© 2008 by Michael Swickard, Ph.D.
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” – Albert Einstein
The Average Yearly Progress numbers for
First, the numbers can mean whatever you want them to mean since the accountability they represent is a political rather than an educational measure. Second, the core socialist political agenda measures are deeply flawed and do not reflect the general state of educational offerings in our public schools.
But No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is the law of the land and we must deal with it. We have to assume a number of things before we can buy into any NCLB testing conclusion.
Foremost, we have to buy into the notion that every single student must do well or the school is failing. We further have to assume that the schools are the only educational influence on the students. Finally, we have to assume that if changes are made it will improve the school.
Why schools miss benchmarks
Some students come to school to learn; others come but are not really looking to learn. Last, some students come to school firmly intent upon not learning. The accountability tests do not note this difference in students. As a former high school teacher, this is so stupid that I do not have words for the concept.
Most schools miss their Average Yearly Progress goals because of the population of special education students who do not perform as well as the students as a whole. Politicians say all students must perform at a specified level. The reality is that students have different organic abilities because of physical issues. These students are doing as well as they can. Politicians insisting they do better have no effect on them.
Also, as stupid as this may sound, many parents tell me they do not like the testing so they tell their children to just put gobble-gook on the tests. There is no consequence for not doing well on the tests so it is not a high-stakes test for the students. If your job at the schools is on the line and the students do not see this as a high-stakes test, what can you do?
Next, a school can pass 36 of the 37 measures and yet be branded a failing school. A friend’s son got 1600 on the SAT (got every question right) yet came from a school that, because of one measure unrelated to my friend’s son education, was branded failing. Obviously, the school did not fail my friend’s son. It is a crime to brand this fine school as failing.
The core dysfunction
The core of the dysfunction in the accountability measures is that 99 percent of the students can get an excellent education and political leaders will make a radical change in the school.
What I thought of most when the accountability numbers came out is that, for more years than we can remember, we have heard that our schools are broken. It is the political and media mantra. People who have not seen a classroom this century give a convincing nod of the head when they say that the schools are terrible and the students are all uneducated.
The politicians and the media have slammed schools for all of history. You cannot find a year when the politicians and media said that the schools were doing well. There is no year when the schools were good. The criticism of schools has been relentless every year.
And if it was just criticism, well, that would not be so bad. As the saying goes, “Opinions are not so bad as long as people do not act upon them.”
This does not excuse our public schools for not being better. There has been one hundred years of research without a breakthrough success. Why? Most researchers are not looking in the right place.
An interesting take
An interesting take on improving student learning is in the August 11, 2008 issue of Forbes Magazine. Researchers Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson write in Creative Disruption: How to Change the Way Kids Learn, “If the goal is to educate all students so they have an all-American shot at realizing their dreams, we must find a way to disrupt the monolithic classroom and move toward a student-centric model.”
Instead of looking at individualizing education, the political establishment concentrates on the factory model by putting educational assessment in terms of a factory. There are standardized tests to see that the entire school makes Adequate Yearly Progress. It is called No Child Left Behind, but if you look closely the children are completely lost in the system. It is only tangentially about students. Mostly, it is about the adults who run schools.
A century from now people will shake their heads and ask, “How could they have been so stupid?” Answer: by using political solutions for educational problems.
The politically driven school-accountability movement damages our students. Hopefully, someone in power will notice this before more generations of students are injured by the NCLB legislation. The school accountability process does not work.
Swickard is a weekly columnist for this site. You can reach him at michael@swickard.com.