What Kind of 'Reform'?

President-Elect ObamaBarack Obama's historic victory and Democratic gains in Congress have transformed the political environment, raising hopes for real change in the nation's schools. Our new President's education agenda is ambitious. It includes an increased federal investment in public schools; a vow to "support new, state-of-the-art assessment and accountability systems"; programs to address the dropout crisis, train and reward excellent teachers, fund early-childhood education, and expand college opportunities; a renewed commitment to equal opportunity for "left behind" groups; and a pledge to support bilingual education.

Reform, change, innovation, and other pleasing generalities are in the air and on the lips of the President and his education advisers. Virtually no one on any side of today's policy debates would oppose these goals in principle. But what will the words mean in practice? While it's too soon to tell, the new Administration has sent some troubling signals.

First, it stood silent in response to the Swift-boating of Linda Darling-Hammond, who had headed Obama's transition team on education. A career educator and a widely respected leader in school improvement, Professor Darling-Hammond was smeared as "anti-reform" and a defender of the "status quo." She was ruled out for Secretary of Education and returned to her teaching post at Stanford University.

Since then the "reforms" most often praised by Administration officials have been those espoused by – ironically – the fiercest defenders of current policies, as embodied by the No Child Left Behind Act. Now they hope to extend the test-and-punish approach even further, by advocating:

  • the firing of "bad teachers" and the closing of "failing schools";
  • a major expansion of charter schools;
  • a lengthening of the school day and the school year to enable increased tutoring (i.e., test preparation) for struggling students;
  • plans to develop "merit pay" systems for teachers based, at least in part, on their students' test scores; and
  • national standards for student performance, designed to make the successor to NCLB even more rigid and prescriptive.

The common thread here is an almost religious faith in high-stakes testing as the Path to Reform – notwithstanding a lack of evidence for its benefits (and considerable evidence for its perverse effects).

As educators understand – unlike many education policymakers – a single standardized test provides only limited information about a child's learning. So it is irresponsible, to say the least, to rely heavily on these tests to determine the fate of schools, teachers, and kids. Hardly anyone would disagree with the importance of "accountability." But accountability should serve the cause of improving schools, not punishing them. To make informed decisions that benefit children, we need what NCLB utterly fails to provide: a "body of evidence" about student progress that encompasses a wide range of indicators.

What's also missing from federal policy, at least thus far, is any plan to remedy the well-documented causes of underachievement: poverty and its toxic effects, de facto segregation, inadequate health care, poor housing, family instability, and crime-ridden communities. The importance of addressing such factors, rather than simply blaming the schools, was outlined in a statement, A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, signed by many of the nation's leading advocates for educational equity.

By all indications, that approach has yet to receive much attention from the Obama Administration. But on May 7, a prominent blame-the-schools lobby, the Education Equality Project, received the red-carpet treatment at the White House, when President Obama met with its leaders: Al Sharpton, Newt Gingrich, and Michael Bloomberg. This group has hailed school reform as the civil rights issue of the 21st century. Unfortunately, its vision of civil rights is a pale shadow of the original concept. The goal of equal educational opportunity has been replaced by the goal of equalizing test scores.

As for No Child Left Behind, the only specific change that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has proposed thus far is to rename the law. There's no doubt this pig could use some new lipstick, but that won't be nearly enough to clean up the mess it has made.

Some advocates for public schools have already expressed their disillusionment with these signals. "Based on what I have seen to date," writes Diane Ravitch, "I conclude that Obama has given President George W. Bush a third term in education policy and that Arne Duncan is the male version of Margaret Spellings." She adds that the "reform" agenda thus far is right out of the Republican playbook. And Ravitch should know – as a former assistant secretary of education in the George H.W. Bush Administration.

Let's hope that assessment is premature. There is much work to be done to improve schools for English-language learners and other "left behind" students. The reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a long-overdue task that Congress must tackle soon, could provide an excellent opportunity to bring about reform we can truly believe in – not just a rehash of failed policies.

In that spirit, we have offered our Equity Agenda for ELLs. We hope the new Administration is listening.

Reauthorization Stalls
No Child Left Behind vs. Reality

U.S. CapitolAs most educators will tell you, since 2001 the No Child Left Behind Act has been on a collision course with reality. Our elected representatives have been slow to appreciate this. Yet – even in Washington – reality tends to prevail in the end. While it's taken the politicians more than five years, they are beginning to face facts: (1) NCLB is a disaster in the classroom, and (2) growing public opposition reflects that reality.

Sen. Edward Kennedy and Rep. George Miller, the senior Democrats on education matters, had hoped to push through a new, slightly modified version of NCLB in 2007. But they now concede that won't happen. While Kennedy left the door open to action by his Senate HELP Committee, on 7 November Miller issued a bitter statement blaming President Bush for refusing to support needed changes in NCLB and for insisting that Congress "stay the course on inadequate education funding."

According to conventional Washington wisdom – which is often wrong, but probably not in this case – reauthorizing the law in a presidential election year would likely prove difficult (though not impossible). Congressional insiders now believe the job won't be finished until 2009 or even 2010.

The good news in this scenario: voters will have more time to express their frustration with test-and-punish accountability, and advocates will have more time to make the case for completely rewriting NCLB. The bad news: current law will remain in place until Congress acts, and nobody can predict when that will be. While the political coalition that passed NCLB seems to have collapsed, a new one has yet to coalesce around an alternative vision of school reform.

Rep. Miller has already tried one approach: a package of modest concessions designed to mitigate some of the worst effects of NCLB. Along with Democratic and Republican leaders of the House Education and Labor Committee, he posted a lengthy "discussion draft" and an 11-page summary of proposals for Title I. (The Institute has submitted detailed comments that focus on the likely impact for English language learners.) A draft for Titles II-IX was subsequently posted in preparation for a committee hearing on 10 September (view webcast).

The ensuing discussion served to mobilize opposition from both sides. Miller's proposals drew fire from die-hard defenders of NCLB – including a veto threat from President Bush – and yet did too little to assuage the concerns of most critics.

In our view, while the draft bill contains some minor improvements, it falls far short of correcting the fundamental problems of NCLB. These include a one-size fits all accountability approach that fails to consider ELLs' unique needs, a reliance on invalid and unreliable assessments to make high-stakes judgments about schools, and a misconceived ELL "subgroup" that is constantly changing and has no hope of reaching 100% proficiency by 2014, as both NCLB and the Miller proposal demand. Click here to read the Institute's letter to the Education and Labor Committee, with its comments on Title I. Click here to view our specific recommendations for Title I and Title III.

The Institute is also working closely with the Forum on Educational Accountability, an alliance of 141 education and civil rights groups that have signed a joint statement expressing major concerns about NCLB. FEA has also submitted comments to the Education and Labor Committee criticizing the inadequacy of the leadership proposal.

For additional coverage, see Mary Ann Zehr's Learning the Language Blog at Education Week.

Selling NCLB
Would You Buy a Used Law from This Woman?

Margaret SpellingsU.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings made headlines last summer when she declared that the No Child Left Behind Act is "like Ivory Soap. It's 99.9 percent pure." That was just the beginning of her unabashed sales pitch.

Spellings has been touting NCLB as a rip-roaring success in boosting academic achievement. "According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP]," she says, "9-year-olds made greater reading gains in five years than in the previous 28 years combined." In fact, as Stephen Krashen has shown, virtually all of those gains occurred before the 2002-03 school year, when NCLB took effect.

Now Spellings has issued a misleading report about the progress of English language learners. In a letter to the Washington Post, she claims that ELLs' 4th grade reading scores "increased by 20 points from 2000 to 2005, more than three times better than their peers." And she credits NCLB for this accomplishment, which suggests remarkable progress toward overcoming the achievement gap.

If only it were true.

Technically speaking, the reported increase is accurate. But that's because ELLs' performance took a nosedive in 2000. Then their scores rebounded over the next three years – that is, before schools began to implement NCLB. The graph below, from the Education Department's own web site, provides a more instructive picture of what's going on. It's clear that no statistically significant gains have occurred for 4th grade ELLs in reading since 2003. (That's true for 8th graders as well.)

NAEP Scale Scores, 4th Grade Reading, 1998-2005

*Significantly different from 2005
Source: National Center for Education Statistics, Nation's Report Card, 2005

Independent analyses of NAEP scores for all students, conducted by the Harvard Civil Rights Project and Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), have also shown virtually no progress in reading or math since 2003. Nor could they find any evidence that NCLB has reduced the achievement gap between racial and ethnic groups.

But the Saleswoman-in-Chief remains undaunted. She continues to "cherry pick" data designed to bamboozle Congress and the public into believing that this law is working for kids. Don't buy it.

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Federal Budget
Congressional Watchdog Challenges ELL Funding Formula

The Bush Administration has been using a formula of questionable validity to distribute federal grants for programs serving English language learners, according to an investigative report by the Government Accountability Office, released on 7 December. The funding under Title III of the No Child Left Behind Act – $669 million in 2006 – is currently based on "self-reported" census data about English proficency rather than on objective assessments by school personnel.

There are major disparities between the two data sources, the GAO found. This seems to have created both "winners" and "losers" among the states in how Title III funds are allocated. In 2004-05, for example, California served 516,000 more ELLs than the Census Bureau counted through its American Community Survey; Texas served 140,000 more; and Arizona served 53,000 more. By contrast, New York served 128,000 fewer ELLs than the ACS reported; New Jersey, 45,000 fewer; and Georgia, 28,000 fewer.

Did some states receive more than their fair share of Title III funding, while others got less? The GAO called on the U.S. Department of Education to find out, by developing criteria for determining whether the language data are accurate.

Rep. George Miller (D-CA), the incoming chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, issued a statement promising that: “I will make sure a review of NCLB’s provisions affecting English language learners is a priority so we can make sure that the law works as intended for these children.” 

Click here to download the GAO's full report.

Bilingual Education
Federal 'Practice Guides' on ELLs Omit Native Languages

Has bilingual instruction become a taboo subject at the U.S. Department of Education? That would seem to explain the omission of the subject from three federally funded "guidebooks" on educating English language learners, released in late October. In advising practitioners on how to serve these students, the authors made no mention whatsoever of language of instruction.

Grover Whitehurst, director of the Department's Institute of Education Sciences, told Education Week that the practice guides were designed "to focus on research-based recommendations that could be carried out anyplace in the country." Bilingual education was omitted because it is illegal in some states, he said.

This is not the first time the Bush Administration has blocked an opportunity to inform practitioners about the benefits of native-language instruction. In 2005, a federally funded review of research on ELL programs, conducted by the National Literacy Panel for Language Minority Children and Youth, determined that ELLs who are "instructed in their native language as well as in English perform better, on average, on measures of English reading proficiency than [those] instructed only in English." But Whitehurst declined to release that report, arguing that it was methodologically flawed. The study, Developing Literacy in Second-Language Learners, was published in 2006 by an academic press.

Reading First
IG Finds Corruption and Cronyism in $4.8 Billion Program

The Bush Administration has been using the Reading First program to reward political cronies and ideological allies, ignoring a legal mandate to make funding decisions that reflect "scientifically based research," according to federal investigators. These and other findings are detailed in a report by the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education, released on 22 September 2006.

As a result of favoritism and conflicts of interest, the IG found, states were pressured to approve materials from only a handful of preferred publishers. Virtually all others were excluded from participating in Reading First, which has provided $4.8 billion in grants to states and school districts since 2002.

The disclosures brought calls to hold the Bush Administration accountable for the alleged abuses. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif), the ranking Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee, charged that Reading First officials had "wasted taxpayer dollars on an inferior reading curriculum for kids that was developed by a company headed by a Bush friend and campaign contributor. Instead of putting children first, they chose to put their cronies first." Miller asked the Justice Department to initiate a criminal investigation.

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NCLB
Public Vote of No Confidence for 'Test-and-Punish' Accountability

While supporting the stated goals of No Child Left Behind – in particular, the effort to bridge 'achievement gaps' – Americans are increasingly skeptical of the law's methods and assumptions, according to a Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll released on 22 August 2006.

  • Nearly six in 10 respondents believe that NCLB has either had no effect or has done actual harm to public schools; only 26% say the law is helping.
  • While NCLB holds schools alone "accountable" for achievement gaps between white and minority students, 77% of Americans blame societal factors, while only 19% cite the quality of schooling.
  • More than two-thirds of the public oppose the use of a single standardized test to measure "adequate yearly progress."

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