Archive for the ‘NCLB’ Category

« Older Entries

Money Rolls In

Wednesday, December 21st, 2011

In spite of comments about the Obama administration from the right and the left, one of the big coups that has just landed in California comes from a United States Department of Education’s Race to the Top grant. Anyone in the education world is happy to grab money for young kids to provide readiness before they start kindergarten. Finally, the state has written a grant that has been approved. Would anyone raise his or her hand to vote to give the funds back? The GOP has tried time after time to snuff out funds for early childhood education.

So, the Obama administration hasn’t shown leadership-when?

Here is a list from Elaine who commented on David Brooks and Gail Collins post on the Opinionator, December 14, 2011.

President Obama’s successes:
-End the Iraq War.

-Health care reform-this will change the way Americans can access health insurance . It will make health insurance affordable for everyone. Who in their right mind can argue the benefits?

-Brought down Osama bin Laden. This is a big deal.

-A great deal of financial intervention, aside from stimulus, during a time when the economy was poised to go over a cliff.

-Recognized the problem with unemployment and the reasons behind the problem-meaning recognizing the real reasons unemployment stays high. Corporations are holding back, not hiring, and also taking this opportunity to practice age and other discrimination.

Also one might add, help to orchestrate the demise of Muammar el-Qaddifi.

Stimulus funds, though not enough and fought over since they were voted for, helped California fix Interstate 5 after trucks had destroyed the right lane. Have you seen the ARRA signs around?

The repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

The resuscitation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (NCLB) that was about to go another year without revision. The administration finally suggested “waivers” and offered them to states.

The California Early Learning Challenge grant of $52.6 million squeezed out of Race to the Top monies given to eight other east coast states is for a specific program that will primarily fund local Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) being developed by Regional Leadership Consortia - voluntary groups of local First 5 commissions, county offices of education, and county governments. These Consortia will work with licensed child care programs, school districts, and child care partners.

Although the current Congress has a perverted way of counting every penny, one of the ways that the administration has led the nation is by looking out for young children. All those, including teachers, who need to criticize, must keep their students in mind.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Elementary and Secondary Education Act, NCLB, No Child Left Behind Act, Race to Top, public schools |
Be the first to leave a comment »

To Fix NCLB or Not

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011

Teachers sit in the middle of the muddle strewed around by California and Congress and the U.S. Department of Education.

November 1 means a rush of teaching in the school days before Thanksgiving and then three weeks of instruction before winter holiday vacation. What units can be completed in that timeframe?  Very few teachers have a moment to consider the legislation passed in the state, much less the fixes that the Senate has supposedly made to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) or the conditions of the waivers offered by the U.S. Department of Education.

To many in the education world, the waiver and its conditions seem to be a program worth attending to. It asks for growth data, requires goals to take the place of the lock-step NCLB yearly progress; and encourages data-driven accountability systems for both students and teacher evaluation.

The main problem is using the standardized or criterion-referenced tests to measure growth during the year. There are too many qualifiers as related in the San Francisco Chronicle, November 1, 2011, article “Test scores a poor measure” by David B. Cohen of Accomplished California Teachers. Assessing the improvement of students or teachers depends on more than one test a year.

On the other hand, the revisions approved by the Congressional Senate Education Committee have gone too far in relaxing accountability for schools. The language leads many disparate groups to worry about the most under-served kids. It’s a bill with deregulation at its core that allows state departments of education to set their own rules, that is, back to the old ways.

The state of California, with a legislature ever ready to stick its fingers in every small muddle, has come up with seven pieces of education legislation to fuss over in the Senate and Assembly-only two of which come even close to addressing the problems with student and teacher accountability. Concerns about head and neck injuries in sports and rules about administering emergency medical assistance to students with epilepsy are important, but guaranteed to cause unforeseen consequences.

The two bills that actually address instructional and learning issues concern the Common Core Standards (CCS) that the state’s Department of Education has approved. Align the English Learning Development curriculum to the CCS (AB 124) and approve additional instructional materials to go with the changed standards (AB 140)–a money issue.

Finally, the California Teachers Association (CTA) stand against an “unfunded top-down approach” by the U.S. Department of Education seems intractable. The CTA is leery of any premise that includes accountability by testing only.  A detailed report on evaluation for teachers has been written by the Accomplished California Teachers called A Quality Teacher in Every Classroom: An Evaluation System that Works for California (2010). A clue-the report advocates teacher input in an evaluation system.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in California Teachers Association, NCLB, No Child Left Behind Act, public schools |
Be the first to leave a comment »

ESEA Revision! Teacher Evaluation?

Wednesday, October 12th, 2011

Good news! The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee has finally released its draft of a bill filled with revisions to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 2002. The House Education Committee version, as stated in a previous post, is being negotiated piecemeal in hopes there will be no revision until after 2012.

The Senate legislation may pass, not only because Congress has been chastised for taking 4-5 years to make revisions. The bill takes into account the propositions made by the Obama Administration in 2009, the NCLB waivers by “executive authority” authorized by the U.S. Department of Education in September 2011, and it closely aligns with GOP proposals. Bipartisan legislation!

The main aspects to look over closely are standards, school improvement, and accountability.

preparing students to be college or career ready

preparing students to be college or career ready

We’ve heard for a long time that standards for student achievement must assure college or career readiness. But each state’s standards do not have to be aligned with the Common Core Standards, although all but six states have agreed to those standards. Also, English language Learners must have a set of standards which assure readiness to graduate.

As for accountability, the major change is that there are no longer hard and fast targets for achievement in reading and math. The states are accountable for “continuous growth.” Who keeps tabs on the growth for each state?

With growth in mind, school improvement for schools in each state must include intensive intervention for the 5% lowest-performing schools. Schools with the largest achievement gap between aggregates of the student population must implement practices to reduce the gap. Again, what entity will oversee these changes?

Critics point out that in the revisions the state determines the method for measuring the impact of programs. In the old NCLB that was the problem! The language was too vague to assure high standards for the measures used to assess student achievement. Without clear achievement targets, poor and minority students will be ignored.

The Senate draft and the House attempt does address the teacher accountability controversy, but leaves much up to the state. Each state must have four ratings for teachers and student achievement must be a factor. But, for example, how is student achievement and teacher evaluation to be made for subjects and grades not tested?

It appears that states and school districts are left to design and implement a plan. New reports to share best practices for teacher evaluation appear monthly. One of the latest is a report Peer Review: Getting Serious About Teacher Support and Evaluation by Julia E. Koppich and Daniel Humphrey. The report describes two exemplary Peer Assistance and Review (PAR) programs in California:  Poway School District near San Diego and San Juan School District near Sacramento.

Briefly, the program is geared to new teachers and experienced teachers who need to improve their instruction and classroom management. Consulting teachers take a year away from the classroom and provide well-designed accountability plans and intensive support to improve teaching. A governance board made up of administration and the teacher’s union has proven to work well to support the program, in spite of tough decisions about employment. It was apparent to the report writers that increased pressure to do better with less money was the critical factor, given that trained consulting teachers provide the most important role in the success of the program.

Back again to the same concern repeated many times. Where’s the money? This school year 37 states have cut funding for education. The American Jobs Act did not pass in the Senate as this post is being written. Since the Senate Education Committee seems to be doing some bipartisan work, maybe they will be the instigators of some spending on teachers. And police and the men and women who put out fires– before Congress lets the schools burn.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in ESEA, Elementary and Secondary Education Act, NCLB, No Child Left Behind Act, Peer Assistance and Review, achievement gap, low-performing schools, public schools |
Be the first to leave a comment »

“The time has come…

Wednesday, September 14th, 2011

To talk of many things”-Lewis Carroll. But talk about the lack of revision to ESEA (NCLB in its last iteration) is dominating the education world in September 2011.

rural school and district on Lopez Island, Washington

rural school and district on Lopez Island, Washington

The No Child Left Behind Act- President George W. Bush’s title for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)– was first authorized in 1965 under President Lyndon Johnson and revised every 5 years until the last alteration in 2001. Since then, all calls for adjustments have hit the high Congressional wall of inaction.

Who’s talking? National teachers’ unions NEA and AFT advocate change. The Council of Chief State School Officers exhorts Congress. Members of the National Governor’s Association have been in the forefront.

All across the country non-union teacher’s groups are the biggest voices: Educators4Excellence in New York; Teacher Plus in Boston, Indianapolis, and Chicago; Center for Teaching Quality in North Carolina, Denver, and Seattle to name a few.

What did the 2001 act provide? The legislation is lengthy and detailed. The sections on which most talk centers are “Improve the Academic Achievement of the Disadvantaged” and “Improving Basic Programs…” which delineate the main provisions of the act. Next, qualifications for teachers and paraprofessionals led to time-consuming paperwork to assure each teacher was “highly qualified.” Also, Innovative Programs morphed into advocacy for charter schools. The section “Improving Basic Programs” outlined the actions to show “adequate yearly progress” in reading and mathematics: in brief, each state must teach to its curriculum standards and provide outcomes on benchmark exams which would lead to 100% school proficiency in reading and math by 2014.

Why is NCLB so despised? All of these mandated programs are underfunded. As has been declared in this blog many times, it was clear to most teachers and administrators from the beginning that to have every student in a state reach grade level proficiency in two subjects by 2014 was a preposterous goal. The cost of upgrading curriculum standards and providing tests that give a single score by which to judge students is a contentious argument.

The ESEA legislation should have been revised by Congress in 2005-2006. It wasn’t. President Obama laid out revisions for Congress to take up in 2009 and March 2011. No go. In August 2011, the U.S. Department of Education used a provision in the legislation to offer waivers to the 2014 proficiency benchmark. States that could show consistent improvement in the four big administration priorities for ESEA revision would be authorized to alter their programs. The administration’s priorities are 1) working state data systems; 2) turn-around plans for low-performing schools; 3) improve experienced vs. new teacher distribution in low-performing schools; 4) boost curriculum standards in the state.

To create jobs in a stricken economy and to provide a further push to Congress, President Obama in his speech on September 8, 2011, recommended $60 billion to be divided among states to save teachers’ jobs and fix the infrastructure of school property. The inference was also to finish ESEA revisions.

Representative John Kline, Education Committee, commented on the high cost and more regulation, calling the program a teacher’s union bailout. Representative George Miller and Senator Tom Harkin of their respective Education Committees were more enthusiastic. So far Congressional revisions have been offered to bolster charter schools, eliminate forty programs under the supervision of the U.S. Department of Education (like the Star Schools Distance Learning Program), and flexible shift of federal funds (like Title 1) from poverty budget lines to special education.

What to our surprise! John Kline’s House Education committee has passed a vote on the charter schools revisions yesterday, September 13, 2011. On to a full house vote.

On the other hand, teacher’s organizations look for revision in school and teacher accountability rules and evaluation; stability in curriculum standards; and testing that leads to better learning rather than a score by which to berate teachers and students when the hurdle is not vaulted even though students may have leaped higher.

The time has come….

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Adequate Yearly Progress, Council of Chief State School Officers, ESEA, Elementary and Secondary Education Act, NCLB, National Governor's Association, No Child Left Behind Act, highly qualified teachers, low-performing schools, public schools |
Be the first to leave a comment »

Waiver to NCLB Goals?

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011

Vacation is over and our weekly posts resume just in time to comment on the waivers proposed by Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan to No Child Left Behind legislation that states 100% of United States students be proficient in reading and math by 2014.

Not long after 2002 when the law took effect, most teachers shook their heads as it became apparent that the goal was laudatory, but not gonna happen.

So four years after the legislation was up for revision and Congress still failed to amend the law, the Department of Education has overridden the requirement and set up a plan for waivers.

Did you hear sighs of relief even in states with high numbers of proficient students? Chiefs For Change, a bipartisan group of heads of state Departments of Education relaxed their pinched shoulders. They are all for setting high standards but allowing states to adjust for the needs of the students in their states. Last year, 2010, about 38,000 of the nation’s 100,000 public schools didn’t make the grade. As the benchmarks rise, more schools will “fail.”

On the other hand, the National Education Association (NEA) noted that now was the time to look at teacher-led and student-focused comprehensive reform. NEA wants to turn away from one-size fits all standardized testing. A good point that comes up the minute any state begins to adjust proficiency levels.

Waivers for flexibility in benchmark goals for reading and math will be offered under strict conditions, but even “plans in progress” will be taken into account, according to Duncan.

How about diverse California, where school starts next week in order to account for furlough days because of scarce money and to provide enough teaching days before state criterion-referenced tests are given in May? Will the state apply for a waiver immediately since it has pockets of proficient students among an abundance of students who are teetering on, if not already fallen below, the California proficiency level for 2010.

The state has not finished re-organizing its learning standards to agree with the Common Core Standards needed for various federal grants, nor completed a revised teacher evaluation and school accountability system. For certain, the state hopes it has sufficient “plans in progress.”

To top off these issues, on Wednesday, August 10, the news came out that the state has not gained enough revenues to keep its budget balanced. If revenues don’t increase, drastic cuts will affect schools and other social services. That’s what the state legislature agreed to in June 2011. Aside from flexibility waivers to achieve reform for California schools, will there be money available?

Who in California’s legislature will blink first?

Tags: , ,
Posted in Arne Duncan, NCLB, National Education Association, No Child Left Behind Act, public schools, school reform |
Be the first to leave a comment »

« Older Entries