Q: Are the tests required by No Child Left Behind making schools more accountable? No: NCLB's excessive reliance on testing is unrealistic, arbitrary and frequently unfair

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 11, 2004

Byline: Reg Weaver, SPECIAL TO INSIGHT

As I travel around the country visiting schools and talking with National Education Association (NEA) members, I sense a growing concern among teachers and parents about the overwhelming emphasis given to standardized testing in America's schools. This concern is heightened when high stakes are attached to the outcomes of such tests. Teachers and parents worry that more and more of the important things that prepare us for life will be pushed off the curriculum plate to make room for test preparation.

According to a recent poll by Public Agenda, 88 percent of teachers say the amount of attention their school pays to standardized test results has increased during the last several years. And 61 percent agreed that teaching to the test "inevitably stifles real teaching and learning."

As any good teacher knows, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to either teaching or learning. In fact, we now have a solid body of research about cognition and learning styles that provides ample confirmation of this. Any good teacher also knows that proper assessment of learning is both complex and multifaceted. Tests particularly paper and pencil tests that are standardized are only one type of assessment. Good teachers make judgments about what has been learned on the basis of a variety of assessments. Finally, we know that what constitutes spectacular achievement for a child who suffers serious challenges may not equal the progress of his or her peers, but we honor this progress nonetheless.

The NEA has a proud history of supporting and nurturing our system of public education. When we are critical of the so-called No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, our interest is to fix those elements of the law that we see as destructive to public education and, ultimately, to the children we serve.

A consensus is emerging from coast to coast and across the political spectrum that this is a law in need of repair. And the present definition of adequate yearly progress is at the heart of what is wrong with the law.

The concept of adequate yearly progress is relatively simple: Set a lofty goal, establish a time frame for accomplishing the goal, establish incremental targets or steps toward achieving the goal, and hold schools accountable for meeting the targets and, ultimately, the goal. The goal is 100 percent proficiency in reading and math, and all schools must meet it by 2014.

Wouldn't life, and particularly parenting and teaching, be simple if progress in learning were linear and time-sensitive? Parents, teachers and cognitive psychologists alike know that learning is anything but linear. And yet we now have a federal law that not only violates what we know to be true about human learning but says that unless schools achieve linear progress, the federal government will punish you.

Do we have a problem with this? You bet we do. Can it be fixed? We think so.

One of our state affiliates, the Connecticut Education Association (CEA), is a leader in recognizing and studying the problems with the federal definition of "adequate yearly progress" (AYP). Shortly after the law was adopted, the CEA had an independent economist develop a scenario based on existing test data in Connecticut in an attempt to visualize the impact of AYP in one of the highest achieving states in the nation. The initial results were shocking; however, because the law had yet to be implemented, the results were still hypothetical. Nonetheless, the prediction became reality last summer when nearly 25 percent of schools in Connecticut were identified as having failed to make AYP. An astonishing 155 elementary and middle schools and 88 high schools were identified as "in need of improvement" under the federal law.

More recently, armed with two years of test data, the CEA asked its economist, Ed Moscovitch of Massachusetts, to update the scenarios. This time the CEA asked what failure rates might look like over the full 12 years of implementation. The new scenario, based on a model that allows for the rate of growth that students actually achieved in the last two years of testing, is very revealing. At the end of 12 years, 744 of 802 elementary and middle schools in Connecticut will have failed to make adequate yearly progress that's 93 percent of its elementary and middle schools.

In the first year none of the schools identified had the white non-Hispanic subgroup failing to make AYP. In the final year 585 of the 744 schools will have the white subgroup failing to do so. Even the powerful combination of social capital and great schools in a state that is regarded nationally as a high performer is not adequate to meet the statistical demands of this law.

Only in Lake Wobegon, perhaps, where all the students are above average, is there a chance of meeting the requirements set forth in the so-called No Child Left Behind law.

The current formula for AYP fails to consider the difference between where you start and how quickly you must reach the goal. That is, in my opinion, irresponsible. It is particularly irresponsible as it applies to English-language learners and special-education subgroups. While the Department of Education (DoE) finally has acknowledged that students whose first language is not English may not perform well when given a test in English, it does not go far enough to correct the problem. With respect to special-education students, the DoE has granted some leeway for the small percentage of severely cognitively disabled students, but there are thousands of other students in this subgroup for whom the test is totally inappropriate and emotionally injurious.