Connecticut is expected to sue the first legal complaint against No Child Left Behind in their dispute with the federal government over annual school testing. Though other states have filed legal complaints, Connecticut is the first to sue.
Connecticut Education Commissioner Betty Sternberg and other state officials met for one hour with U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings in Washington. Afterward, they said there is only about a 1 percent chance that they will get a waiver for the No Child Left Behind education act’s requirements for testing in grades three, five and seven. State officials had sought periodic assessments of those students instead of testing, because Connecticut already tests students in grades four, six, eight and 10.
…Federal officials agreed there is little chance they will give in on the annual testing requirement of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law.
…Connecticut’s planned legal challenge is expected to focus on a lack of federal funding for states to implement changes mandated by the law. No Child says states and school districts will not have to spend their own money to meet the law’s requirements.
Dr. Betty J. Sternberg, Connecticut Education Commissioner, was called “un-American” by Margaret Spellings, the secretary of the United States Department of Education, for criticizing the law as a “soft bigotry of low expectations.” Though Dr. Sternberg has asked for a formal apology none has been given.
eRobin has done a good job at dissecting the political implications of this battle, but I’m more concerned with the practical applications. We have all heard the phrase “teaching to the test” and criticisms of this phenomena, but Dr. Sternberg perfectly captures the real problem with all this testing. She writes that replacing Connecticut’s bipartisan, twenty year record of testing in alternate years for a yearly standardized test “will cost millions of dollars and tell us nothing that we do not already know about our students’ achievement.”
So what’s with all the talk about NCLB’s progress?
Northwest [a research company] found that test scores on its exams did, in fact, go up from one year to the next under No Child Left Behind, typically by less than a point. The reason successive classes appear to do a little better than those before them may stem from the fact that younger students have grown up during a time of more regular testing than their immediate predecessors, the researchers said, and are therefore higher achievers.
But rising test scores tend to mask how much progress individual students make as they travel through school, the researchers found. Since No Child Left Behind, that individual growth has slowed, possibly because teachers feel compelled to spend the bulk of their time making sure students who are near proficiency make it over the hurdle.
The practice may leave teachers with less time to focus on students who are either far below or far above the proficiency mark, the researchers said, making it less likely for the whole class to move forward as rapidly as before No Child Left Behind set the agenda.
Public schools and public school teachers are vilified as socialist bevies of decay, but there is evidence now that some of our assumptions about public school and private school are wrong. Kimberly Swygert looks at some surprising research on public and private schooling: public school students outperform private school students every quarter.
As per the BushCo patterns, and shucking any accusations of conspiracy theories, I firmly believe that if the purpose of NCLB isn’t to strip the school systems of funding and legitimacy and force them into privatization altogether, it is to turn the public school system (a socialist system, as Rush would say) into business models.
This particular attempt at running a school like a business was quite successful. They ran it like Enron.
More Education Reading:
This week’s Carnival of Education.
The Super’s Blog, by a superintendent in Indiana. Heavy on satire, including this post titled “Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels admits he would lie, steal, cheat or put a dead horse head in your bed, in order to get what he wants.”
Minnesota, a Nanny State?: Some Minnesotan politicians are legislating mandated curriculum literally from birth, including a statewide testing system that requires preschoolers are tested at least once for state-determined proficiency by the age of three.