Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

NCLB: Democrats Are Stupid Too

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And Kennedy is no better.

Kennedy, who worked closely with President Bush in writing the law, has for years said the much-reviled measure would work if the administration provided the money schools need to develop good tests and help struggling students, especially those in poorer school districts.

I once read in a New Yorker profile of TWPE that Kennedy was snookered by Bush. Few will remember, and fewer still will believe, that TWPE entered the White House with a reputation as a bridge-building, bi-partisan executive. With NCLB, the President was supposedly working with the Kennedy in good faith. There was supposed to be a lot more money, according to our senator. That’s his story anyway, and he’s sticking to it.

But Kennedy fails to recognize the short-comings of the law. It’s not the money. It’s the mandates, the accountability. You can’t legislate educational achievement any more than you can legislate morality.

Enter Senator Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut) and presidential candidate. He’s the reformer in the bunch:

“Test scores obviously have value, but if it’s the only thing you’re doing, you’re not making a coherent and substantial judgment of how an individual is doing or how a school is doing,” Dodd said in an interview.

State test scores have value if you don’t know anything about state tests. We’ve been living with standardized tests for a century and high-stakes tests long enough to know their problems. How much value do test scores have, for example, when there’s cheating?

Tens of thousands of students cheat on the TAKS test every year, according to an in-depth data analysis by The Dallas Morning News.

The analysis ? among the first of its kind on this scale ? found cases where 30, 50 or even 90 percent of students had suspicious answer patterns that researchers say indicate collusion, either between students or with school staff. Perpetrators go almost entirely undetected and unpunished by state officials.

And how useful are test scores for sophomores in high school? In Massachusetts, we test sophomores for high-stakes in the second half of the year. Those scores typically reach schools in the November of the following school year, much too late to address the needs of kids who pass, but may have weaknesses. And if we could fix the scheduling problem, the tests themselves don’t yield useful information. Questions, at least in English Language Arts, are so loosely tied to the standards that it’s impossible to address areas of apparent weakness. In the quest for higher scores, teachers, spurred on by administrators, teach to the test. Teaching then becomes training students for the test rather than teaching them to learn. That’s the nature of extrinsic rewards: people work for the reward, or in this case, the avoidance of punishmen, rather than the behavior the reward is supposed to encourage.

No Child Left Behind is one of the worst (perhaps even the worst) pieces of educational legislation ever passed. Because the federal government really has no need to be involved in the charade called accountability, because it absurdly mandates all kids regardless of ability be “proficient” by 2014, because it relies on standardized test scores, because these scores result from tests created by different states, because it increases the amount of time students spend testing, because it assumes the problem with education is a lack of motivation, because it assumes the solution to achievement is punishment, and most of all, because it doesn’t help kids learn, the entire law should be scrapped.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Or so the saying goes. Congress has two hammers: funding and law-making. In our conservative era, when a dollar spent is a dollar wasted, the funding hammer stays in the toolbox and lawmaking does double-duty. I’ve yet to see a hammer work where a jigsaw is needed. But try and tell that to a senator and congressman who have limited experience with either.

–Mark

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Comments

  1. Assuming that you are correct that test scores are a highly flawed way to achieve “accountability”, the next question is: how DO we ensure that schools are doing all they can to educate their students well, and how do we ensure that the best teachers are rewarded and the worst weeded out?

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    Because it is certainly true that there are many teachers who work tirelessly on behalf of their students, and others that do the bare minimum possible. Is there anything we can do about this apart from flawed testing?

      1. What makes you so sure that schools need to be held “accountable”? Even accepting the fact that there are going to be high-stakes tests for a long time to come, and thus, some “accountability” measures, why does the federal government need to be involved? We started developing MCAS long before NCLB; less educated states like Alabama had implemented such testing back in the 1980’s. If we have to have accountability, why can’t we have it at the state level?

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      2. Test scores will never be an effective way to hold individual teachers accountable. In fact, they aren’t used that way in Massachusetts now.

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      Holding individual teachers accountable by individual test scores implies that you can control for an individual student’s effort. Holding individual teachers accountable by the test scores of his or her individual classes would require all classes of students be created equal. Another impossibility.

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      Mark

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