Congress is evaluating the No Child Left Behind Act since it is due to be re-authorized. Some are wondering if it will finally get the funding it needs for proper implementation. I vote for zero funding. I’m with the three voices of dissent in the NEA who say the act is too flawed to fix. But here are some things I thought interesting, [from KPBS News]:
Despite issues with how the data is gathered, San Diego City Schools are using No Child Left Behind and the state Public Schools Accountability Act to pinpoint learning gaps in the classroom. Among sub-group data determined by race, African American and Hispanic are scoring at the lowest rate of proficiency in San Diego City Schools. And only 30 percent of children from economically challenged households are performing at acceptable levels.
So NCLB has failed in one of its major goals…to close the achievement gap. Actually, every study I have looked at says that the use of standardized tests to sort students disproportionately affects minorities. And which schools are in danger of losing even more funding from their tight budgets? The ones failing to meet standards which directly translates to those serving the poor and minorities.
[Republican California Congressman Buck]McKeon: “If you look at how much money has gone into funding education, both at the higher level and at the k-12 level, since we’ve won the majority in 94, we’ve doubled what the democrats did previously.”
There’s something to be proud of. Spent more. Got less. There have been slight gains since NCLB took effect. But the rate of gains seem to have slowed since NCLB’s enactment. And I’m not sure how to factor for the reports of teacher, school and district cheating combined with the evidence of states lowering standards to keep from losing funding.
With the emphasis our society is placing on testing, there is increasing pressure to have all children tested, including homeschooled students. Traditionally, homeschooled children have done well but imagine if there were the same pressure on each homeschool that there is on each school. Right now, I know my daughter would fail miserably. It wasn’t all that long ago she faced a multiple choice test in math for the first time. She got one in ten right. After interviewing her, I realized she understood all the concepts. However, she had attempted to match the letters with the numbers (ie., a=1, b=2, etc.) She got confused after number four, but never even looked at the math problems. If my ability to homeschool her had been on the line, however, would I have taught her the same way? Right now, she can write out her answers and explain how she got them. She is beginning to write out small paragraphs to explain her solutions. Would I have spent too much time teaching testing format for her to have actually been able to demonstrate true understanding?
Principled Discovery is a place to stop and discuss news and information related to faith, family and particularly education. Pour yourself a cup of tea and join the conversation! 
” Actually, every study I have looked at says that the use of standardized tests to sort students disproportionately affects minorities”
Is it not possible that the reason standardised tests disproportionately affect minorities is not a problem with the tests, but a problem with the education of minorities?
On many other outcomes, some minorities do worse than white people, eg % of population in prison, average earnings, attendance at university, at engineering school. And this has been the case for a long time. Just because standardised tests also reflect this disparity does not mean that standardised tests are biased - they may be identifying an underlying truth.
Due to poor education and legal discrimination in the past, many minority parents do not have the educational background to fill in any gaps in schools’ teaching of their kids. Schools should therefore adopt curriculums designed to ensure that there are no gaps, and that any child who, eg, fails to grasp how to multiply two digit numbers, is picked up that very year and the education remedied. (Of course every school should do this for all kids, but in low-socio-economic areas a school can place even less reliance on parents doing the teaching).
If a measuring tool is telling you that there is something unfair about the world, it’s not necessarily true that the right idea is to chuck out the measurement tool.
As for your daughter - how long would you have spent teaching her how to answer multi-choice questions? 10 minutes? 20 minutes?
Is it a big deal that you might spend 20 minutes out of the whole of her life teaching her that you don’t select the answer that matches the question number?
Depends on the minority, actually. Asians Americans outscore us, then Hispanics, with African Americans who have been here longer than both at the bottom.
There are cultural biases in some of these tests as well. Such as the tennis question I posted of in my other entry. Are we testing reading comprehension or tennis knowledge? Once the reading goes too far outside of the child’s experience, they are going to be at a disadvantage that has nothing to do with educational disparities and everything to do with cultural biases. When there are large disparities, we need to look more closely at what we are testing. Poor whites outscore rich blacks on these tests. That seems to indicate that more than socioeconomic issues are at stake. It is obvious that suburbia which is predominantly white is going to outscore the inner city which is predominantly black. But why do the white kids in those inner city schools where education is so poor still manage to outscore the rich African Americans in the rich districts which have the funding?
As it states in the article I linked to:
“. . . students who come from better-off families can afford coaching for the test . . . They are more likely to have been exposed to books and travel.”
In other words, they have more access to the culture.
There has always been a tendency toward this. The original purpose of this testing, after all, was to weed out mental defects and African Americans were one of the targeted groups.
I am not necessarily against these test as one measure. I am against them as the only measure. The testing companies themselves say they should not be used thus….that there is too much room for error. And reliability isn’t the issue. They generally are fairly reliable. It is the validity that concerns me.
Regarding my daughter…perhaps. But you do not know what this is doing to classrooms. It is completely changing how instruction is done…like one big practice test. One would imagine it would (or should) eventually lead to improved performance, as the state defines it, since performance is now defined as the ability to pass a standardized test. But that is not the same as performance in life.
OK, found it. Think this was actually on the other post, but here is the reference I couldn’t find. I’ll just repost the entire article. This is from 1996, when Bush was still governor, but is presumably where he is planning on going with this as we see some implementation going on through NCLB. And it is part of School to Work which is older…and independent of Mr. Bush. Not everything in all of these things is totally bad. There are some good points and some things that need to be considered. There are definite weaknesses in our educational system, but there are some definite strengths as well. We don’t have to throw out what is excellent and unique about our system in order to fix the difficulties. Also, just as an aside, our government structure is far different from yours. Our central government is not supposed to have this kind of power over education…actually, it isn’t supposed to have any. That is more my problem than anything. If it were just TX, I just wouldn’t move there, but I wouldn’t worry about it. Education reform is a state-by-state issue. Anyway, here is the report I was referring to:
“On 30 August 1996, Governor George Bush submitted an application to the federal government requesting $61 million over five years to implement a statewide School-To-Work (STW) system. The Texas Education Agency, The Texas Workforce Commission, The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board all signed a memorandum of understanding committing agency resources to implementation of the plan. States are required to plan for the participation of “all students,” identify barriers for the participation of any students and propose ways of overcoming these barriers. The Texas proposal lists “limited STW options in rural areas and for home-schoolers” as one of the barriers hindering participation of all students. It proposes a marketing campaign to reach home schoolers.
A School-To-Work system as spelled out in the literature about STW involves the total transformation and reorganization of the public educational system and the private business sector through: the systematic implementation of a certification system based on knowledge and skill standards developed by the nation and the state; the provision of government services and support to enable each person to meet the standards; and a cradle to grave tracking system.
The foundation of the certification and tracking system is the Certificate of Initial Mastery which will eventually replace the graduation diploma. The standards, assessments, and certification system will be used for certifying financial eligibility for government services, health status, personal and interpersonal qualities or “skills,” job eligibility, job placement, job security, and career advancement. Individuals will be tracked through social security number by income, job placement and advancement in order to determine the effectiveness of educational programs.
The certificate is like a comprehensive report card that follows a person for the rest of his life and will be “transferable” (computerized) and “portable” (as in a magnetic strip on a credit card). Employers will be encouraged not to hire anyone for “good” jobs unless they have the certificate. Those now in the workforce will be encouraged to obtain the certificate if they lose their job and want to obtain another. Texas plans call for validating national skill standards ad entering into agreements with other states for mutual recognition of credentials.”
Even if the central government came out with the perfect plan, if it involved central control and funding, I would be against it. To me, that is an oxymoron in and of itself, but it is a vastly different worldview. When there is a problem, I look at increased government as adding to the problem, not as a solution. That’s just the rebellious American in me : )
Once the reading goes too far outside of the child’s experience, they are going to be at a disadvantage that has nothing to do with educational disparities and everything to do with cultural biases.
This paragraph assumes that schools cannot teach culture. Or to be more precise, it assumes that schools cannot teach cultural literacy. I make the distinction because you can know about a different culture without actually adopting its beliefs as your own. Eg I know what references to the Indian caste system broadly mean, without feeling inclined to split up my fellow citizen into Brahmins, untouchables, etc (I am very far from an expert on Indian culture, sadly).
Cultural literacy is important not just for passing standardised tests, but for making sense of the world as an adult. Eg public debate often assumes a good deal of cultural literacy. People, in debating a possible policy choice, often make passing references to other choices, eg appeasement before WWII, the Dred Scott decision, without providing more explanation. An adult who has been taught about the lead-up to WWII or the history of the slavery in the USA can make much more sense of these debates.
So a guy called Hirsch developed a “Core Knowledge” series of curriculum - of things that American kids should learn to have cultural literacy. See http://www.coreknowledge.org/CK/about/articles/fair.htm for an explanation of his approach. This website also has examples of his curriculum.
From the link, “tutors in West Germany, having the benefit of detailed guidelines, are able to bring the highly disadvantaged offspring of Turkish “guest workers” up to grade level, despite the enormous educational handicaps of Turkish children in Germany.”
…
” In the United States, the gap between academic haves and have-nots grows wider in each successive early grade, until, by fourth grade, it is often unbridgeable.
…
But this disheartening characteristic of American schools seems less than inevitable when we look at the successes of Swedish, German and French schools in teaching third-world and other disadvantaged students.12 As children progress through those systems, the gap between haves and have-nots grows narrower rather than expands. The main reason these other systems are fairer to disadvantaged students is that they are able to compensate for the snowball effect of background knowledge upon early learning — a snowball effect that allows a small knowledge difference in kindergarten to become a huge gap in learning ability within a few years. “
See http://www.coreknowledge.org/CK/about/research/eval12_2002.htm for research results. Some studies have found that this curriculum narrows the achievement gap between disadvantaged and advantaged children.
And see http://www.coreknowledge.org/CK/about/sequence_glance.htm for a broad list of the topics to be covered. It includes things like “Early and Medieval African Kingdoms” in the fourth grade, “American Indian Art” in the third grade, “American Musical Traditions (Spirituals)” in the 5th grade, so kids learn a wide variety of subject matter, not just English culture.
The success of Germany, France and Sweden has lead to an alternative subculture of immigrants which has absolutely no integration with mainstream society. Do you recall the violence and rioting? The car burning? The “youth” in Sweden who suddenly went wild and turned violent (part of the muslim minority)? Regardless of what you think of the cartoons out of Denmark, should their authors be receiving death threats? We integrate. They do not. And Germany has not brought the Turks up to par with German students. Go to any Gymnasium in Germany and I doubt you will see a single Turk. I’m sure there are a few, somewhere, but Germany has a system built on “separate but equal.” We could take our low performing students and house them in a different building, with different teachers and lower expectations and call that success, to, but it is not equal opportunity.
And while that on some level might sound good…ie., we could focus resources for basic skills on lower performing populations and different for higher performing students, the sorting occurs at 10 with no room for movement. Does every child who fails at 10 deserve to have so many doors closed for him? After all, if you get into the Realschule, you will only be educaated until 16 and will never have the opportunity to go to college. You will be apprenticed and learn a trade. And if you don’t quite make that cut, it will be the Hauptschule. Which educates in math and basic literacy until 8th grade and some vo-tech. And you’ll be a manual laborer. Fine if that’s what you want, but the decision is made for you at 10.
Actually, a couple of years ago, a study was done in Belgium asking the question of why America has historically had so few problems with immigration while the whole experience has been wrought with violence over in Europe. Basically, they hold their immigrants “separate but equal.” Or maybe not so equal…
This isn’t that study, but highlights the problem.
If that is your definition of teaching culture, I’ll stick with ours for the moment. At least our low performing students have a chance at doing what they want after leaving school.
And I don’t assume culture cannot be taught. And I do not desire for people to live here without some certain level of knowledge of the dominant culture. The problem is, I don’t believe that people’s life chances should be closed to them based on standardized tests of questionable validity. So far, there has been little correlation between these types of tests and future success.
And I guess we are straying from your three R’s now.
Actually, you might be surprised ar how relevant I think “cultural” education is…US history and the foundations of our country are vital for the long term keeping of our liberty…but that hasn’t been going on for a long time. Also, the test item I cited (there aren’t a lot of samples out there to peruse), is more of a socioeconomic bias than cultural. I as a middle class adult had to concentrate and read it twice…but I know enough about tennis to know that they wouldn’t be playing with two balls or without a net.
Dana - I am sure that American schools can teach things like the world history of slavery, photosynthesis, dividing by fractions, etc, without introducing streaming at age 10. The two are separate things. One is a curriculum, the other is an examination system.
As for American integration - the US has had the LA riots, and the Washington Snipers. And American inter-generational income mobility is very low compared to European countries. See http://www.americanprogress.org/atf/cf/{E9245FE4-9A2B-43C7-A521-5D6FF2E06E03}/HERTZ_MOBILITY_ANALYSIS.PDF. This report also proposes that gaps in educational achievement between the children of rich families and the children of poor families is one of the causes of this low intergenerational income mobility.
American (and NZ) schools are just not doing a good job of providing a good quality education to students from a disadvantaged background to catch up with luckier students. Not just by standarised tests, but by every measure I know of. Teaching cultural literacy would help with that.
Perhaps the gaps in wealth lead to gaps in educational achievement. Afterall, wealthier parents are more involved in their children’s education, hiring tutors, changing schools, etc.
I was not at all saying that America is perfect, but you brought up France, Germany and Sweden as models of integration and they are not. We do a better job. We have had problems, yes, and I would relate that directly to the adoption of policies similar to those in Europe of greater social programs and less integration.