NCLB

Matthew Lynch published in Matthew Lynch, Policy & Reform, Teachers

Highly Qualified Teachers: Should Federal Requirements be Removed?

The federal provisions that define “highly qualified teachers” in the No Child Left Behind Act could soon be a thing of the past if U.S. House legislation is signed into law. The Student Success Act, drafted by Minnesota Republican John Kline, calls for removal of teacher hiring requirements at the federal level. Kline and other proponents of the Student Success Act, say the current outdated policies in place are actually hurting K-12 schools because things like credentials get in the way of hiring the best teachers. Individual states could still enforce stringent credentialing for teachers but the federal government would have no input. The term “highly qualified teachers” (HQT) would be removed from federal law.

Predictably, Democrats on the Education and the Workforce Committee that drafted the legislation hate it. Representative Pete Gallego, a Democrat from Texas, says the bill is a recipe for disaster when it comes to federal oversight and protection for disadvantaged students. He says:

“This legislation guts the core goal that all students should receive a quality education. It leaves children behind by taking resources from kids who need it most.”

Also at issue is the removal of funding for professional development for teachers and lack of protection for collective bargaining action.

A different K-12 bill supported by mostly Democrats has already passed the Senate that maintains the HQT policy but hands over a little more control of hiring teachers to states. The Strengthening America’s Schools Act would keep in place federal requirements that insist teacher evaluations, including student achievement, be used in personnel decisions.

Both bills allow states to use Title II funding to further develop teachers and administrators and for reduction in class size (though the House bill limits that to 10 percent of funds). Both bills also call for teacher evaluations to be used to determine equity in distribution. The biggest difference between the Senate and House bills is the inclusion and exclusion, respectively, of the HQT federal requirement.

At least on paper, the federal HQT provision looks good. HQTs must have state certification, at least a bachelor’s degree from a four-year institution and demonstrate competency in the core academic subject area. That seems pretty standard to me. If a state license, college degree and expertise on a subject being taught are somehow keeping qualified teachers from the classroom, what requirements should there be instead?

Critics of the HQT federal mandate say that the requirement focuses too much on the upfront status of the teacher. While those three conditions are a starting point, the real measure of a teacher should lie in student outcomes. To help K-12 teachers reach their full potential in the classroom, provisions that allow for continued training and development need to be emphasized, not taken away. Further, since the strength of college-level education programs vary and the licensing exams are different between states, how can the federal government really mandate what constitutes a HQT?

Proponents of the HQT provision concede that states must do more than the basic requirements when it comes to hiring and cultivating teachers, but that without that federal mandate, students will suffer – particularly minority and low-income children. The concern is that without the three HQT provisions, inexperienced and unqualified teachers will find their way into Title I schools. The promotion of equitable distribution of teachers in all classrooms – particularly ones with at-risk students – would be detrimentally impacted if federal HQT mandates are eliminated.

So what control should the federal government truly have over teacher qualifications? Should it be up to states to decide what their student bodies really need from teachers? To what end will disadvantaged students be harmed if either legislation is signed into law?

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Matthew Lynch published in Policy & Reform, Teachers

Well, What Do You Know? A Discriminating Look at the No Child Left Behind Act

By David Moscinski

The prime expectation of the No Child Left Behind Act is that all students become proficient in Reading and Mathematics. It mandates annual student testing, along with a comparison of the results obtained by majority and minority students. This mandated comparison has revealed the existence of an “achievement gap” between and among student sub-groups. This article looks at what we “know” about this gap and how our knowledge may unintentionally support it.

What is the relationship between knowledge and expectation? Does what we know determine what we expect? The obvious answer is “Of course it does.” Pragmatically speaking, isn’t that the purpose of knowledge – to tell us what to expect? Let’s take a closer look at this relationship.

In 1686 Sir Isaac postulated the Laws of Motion, the third of which is “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Nearly three hundred years later knowledge of this law and what to expect because of it ultimately put an astronaut on the moon. Feeling safe in expectations based on this knowledge, people will enter long cylindrical tubes that propel them six miles into the sky at speeds in excess of five hundred an hour to destinations thousands of miles away, usually without hesitation. Expectation based on knowledge is deeply ingrained in our psyche.

It may not even be unusual for expectation to take on a life of its own. The ancient Roman poet Ovid in his work Metamorphosis records the tale of the Greek sculptor, Pygmalion who fell in love with a beautiful statue he had sculpted. He petitioned the gods to give him a spouse as lovely and as perfect as his statue of ivory and according to the legend they did. Pygmalion’s man-made expectation thus became reality.

Eliza Doolittle and Learning Expectations

A wonderful artistic example of expectation comes from the words of Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney speaking flower girl in the 1964 Learner and Lowe musical “My Fair Lady.” In the musical, based on the novel Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, a prominent elocutionist, Professor Henry Higgins places a bet with his friend, Colonel Pickering. He wages the Colonel that with three months of his training he can expect a lowly flower girl, played by Audrey Hepburn, to become a society accepted lady. Professor Higgins does succeed and wins his wager, but not for the reason he believes. In a poignant scene Eliza states the real reason behind her transformation:

I should never have known how ladies and gentlemen really behaved, if it hadn’t been for Colonel Pickering. He always showed what he thought and felt about me as if I were something better than a common flower girl. You see, Mr. Higgins, apart from the things one can pick up, the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated. I shall always be a common flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me like a common flower girl, and always will. But I know that I shall always be a lady to Colonel Pickering, because he always treats me like a lady, and always will.

In education, the work of Rosenthal and Jacobsen in the 1960’s established the relationship between expectation, whether real or perceived, and student performance. In their book Pygmalion In The Classroom published in 1968, Rosenthal and Jacobsen described the results of an experiment in which children were pre-tested with I.Q. tests before the start of the school year. Teachers were then given the names of 20% of students who had tested as being “latently gifted.” The teachers were told these students could be expected to “blossom” in the coming school year.

Unknown to the teachers however, the students had been not been selected based on test results, but rather had been assigned at random. When post-tested at the end of the year, students who had been expected to blossom scored significantly higher on the I.Q. test. Rosenthal termed this the Pygmalion Effect. It occurred because in his words :“When we expect certain behaviors of others, we are likely to act in ways that make the expected behavior more likely to occur.”

The Iowa Lighthouse Study, conducted by the Iowa Association of School Boards and published in September of 2000, further supported the importance of knowing what to expect, this time at the school board level. The purpose of the study was to determine what influence, if any, school boards could have on student achievement. For the study test districts were matched on as many variables as possible, then divided into “high” and “low” achieving districts based on their students’ test performance on annually administered state tests.

The study found that board members in high-achieving districts had significantly different knowledge and expectations than those that existed among board members in low-achieving districts.This knowledge and expectation set the tone for the district’s culture. Board members in high-achieving districts:

Consistently expressed the belief that all students can learn and that the school could teach all students. This “no excuses” belief system resulted in high standards for students and an on-going dedication to improvement. In low-achieving districts, board members had limited expectations and often focused on factors that they believed kept students from learning, such as poverty, lack of parental support or societal factors.

Looked at another way, board members in high achieving districts became The Little Engines That Could that pulled all the girls and boys of their district over any potential “gaps” in their learning.

A final thought on the subject of expectation comes from the recently published book The Social Conquest of Earth by biologist Edward O. Wilson. In his book Wilson states:

Experiments conducted over many years by social psychologists have revealed how swiftly and decisively people divide into groups and then discriminate in favor of the one to which they belong. Even when the experimenters created the groups arbitrarily, prejudice quickly established itself. Whether groups played for pennies or were divided by their preference for some abstract painter over another, the participants always ranked the out-group below the in-group. They judged their “opponents” to be less likable, less fair, less trustworthy, less competent. The prejudices asserted themselves even when the subjects were told the in-groups and out-groups had been chosen arbitrarily.

How does all this relate to the NCLB and closing the “achievement gap”?

If we “know” that minority students do not test as well as their counterparts in the majority, does this imply anything about our expectations for them? Like Pygmalion does our knowledge sculpt what we come to expect? Does our knowledge form our expectation? If it does, how does this help eliminate the “achievement gap”? Would education be better off simply expecting that all children can lean regardless of any cultural, ethnic, racial, income or any other quantifiable variable? Does saying that that all children are created equal, but then sub-dividing them according prescribed variables result in treatment like Eliza Doolittle received, as the instructional equivalents of Cockney flower girls? Or, are they treated like the majority students, as respected members of society?

Based on the results of Rosenthal’s study, what are the instructional behaviors likely to produce results which close the gap or even prevent it from forming? The Iowa Lighthouse Study suggests closing or preventing the gap starts at the top with the Board of Education and the firm belief that all children can learn and can be taught in their schools, regardless of circumstances. These school board members and their instructional staff have expectations for all students and excuses for none. Led by this attitude of expectation for all, they get what they expect.

And what about Edward Wilson’s findings described in The Social Conquest of Earth?

Experiments conducted over many years by social psychologists have revealed how swiftly and decisively people divide into groups and then discriminate in favor of the one to which they belong.

This is perhaps the greatest caveat concerning NCLB, the required disaggregation of data by minority groups with the resulting “achievement gap.” Taken together, do they form a self-fulfilling prophesy that is the basis for a new, but subtle form of discrimination? If we truly believe that all are created equal and that all children can learn, let’s begin by examining our expectations based on these beliefs.

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David Moscinski is the District Administrator for the School District of Stockbridge in Stockbridge, Wisconsin. Stockbridge Middle School has been identified as “Exemplary” by the Association of Wisconsin School Administrators for five years. Student proficiency results there have been in the upper 10% of all middle schools in the state. In 2014 Newsweek named Stockbridge High School to its “America’s Top High Schools 2014” list as well as to its “Beating the Odds: America’s Top High Schools for Low Income Students.”

Mr. Moscinski has also had articles published in the “American School Board Journal,” the American Association of School Administrators “School Administrator” and the Wisconsin School News. His article “Proficiency For All?” was selected for inclusion in the 09-10 McGraw Hill Annual Editions – Education.

 

Click here to read all our posts concerning the Achievement Gap.

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Matthew Lynch published in Matthew Lynch, OpEducation, Policy & Reform, Testing

Why K-12 Education Still Needs Federal Oversight

Educating American children has always been a responsibility that has fallen heavily on the states. As the public school system matured in the 20th century, however, it became increasingly apparent that states left to their own educational devices meant dangerous consequences for many children—especially students with disabilities and those living in poverty, for example. Historically, the federal government has always been the one to pick up the slack in K-12 education when states have fallen short.

In his piece for The Daily Beast, Jonah Edelman of Stand for Children warns that members of the newly-seated Congress have already voiced intentions to reduce accountability and transparency over states’ educational systems, while providing additional flexibility with federal funding.

Contrary to what some states-rights activists claim, states do not always act in the best interests of their residents, especially when it comes to education. Left to their own devices, states tend to enact discriminatory practices.

My home state of Mississippi is an example of state control gone awry. If its schools were wholly reliant on the state to outline learning benchmarks and divvy up funding (based on a state population with 24 percent in poverty and over 70 percent of its students eligible for free-and-reduced-price lunch), the inequalities would compound exponentially.

And those inequalities are already startling. For example, while 83 percent of high schools in New Hampshire offer calculus, only 41 percent of those in Mississippi do.

Mississippi has never quite been able to recover from its rampant poverty that began after the Civil War. Even when freedom was granted to slaves in the state and nearby, the African-American population was not able to elevate its quality of life due to the barriers erected by segregation and Jim Crow laws. Less-overt inequalities still exist that keep each new generation of African-American students in the state from breaking the cycle of poverty at home and underachievement in the classroom.

Edelman mentions issues like desegregation as wins for the federal government when states refused to do the right thing for all students. Without federal intervention, for instance, we wouldn’t have programs like the DREAM Act, which encourages continued education for students who might otherwise have been eligible for deportation. Instead, because of this federal program, they can contribute positively to their communities and to our country.

For one, federal guidance is needed to measure how much students are learning from one state to the next. Establishing a common high bar for academic performance that includes rigorous college-prep expectations can only be brought forth through federal involvement in schools.

It will be interesting to see what twists and turns the NCLB rewrites take and certainly no group will ever be completely satisfied. But the basic principle that guaranteeing every student in every state equal access to education is one worth fighting for.

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Matthew Lynch published in list, Matthew Lynch, Policy & Reform

3 Developments on No Child Left Behind

No Child Left Behind expired in 2007 after lawmakers couldn’t come to a compromise over its renewal. Fifteen years have blown by since the last time No Child Left Behind was updated. That’s a significant period of time when we are talking about the treatment of our students in every school of the nation.

But just because No Child Left Behind has not been updated does not mean that it has been forgotten. In fact, there are some relatively recent developments. Let’s take a look at three of them.

  1. “No Child” Waivers extended to 2018. The Department of Education has released a letter stating the new guidance for securing waivers from No Child Left Behind, President George W. Bush’s education reform law, for three or even four more years. The waivers stop states from being tied to the rigorous expectations of Bush-led Adequate Yearly Progress, but in turn, each state must adhere to education reforms encouraged by the Obama administration.

The DOE informed chief state school officers that they would be eligible to apply to renew their waivers through the 2017-2018 school year.

The Bush-era law has been due an update since 2007. In 2012, the administration began granting waivers to state if they met certain requirement such as adopting college- and career ready standards and developing teacher and principal evaluation systems based largely on how much students learn.

Currently, 43 states and the District of Columbia have received waivers from No Child Left Behind, which allow them to forego certain accountability requirements law in exchange for implementing education reforms backed by the Obama administration.

Some education advocacy groups were pleased with the emphasis placed on ensuring states have a plan to improve student achievement for all groups of students — including students with disabilities, those from low-income homes and English language learners — and prohibiting states from giving schools high scores on state accountability reports if they have large achievement gaps.

The requirements also sparked some widespread criticism across the political spectrum.

  1. The Senate attempted to rewrite NCLB. According to The Washington Post, No Child Left Behind faced a 600-page rewrite. The Senate HELP committee (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions) worked on adjusting language and amendments that would seriously alter the bill’s impact.

Some of the revisions include a pivot towards allowing states to assume control over how teachers are evaluated and would drop the federal definition “of a highly qualified teacher.”

The bill  also gives additional support for charter schools by providing “incentives for states to adopt stronger charter school authorizing practices.”

No Child Left Behind expired in 2007 after lawmakers couldn’t come to a compromise over its renewal. But this time seems to be different. The bill has a bipartisan tone and any amendment that did not have support from Democrats and Republicans was withdrawn during the bill’s mark up.

Yet those amendments will likely appear again when the full Senate has an opportunity to vote on the measure. Republican Senator Tim Scott has an idea  to funnel federal money meant to help poor students into a voucher system that any child attending a high-poverty school may use to transfer into a new school district.

His amendment failed in committee but he will reintroduce on the Senate floor.

Other inclusions and provisions included are an update to federal testing requirements, the peer review process, and an alteration to funding for early childhood learning programs.

  1. The Senate approved the changes to the law in July, a move that finally sets up negotiations with the U.S. House on updating the federal law on education.

“The Senate-passed measure would prohibit the federal government from setting performance targets or requiring specific standards such as the Common Core curriculum. It would make states responsible for establishing systems of accountability, including how much weight should be put on testing to determine whether schools are succeeding.”

According to ReviewJournal.com, the bill faces critics that believe it doesn’t reach far enough to help “minorities and low-income students.”

It is highly unlikely that the Senate’s bill will end up being passed as the final version as there is too much wrangling left to do with the House.

But besides that point, what may catch the eye of educators as they follow along with the progress of No Child Left Behind is how heavily it leans on allowing states the make final decisions on education.

Instead of receiving direction from the federal government, each state may end up having the ability to create policy surrounding how it decides to approach education. If you think about it, that is a scary prospect and would go completely against the idea of national standards.

Even that, though, is sure to change before the final version actually passes.

What do you think of the changes being made to No Child Left Behind?

Click here to read all our posts concerning the Achievement Gap.

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