Contributor
Monty Neill, Deputy Director, FairTest
Related Link:
http://www.fairtest.org
Biography provided by participant
Monty Neill, Ed.D., is currently Executive Director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest). He has led FairTest's work on testing in the public schools since 1987. He has initiated national and state coalitions of education, civil rights, religious and parent organizations to work toward fundamental change in the assessment of students and in accountability. He currently chairs the Forum on Educational Accountability, an alliance working to overhaul federal education law (the No Child Left Behind Act, in particular) based on the Joint Organizational Statement on NCLB, signed by nearly 150 national groups. Under his leadership, FairTest has worked on graduation tests and other high-stakes tests with organizations in many states.
Among many publications, he is co-author of Failing Our Children, a report analyzing the federal No Child Left Behind Act and providing guidance toward new, helpful accountability systems. He led the National Forum on Assessment in developing Principles and Indicators for Student Assessment Systems, signed by over 80 national and regional education and civil rights organizations. He also authored Implementing Performance Assessments: A Guide to Classroom School and System Reform, and Testing Our Children: A Report Card on State Assessment Systems, the first comprehensive evaluation of all 50 state testing programs.
He earned a Doctorate at Harvard University with his dissertation The Struggle of Boston's Black Community for Quality and Equality in Education: 1960-1985. He has taught and been an administrator in pre-school, high school and college, and he is a grandfather of three children in the public schools.
Recent Responses
November 3, 2009 12:51 PM
The consensus among education experts is that RTTT is not backed by research. It is based, it would seem, on the same test-and-punish ideology that produced NCLB. If anything, RTTT is NLCB on steroids. It extends to teachers the punitive attacks based on limited and flawed standardized tests that have been waged on schools, and it intensifies NCLB's inadequate requirements for "transforming" schools, which are either unproven or aleady proven to fail. Einstein’s definition of insanity was "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" The new definition should be doing the same thing ever…
Read moreOctober 28, 2009 02:39 PM
In considering how much or what sort of foundation involvement with government is desirable, it is worth looking at a prominent case: the Gates Foundation. A recent Associated Press article opens with the line, "The real secretary of education, the joke goes, is Bill Gates." The Gates foundation recently offered 15 states $250,000 each to help them prepare applications to the Department of Education's "Race to the Top" fund. After many other states complained, the Gates purse strings will be open to all states willing to sign off on an 8-point checklist saying, in essence, they will…
Read moreOctober 21, 2009 05:51 PM
I want, sadly, to announce here the death of researcher, writer and advocate, Jerry Bracey, who died quietly in his sleep last night, at age 69. His death has stunned many of us, particulary those of us who knew him personally and the many more who relied on his critical analyses and careful interpretations of data. His most recent book (of 8 published) is "Education Hell" (Educational Research Service), he blogged regularly on Huffington Post, he wrote the research column for Phi Delta Kappan, and he moderated for years the unusual "EDDRA" listserv, aimed at exposing and debunking educational misinformation.…
Read moreOctober 21, 2009 05:06 PM
Sometimes it is worth weighing in late in the development of a discussion because you can see a wide array of interesting posts. I will avoid repeating them, but I want to give special kudos to Bob Peterson for reminding us that unless the nation is willing to pay enough to provide good schools and ensure skilled professionals (which we do not in most urban, some suburban, and many rural areas), we cannot expect good results. Yes, serious evaluation of teachers aimed primarily at improving their craft is fundamental to improving schools, and that means principals and other…
Read moreOctober 14, 2009 04:07 PM
Concurring with Diane, not only should AYP requirements be scrubbed from i3, but that entire component of NCLB should be completely overhauled ASAP. As several respondents explained, excluding needy districts based on AYP when most are now not making AYP will exclude some districts in which improvement is both sorely needed and possible with an infusion of well-used resources. For those continuing to wonder about the consequences of NCLB, it is interesting to see once again the trend lines for NAEP improvement are flattening, continuing a trend that began in 2003, which is about when NCLB started to…
Read moreSeptember 28, 2009 01:56 PM
I am not a teacher nor a subject area expert. So I am not going to comment on the content. Rather, I'll address two related points: the use of top-down standards and high-stakes testing. Having standards is pretty common across nations (or their states), but their specificity and intrusiveness varies greatly. Highly-praised Finland (the size of a U.S. state) has national standards described as loose. What really drives Finland’s achievement is high-quality teaching and continuing professional learning and collaboration that turns general standards into strong curriculum and instruction. They are closer to having horizontal standards – things teachers…
Read moreSeptember 16, 2009 05:21 PM
I find it interesting how much of the discussion of seemingly somewhat different topics – such as ensuring more college graduates - ends up involving assessment issues. I was pleased to read Michael Lomax' discussion of how the Gates Millenium Challenge does not rely on SAT or ACT scores as the high school record is more valuable. In fact, at the Historically Black Colleges and Universities studied in Crossing the Line, there's a negative correlation between SAT scores and six year graduation rates. Fortunately, a growing number of colleges do not erect test barriers to applicants. FairTest has…
Read moreSeptember 10, 2009 09:55 AM
It is certainly true that some local approaches have been tied to low-level practices and expectations - while others have been excellent. High-stakes standardized tests have created an illusion of quality based on inflated scores. They have failed to support or lead the kinds of strong schooling all children deserve (through inadequate tests and often by pretending that ignoring resources and focusing on tests could solve educationa problems). And they are undermining high quality in many localities. The danger is to believe we must choose between inadequate localism and inadequate centralized high-stakes testing. Nor is the solution simply to have better…
Read moreSeptember 9, 2009 05:35 PM
Assessments used for accountability should meet the thoroughly ignored criteria that were in the 1994 and 2001 (NCLB) authorizations of ESEA, including the requirements to use multiple measures (multiple sources of evidence would be an improved way to say it) and to assess both lower and higher order skills. What is "commonly given" as Sandy puts it should be at a minimum open to more investigation: if kids can show they really can write well, do we care if they all respond to the same prompt? Doing the latter has clearly shown it produces teaching to narrow prompts and is…
Read moreSeptember 9, 2009 01:32 PM
It is encouraging to see how much the discussion of 21st, 20th and 5th BCE century skills recognize that the current testing structure cannot work for our children or our society. Neither it nor the unequal educations provided by race and class ever served many children well. As some have noted, too many current efforts, such as looming "common" tests and the intensified misuse of current state exams to measure (not evaluate) teachers are helping to cement in place the inequalities of past centuries. So long as the nation mandates high stakes attached to multiple-choice and short-response standardized tests,…
Read moreAugust 26, 2009 02:07 PM
I will be brief in my response to Sandy's latest post on NAEP. He and I do agree that people should examine those results carefully in light of other evidence on the impact of NCLB. First, score gaps closed dramatically and scores increased greatly from the introduction of NAEP until the late 1980s. In some cases, the gaps have never been closer. That was, as the Civil Rights Project has pointed out, primarily the legacy of desegregation. As desegregation faded, scores declined and gaps widened. Second, scores have again risen and gaps closed since the late 1990s.…
Read moreAugust 26, 2009 01:51 PM
FairTest and I deeply appreciate Sen. Kennedy's decades of national leadership on education, his focus on equity, commitment to adequate federal funding, the top-notch staff with whom we often worked, and more. FairTest recognizes that schools alone will not improve education, and Sen. Kennedy was a vital force for improving communities, job opportunities, health care and many other factors that can help or harm student learning. We disagreed with him on NCLB and the political and educational strategy which has resulted in the current mandates, but for nearly five decades Kennedy was an important force for progressive education reform. …
Read moreAugust 25, 2009 03:38 PM
Sandy Kress wants to dismiss my arguments as 'silly and gratuitous,' but to do so requires avoiding real evidence. He asserts that "Poor and minority students are far closer to grade level in the earlier grades today, as measured by NAEP, than they were in 1999 when the poilcies of these "experts" were in place." Well, my policy proposals were not in place, but more to the immediate point is Kress' selection of the comparison date, 1999. Black NAEP age 13 long-term trend reading results in 1988 were statistically indistinguishable from the 2008 scores. Black scores declined, then came…
Read moreAugust 25, 2009 03:05 PM
Bill Jackson wrote: <And finally, a question for Monty: If standardized tests like NAEP are so meaningless, why do we care about NAEP results anyway? Why would we look to them to assess whether NCLB was “working” or not?’> Standardized test results are not necessarily meaningless, but they are of quite limited value. One of the areas where they do have use is as a snapshot of some useful aspects of student learning. For this purpose, sampling is quite sufficient. Which is what NAEP does, and it provides some useful information. There is much in reading, math…
Read moreAugust 24, 2009 08:00 AM
Stagnant scores on college admissions exams, such as the ACT and SAT, provide further evidence that the test-and-punish regimens of the federal “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) law and many state assessment programs, some of which include graduation tests, are failing to meet their primary goals. High-stakes exam proponents have long claimed that attaching sanctions to mandatory annual tests would markedly improve educational performance, increase readiness for higher education and close racial achievement gaps. But college admissions exam scores have remained generally flat over the past five years. Little progress has been made in college readiness or in reducing historic…
Read moreAugust 10, 2009 04:09 PM
One more quick comment. The question is whether students should be paid to learn. I think the responses make clear we already have plenty of research to show that the answer is 'No." However, the example in the question is about test scores, and almost all the reward programs pay kids for boosting their scores. Learning does not equal test scores: it is far richer and deeper, while the tests measure far too little and the focus on boosting test scores narrows curriculum and instruction. These kinds of rewards programs only produce more fuel for test score inflation instead of…
Read moreAugust 10, 2009 03:28 PM
Test score "bribes" for students are like steroids for athletes -- they can temporarily boost performance, but their long-term impact damages the very thing you are trying to improve. Policymakers, educators and parents need to ask if short-term test score gains are worth the cost of long-term damage to students’ intrinsic motivation to learn. From the distant vantage point of politicians and policymakers, short-term test score bumps look mighty attractive, especially in the age of No Child Left Behind. By the time the test score bubble bursts, policymakers and pols are likely to have moved on. Parents and teachers, however,…
Read moreAugust 4, 2009 12:27 PM
Just to perhaps get some discussion going among colleagues on this list: Lisa Graham Keegan is correct that evaluation of teachers and principals is generally quite poor, a point on which a wide variety of analysts and organizations agree. Union contracts may be an obstacle in some places, but that hardly explains the problem in states where there are essentially no union contracts. The reasons are no doubt multiple, from lack of willingness to spend on good evaluation to lack of structures in which to carry them out to lack of training for evaluators, etc. Causes will have to be considered in…
Read moreAugust 4, 2009 09:41 AM
Is it fair to children to further narrow their education and encourage even more teaching to predominantly multiple-choice tests, as is now happening under "No Child Left Behind"? No – but that will be the primary consequence if federal "Race to the Top" guidelines link test scores to teacher and principal evaluations and create a new cycle of standardized tests. The guidelines say that tests should be a "significant factor" in teacher evaluations. "Significant" is not defined, but it is safe to assume it means weighty enough to affect educator behaviors, and hence intensify teaching to the test. …
Read moreJuly 27, 2009 01:17 PM
Gloria Ladson-Billings, former president of the American Educational Research Association, correctly re-named the "achievement gap" as the "educational debt." That is, the learning gaps by "race" and class exist due to deep-rooted, historical, wide-ranging differences in social and educational opportunities. The assumption that schools alone can solve the problem of differential inputs, processes and outcomes is dangerous because it ignores all the other social areas while consequently blaming schools for what they cannot do by themselves. It often excuses the radically unequal funding the US allots to schools serving mostly poor versus mostly wealthy children. That said, schools can…
Read moreJuly 22, 2009 12:56 PM
The problem is that our current "accountability" system mis-focuses attention on boosting standardized test scores through a punitive approach, thereby encouraging teachers and administrators to game the system. The Chicago Commercial Club – whose "Renaissance 2010" proposals Arne Duncan was implementing – now says the solution is policing. This is like addressing the destructive consequences of high-stakes uses of standardized tests on schools and classrooms by ratcheting up surveillance and punishment to counter cheating, rather than by changing the dysfunctional system. In Massachusetts, an alliance of groups has proposed an accountability system that would include an inspectorate, modeled on those…
Read moreJune 29, 2009 04:46 PM
With states and districts in dire economic shape, it will not be easy to focus their attention on change and improvement as opposed to mere survival. Still, at least some states will aim to obtain ARRA "Race to the Top" funds for improvement purposes. Any reform worthy of the label must begin to overhaul the No Child Left Behind law and address the damage it has caused to America’s schoolchildren. Much of that effort will have to await reauthorization of NCLB, but some steps can be taken as part of ARRA. Indeed, each of the “four assurances” states must provide…
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