Great news coming out of our new education test scores:
Oddly, you heard the sound of one hand clapping last week as the Education Department released national data showing dramatic narrowing of racial learning gaps among elementary and middle school students. The news deserved ringing applause.
Rarely can education trends, good or bad, be described as “dramatic” because they tend to play out at glacial speeds. But the progress 9-year-olds are making in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s premier sampling of student achievement, qualified as dramatic:
•Long-standing achievement gaps between white students and black and Hispanic students fell to the lowest levels ever. Plus, the gains didn’t come as a result of white students falling behind. Everybody won.
•The news was nearly as good for 13-year-olds. Black and Latino students showed big gains in math.
Loudly cheering were Democrats and Republicans who championed the No Child Left Behind law that set out with a mission of closing racial learning gaps. No cheers, however, came from the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, which has filed suit to cripple No Child Left Behind.
Also silent was the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. Earlier this month, the group issued a report essentially accusing the federal law of being racially discriminatory because its accountability net caught too many poor and minority school districts. Huh?
For years, poor and minority students have suffered from attending schools that have failed them. Holding those schools accountable is the law’s bedrock.
Considering that No Child Left Behind has been in effect for only three years, it probably played a supporting role. The primary credit belongs to decade-old state reforms that the federal law was modeled on. They have pushed up education standards for all students, using standardized tests that teachers tend to dislike as the measuring stick.
The bad news in the report is that high school students are making little progress. That’s not surprising. Education reformers focused first on early grades. High schools, with older students whose habits are formed, promise to be tougher — particularly if people who can help continue denying the obvious: Accountability works.
Closing racial learning gaps begins with understanding the problem. If a disproportionate number of poor and minority students are dropping out of school, the public needs to know. And yet for decades states have hidden, ignored and twisted dropout data. They’ve preferred hiding the problem to solving it.
Why does it not surprise me that the two groups that were against this were unions and elite Universities?
Link via AConstrainedVision who has more.
HP: I sense an inconsistency here. I thought you didn’t like these big bills coming out of Congress that mandate huge amounts of spending. I seem to remember you being critical of the farm bill, the energy bill and the transportation bill for all the taxpayer money that was being spent at a time of huge deficits (I don’t remember what you had to say about the Medicare Prescription law). How is the NCLB law different? Wouldn’t a principled economic conservative be opposed to all these hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on government programs?
I do, I hate government spending that amounts to waste, but I don’t hate government standards.
The NCLB is fundamentally higher standards, that is the essence of it, the heart of the bill. All of that extra spending is a negative, and I am against it, but it’s a negative secondary to the fundamental part of NCLB, the higher standards.
So when I support NCLB, I support primarily the higher standards, and nothing else.
As far as the energy bill and so forth, there was no essence to it, it was almost all pork, pork to corporations, and pork to localities.
Oh yeah, and for the record, while I support higher standards, I am also no big fan of the NCLB.
Unless we attack the core problems of our public school system, the monopolized uncompetitive structure, anything else will only cause minor movements in the quality of education.
I recently administered the Iowa Test (ITBS) to Hispanics students that have been here for less than one year. I was overwhelmed and frustrated when I saw this intelligent and capable kids being forced to take a test that they could not even understand the directions. I am mad as hell with the No Child Left Behind Act, where they put all of our children in a nice neat box, not being aware of the demographics of each school and school district. As an educator for 20 years, we are in a state of panic and intimidation. Our Hispanics students are expected to pass and perform after a year same as their white/middle class counterpart. This is a racist and decriminatory measure. It has been proven by research that it takes 5-6 years to have command of a language, let alone pass a standarized test after a year of being in the U.S. And yet these students are placed in this horrific situation. I saw tears, sickness and faint spells during the test. I have never been so mad in my teaching career and I want to get involved in whatever I can to suit the Federal Government for the waist of my tax dollars in this discriminatory practices. If I would have listened to my guidance counselor and her predictions on a university career based on a standarized test score, I would have never been the master teacher that I am today
So what would you prefer, just bumping them to the next grade?