Recent Responses
November 11, 2009 05:23 PM
After 7 years of NCLB implementation, the most anyone can say for what it has accomplished is that the law has "paved the way for a sustained national dialogue on closing the achievement gap and improving our schools." Paved the way for a dialogue? Is this sufficient justification for a law that has narrowed the curriculum (and thus widened the achievement gap in areas other than math and reading), turned schools into test-prep factories, substituted word-calling for literacy, demoralized many teachers and parents (and turned others into cynics), misidentified failing and successful schools alike, and squelched local initiative in…
Read moreNovember 2, 2009 07:51 AM
It is an admirable goal to "turn around" low-performing schools. But before attempting this, we need to ensure that we have accurately identified which schools are low-performing. It would be tragic if we aggressively intervened in (or even closed) schools that were, in fact, better performers, while ignoring schools that were worse. This is the fundamental flaw in Arne Duncan's proposal. We don't, in fact, have any good ways to identify low-performing schools, so any turnaround efforts are likely to include considerable misdirection. Indeed, as I have written in a recent Policy Brief for the Economic Policy…
Read moreOctober 13, 2009 09:14 PM
Steve Peha just observed that “So far at least, Mr. Duncan has only indicated his desire to patch [NCLB] up, not to replace it.” This is true, but few realize how radical are the “patching” principles that Arne Duncan has articulated. For example, he has denounced a fixed achievement goal for all students as “utopian,” insisting that we should hold schools accountable for student achievement at all points in the distribution. He has insisted that schools alone are not responsible for learning, but that city parks departments, health services, social services, and others also share responsibility. He has said…
Read moreJuly 27, 2009 01:38 PM
We can better understand the new NAEP report on the persistent test score gap by examining it in combination with another study, also just released, that shows the cognitive gap well-established long before children enter school. Commissioned by the Council of Chief State School Officers and prepared by a research team at Child Trends, it is based on an analysis of a federal data set, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Birth Cohort (ECLS-B). Like NAEP, these data track a nationally representative sample of children, in this case infants born in 2001. The children were then assessed when they were…
Read moreJuly 22, 2009 01:24 PM
As previous contributors to this week's discussion have noted, manipulation of test score data in the NCLB era is rampant. An auditor of these data would solve little, however. Even if the most egregious forms of manipulation – lowering cut scores, reducing the difficulty of test items, making test items more predictable – could be eliminated, a more serious problem would persist: NCLB and accompanying state accountability systems attempt to judge the overall quality of schools by reporting only on the most easily measured of their outcomes, basic skills in math and reading. This accountability system creates incentives for…
Read moreJuly 13, 2009 10:11 AM
Colleges and other educational institutions can influence which students get the more highly-skilled jobs that are available. But colleges and other educational institutions cannot, to a significant extent, affect the number of jobs that are available - highly skilled or otherwise. This truth is obvious in our current economic crisis. Nobody can seriously believe that if colleges made graduates more attractive job candidates, this would cause the unemployment rate for college graduates to fall. If employers are now filling vacancies for recent college graduates in a number equal to only 20% of their class, surely this is not…
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Related Link: http://www.epi.org/authors/bio/rothstein_richard/