Rhymes With Right

March 14, 2007

Somebody Finally Noticed

Well, besides those of us who actually have to teach.

One of the absurdities of No Child Left Behind is the absurd notion that 100% of children would meet grade level in math and reading by 2014. Such a mandate, while laudable, is completely out of the question. Getting EVERY SINGLE CHILD to grade level? It is a nice talking point, but just can't happen. Well, some in Congress are finally giving that reality some consideration.

No Child Left Behind, the landmark federal education law, sets a lofty standard: that all students tested in reading and math will reach grade level by 2014. Even when the law was enacted five years ago, almost no one believed that standard was realistic.
But now, as Congress begins to debate renewing the law, lawmakers and education officials are confronting the reality of the approaching deadline and the difficult political choice between sticking with the vision of universal proficiency or backing away from it.
"There is a zero percent chance that we will ever reach a 100 percent target," said Robert L. Linn, co-director of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing at UCLA. "But because the title of the law is so rhetorically brilliant, politicians are afraid to change this completely unrealistic standard. They don't want to be accused of leaving some children behind."

Let's face a simple reality here -- we teachers are not stamping out widgets on a machine -- and even if we were, there would be a percentage that wouldn't pass inspection because of flaws in the material or the process. And when you consider that we are molding human beings, not hunks of metal or plastic, and that every human being has different abilities and interests, you can see where the goal becomes problematic.

When I taught English III (I now teach World History), I had students in my classes who were chronic attendance problems, who were ESL, and who were mainstreamed special education students (including one whose parents would not permit her to be in special classes, despite a 72 IQ). The reality is that I could have been super-teacher and not have gotten all those kids up to grade level.

After all, I cannot make the kid who isn't there learn. I cannot make a kid who doesn't know English read English at grade level. And I cannot make a kid who lacks the intellectual capacity to take in and retain the material learn how to read at grade level. And we won't get into the problem that the "snapshot" of how a kid is doing is taken with a test given on one day -- a day when the kid may be ill, tired, or still mourning the death of a close relative and therefore not performing up to ability level. Those are not excuses -- those are the realities you face when you deal with human beings!

And even with exemptions allowed for special ed kids (though often this translates to only the lowest of the low) and delayed accountability for ESL kids (except at exit level, where a kid who has been in the country for less than six months MUST test at grade level), you still cannot reach 100%.

Of course, the problem is that supporters of the law want to argue that any lowering of the standards constitutes "leaving children behind", despite the fact that there will always be children who do not meet the standard, no matter what teachers do. Is a goal of 100% admirable? You bet -- but it will never be achieved. I would prefer a goal of 90-95% -- one under which the standard is rigorous, but achievable when one takes into account the variations in ability, aptitude, and circumstances that impact student performance.

UPDATE: Here's an interesting piece by Kevin Drum from Washington Monthly.

1. Details aside (about which see below), I support the basic idea of NCLB. I'm fine with testing and I'm fine with holding schools accountable.
2. Different people had different reasons for supporting NCLB. I don't think Ted Kennedy supported the 100% goal because he wanted to label public schools as failures, but I think that a lot of movement conservatives and evangelicals did. These are not people who would ordinarily favor a multi-billion expansion of education funding and an enormous new intrusion of federal oversight into local schools, after all. Rather, they reluctantly supported NCLB because they were persuaded that it was a stealth measure that would eventually undermine support for public education.
Go ahead, call me paranoid. All I can say is that in the past, when I've given George Bush and his enablers the benefit of the doubt on things like this, I've turned out to be wrong.
3. Three years ago, when I asked about the 100% requirement, people told me that of course it would be relaxed. Just wait until NCLB comes up for renewal. 100% was nothing more than a nice-sounding goal that helped get the bill passed in the first place.
Well, it's renewal time and Republicans are still loudly insisting that we keep the 100% requirement. "Which child do Democrats want to leave behind?" they ask unctiously. So what happened?
4. The obvious solution to the 100% requirement, as Matt points out, is that school districts will simply reduce their standards to a point where even drooling idiots can pass. Not so. There are political limits to how absurdly low you can set standards, and in any case you're not likely to literally get a 100% pass rate even if all you have to do is randomly fill in bubbles. There's always going to be at least one kid in most schools who screws the thing up no matter how easy it is.
Besides, does this make any more sense than the 100% pass rate requirement? Why would anyone support a bill that motivates public schools to set comically low standards? Answer: see #2 above.

He's dead on in his analysis.

Posted by: Greg at 02:05 AM | Comments (13) | Add Comment
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