lawmakers. Education groups, such as the National Education Association and the New Hampshire School Boards Association, often undertake lobbying efforts on behalf of schools and teachers, but Shaker wanted to bring it to the local level, Cozort said.

"I think our residents expected us to be more active politically," he said.

School Board Chairman Graham Chynoweth began the committee soon after the district started feeling the effects of the No Child Left Behind Act, which was first implemented in 2002.


The group has had lunch with Merrimack County legislators to discuss the resolutions and plans to meet with Belknap County lawmakers as well. Committee members have also written letters to Sens. Judd Gregg and John Sununu, former congressmen Charles Bass and Jeb Bradley and new Reps. Paul Hodes and Carol Shea-Porter.
"I don't know if it makes a significant difference in their thinking, or whether it's something that makes us feel better," Cozort said. "But I think if more people do this, it's not a lone voice in the wilderness."

The committee - made up of two school board members, the superintendent, and the district curriculum coordinator - has spoken out about school vouchers, charter schools and the state dropout age. The group has also issued a statement against a plan that could reduce Medicaid reimbursements for schools that provide services to students with disabilities, but the issue did not make it to the warrant this year. Foremost on the minds of committee members is the upcoming reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act and the state Legislature's task of defining and funding an adequate education.

"In some ways, we are no longer policy makers," Chynoweth said. "We are enforcers of state and federal regulations, and that's an unhappy event, from my point of view, for local school boards."

The No Child Left Behind Act is the largest set of regulations the district must adhere to, and the resolution will encourage the federal government to help by contributing more funds or loosening the requirements.

The law was intended to narrow achievement gaps among students, hold schools and teachers accountable for education shortcomings and bring all students up to grade level in reading and math by 2014. But it has come under fire from teachers and school officials, who say it forces them to teach to the test and pressures schools by setting unrealistic goals for student achievement.

In the Shaker Regional School District, 5 to 7 percent of the budget comes from federal grants. But the government's intrusion into the school district's daily operations is not proportional to the funding it provides, Chynoweth said.

"It all comes down to local taxpayers funding federal law," he said.

If approved, the second resolution would call upon all branches of state government to work collaboratively to define and support an adequate education for New Hampshire's children, as required by the state Supreme Court in its recent school funding decision.

That may be a difficult task considering New Hampshire's tax structure, but Chynoweth said the committee feels it can be done. It just needs a little work.

"Make it the first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do at night," he said, pleading with legislators.

Although the committee's effect is difficult to measure, the results of the last election may be some indication, Chynoweth said. Hodes and Shea-Porter, who shared the school district's view of the No Child Left Behind Act on the campaign trail, defeated Bass and Bradley, he said.

"We'd like to believe that our previously voiced opinion in opposition to No Child Left Behind may have had an influence on someone, one voter maybe," Chynoweth said.

The resolutions will be open for discussion at the school district meeting on March 9 at 7 p.m. at Belmont High School.


By KATE DAVIDSON