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Thanks to the federal education law No Child Left Behind, American children starting kindergarten today can expect to take 17 federally required tests by the time they graduate.
Congress started debate last week on bills that will decide whether the next generation of American students faces the same gauntlet of tests.
What happens in Washington, D.C., should also decide whether, because of those tests, all public school teachers and schools would remain at risk of being labeled as failures.
It will decide whether power over America’s classrooms will shift from Washington to the states. And whether public tax dollars will flow to private schools.
This is the first time since the No Child Left Behind Act was supposed to expire in 2007 that Congress has even held a debate on the controversial – some say despised — education law. It has remained the law of the land.
Replacing it is a popular idea.
Replacing it with what is the big question.
“It’s exciting,” said Denise Juneau, Montana’s state superintendent of public instruction. “I’m glad it’s getting a discussion. It’s long overdue.”
The U.S. Senate last week started debating a bipartisan bill, the Every Child Achieves Act.
The House voted narrowly, 218 to 213, Wednesday to pass its own reform, the Student Success Act, a Republican bill. President Barack Obama has threatened to veto the House bill and criticized the Senate bill.
Montana Democratic Sen. Jon Tester said Friday he likes the Senate bill and thinks it will pass the Senate, perhaps by the end of this week, though it faces a hundred amendments.
“One never wants to bet much money on the Senate,” Tester said in a phone interview, “but I would almost bet the farm it will by out by the August break.”
Co-sponsored by Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander and Washington Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, the Senate bill came out of committee with rare unanimous support.
Alexander said the 600-page bill would shift decisions about how to help 3.4 million teachers help 50 million children back to “those closest to the children.” It would also oversee how $23 billion in federal money is distributed to states each year – about 4 percent of national spending on public schools.
“I’m actually very optimistic,” Tester said. “This bill isn’t perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot better than the old No Child Left Behind – a heck of a lot better.
“It moves power back to school boards” and states, he said. “It moves away from high-stakes testing.”
The 100 percent solution
No Child Left Behind sought to force public schools to improve academic performance, particularly by poor and minority students, by giving all students standardized tests and publicizing results, school by school.
It declared that 100 percent of students were supposed to test at grade level by 2014, including all subgroups – poor students, minority students, those with disabilities, and kids still learning English.
If students didn’t reach 100 percent proficiency, entire schools and districts were labeled as failing to make “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) and faced punishment. Critics said the law was based on sanctions and “shame and blame.”
Diane Ravitch, a former Education Department assistant secretary in the Bush administration, was a supporter who became a critic of No Child Left Behind.
“Congress and the Bush administration believed that their mandate could produce universal success in school,” Ravitch wrote, “akin to passing a law proclaiming that all crime should cease by a date certain.”
In some states, teachers were fired. Low-performing schools were closed.
That didn’t happen in Montana, Juneau said, but even here, teachers have focused more and more time on teaching kids to pass tests.
“Parents and communities know their school does a great job,” Juneau said. “But No Child Left Behind labels them a failure.”
The Senate bill would end AYP, Tester said, and let states decide how to measure schools’ progress.
Tester plans this week to offer an amendment that has gained attention nationally, which would cut the number of federally mandated tests roughly in half.
Called “grade span testing,” it would have students take math and reading tests just three times – once each in elementary school, middle school and high school – instead of every year in third through eighth grades plus high school. It’s supported by teachers unions.
“It faces an uphill climb,” Tester said, with critics on two fronts. Some Republicans think there should be no federally mandated tests, while some Democrats fear poor and minority students would be overlooked again without annual tests.
“I’m a former teacher, my mom’s a teacher, my aunts are teachers, one of two my kids are teachers – this thing is important to me because classroom time is a valuable commodity,” Tester said. “We’re spending a lot of time testing. For the federal government to require testing every year is an overstep.”
Montana Republican Sen. Steve Daines introduced an amendment called the A-PLUS Act as a way to “expand local control of our schools” and put education dollars “closer to the classrooms.” It failed Thursday on a 44-54 vote.
“Increasing educational opportunity in Montana and across the country isn’t going to happen through federal mandates or one-size-fits-none regulations,” Daines said on introducing A-PLUS. “My amendment would give states greater flexibility in allocating federal education funding and ensuring academic achievement in their schools.”
Long championed by conservative reformers, the A-PLUS Act would allow states to receive federal education dollars in block grants with few strings attached, instead of tying dollars to specific programs (helping poor or Indian students or promoting safety, for example), each with federal rules and oversight.
A-PLUS was supported by the Heritage Action for America, and opposed by the National Education Association teachers union, which charged it would let states use federal funds for any educational purpose, including private school vouchers, and could distribute dollars away from needy students.
In the House, Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke cast a yes vote last week for the House education bill. He said it would restore local control and parental control, while outlawing “abusive tactics” used by the federal government.
“Unelected bureaucrats who don’t know the difference between Butte, Bozeman, or Winnett have made decisions … long enough,” Zinke said in a press release.
If both the House and Senate bills pass, then a conference committee would meet to hammer out a compromise. That may happen in September, Tester said. What happens will matter to Montanans.
“Education policy touches every family out there,” Tester said.
The education debate is happening in an era when conservatives and liberals are in a long tug of war over “school choice.” Sen. Alexander proposed Wednesday an amendment to allow school vouchers, which would let low-income students use federal tax dollars to pay for tuition at private schools.
It failed, on a 45-52 vote, the Washington Post reported. Sen. Murray argued vouchers would undermine public schools.
Eric Feaver, president of the Montana teachers union MEA-MFT and a fierce opponent of privatization, said his union opposed No Child Left Behind from the start.
“Everything bad we predicted would happen, happened,” Feaver said. “It did cause a narrowing of curriculum, it did cause teachers to teach to the test, it did drive school districts nuts with an absolutely impossible-to-achieve expectation that all our students would be 100 percent proficient by 2014.
“If Congress blew the whole thing up, I wouldn’t be very unhappy.”
Feaver said he’s watching the bill’s progress, leery of “dangerous” ideas like vouchers and “portability,” which would let parents of poor children take federal dollars from low-income Title I schools and use the money at private or even religious schools.
“Sometimes the devil you know,” Feaver said, “is better than the devil you might get.”
Farewell, Lake Wobegon
Eighteen years ago, when Bozeman’s then-School Superintendent Paula Butterfield made school-by-school test scores public for the first time, she could brag, “There isn’t a single school that’s not above average. We’re Lake Wobegon.”
For a generation of parents raised with the idea of bell-curve grading, it wasn’t surprising that most students would do OK, some would excel, and a minority would fail. It just seemed the natural order of things.
The majority of students were winners, so the schools were seen as doing a good job. If a couple schools had lower scores, that was usually explained by larger populations of poor kids. So, not the schools’ or teachers’ fault.
No Child Left Behind turned things upside down.
Passed by President George Bush’s administration in 2001 with strong support from liberal Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy, the new law focused attention on the kids who were left behind.
Thanks to that focus on helping struggling students, as well as innovative teaching techniques, test scores do appear to have improved since No Child Left Behind took effect in 2002. A look at reading and math scores for Bozeman, Montana and U.S. students shows a general trend of improvement, even when measured by race and poverty.
Rob Watson, Bozeman’s school superintendent for the last three years, said the legacy of No Child Left Behind here is that it required taking account “of all students.” By focusing on poor and minority subgroups, he said, “that’s been beneficial for everyone.”
“The impact has been a change in the way we look at student performance data, to focus on making sure all students succeed,” Watson said. “That’s not to say we weren’t doing that before. No Child Left Behind shined a light on that.”
“Moving forward, that’s what we want to continue with – making sure we’re meeting the needs of all students.”
A lot of the credit for rising test scores, he said, should go to processes Bozeman schools and teachers have put in place. For example, teachers now meet regularly in teams to talk about strategies for helping individual students who struggle. Credit should also go, he said, to families.
But No Child Left Behind “just didn’t make sense,” Watson said, when it set a goal of 100 percent proficiency for all students. Under AYP standards, Bozeman High, both middle schools and five elementary schools have all been labeled as “in need of improvement.”
“I think if you asked most teachers,” Watson added, “they would say there are a lot of instructional days lost to testing.”
Barb Pierre, a Bozeman elementary teacher for 26 years who now works as a mentor with new teachers, agreed.
“Teachers get frustrated,” Pierre said, to have their kids tested in March, two months before the end of the school year. So they try to cover as much curriculum as possible before the tests.
Both teachers and kids feel stressed by tests, she said. And they take away from instructional time.
“When you’re testing, you’re not teaching,” Pierre said.
Bozeman and Montana have done better than many states in resisting the push to high-stakes testing. Juneau, for example, refused to jump on board with the Obama administration’s effort to tie teacher evaluations to test scores.
“In some states, teachers are scripted, they’re teaching to the test,” Pierre said. “We’ve never been asked to do that here.”
“Fortunately Bozeman has resisted that pressure to eliminate art, music, science,” she said. “We still believe kids need a well-rounded education.”
In the future, Pierre said, she’d like more focus on whether students are progressing from the point where they started. A struggling fifth-grader, for example, may improve from second- to fourth-grade level in math, but still fall short of the bar set for fifth-grade proficiency under No Child Left Behind.
“We’re one of the last, best places in valuing a varied curriculum,” she said, “and not letting testing drive our teaching.”
Originally published by the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.