Enough, already, of the current No Child Left Behind law
It's State Fair time, and our school "report cards" from the Department of Education, based on test results mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, are now available. A couple of weeks ago, the department published its list of schools that were meeting standards and those that weren't, under NCLB definitions. We should make this the last summer we have to look at NCLB-dictated reports in their current state.
The test data provide a wholly inadequate snapshot of how Minnesota's students and schools are doing on a given day. Think of your driver's license photo. It's actually you in the picture, but how many of us would consider it a true representation of how we look?
NCLB test results are designed in such a way that all Minnesota's schools will be on the failure list by 2014, according to the legislative auditor. The arbitrary standards defy common sense. Schools can fail by missing one of 37 different criteria. If 100 percent of Special Ed kids aren't proficient, the school doesn't meet standards. And every year the standards change.
A colleague of mine recently told me his daughter, who loves science, received her MCA (Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments) science test results. Her score exceeded the average in her school, in her district and in the state. Yet she only "partially met" standards. Is that a fair assessment, or is something wrong with the standards?
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Our students are among the national leaders on ACT and SAT college entrance tests and international science tests. But that is not the image that NCLB paints of Minnesota students. What's wrong with this picture?
The NCLB is supposed to bring accountability to our schools, but it does harm to our schools by punishing them for falling short of impossible expectations.
Minnesotans deserve a real accountability system for students and schools, one that has meaningful measurements, incentives for improvement and research-based solutions. Such a system ought not demonize individual schools and their students. The new data from the Minnesota Department of Education employ a growth model for student achievement that measures the same group of students year by year, in addition to the federally mandated comparison of one year's fifth graders with the previous year's fifth graders, for example. This growth model is a step in the right direction, but NCLB continues to put too much emphasis and focus on one test and on the negative aspects of that test's results.
The achievement gap is real for many of our students. But punishing their schools and teachers is not an answer. We need to take a systematic approach that includes more resources for schools, more individual attention for students, smaller class sizes, more commitment to early childhood education, recruitment of the best people to be teachers and outreach to families to get them involved. Working with the federal government, not at odds with it, we need to shift the current focus away from imposing underfunded mandates and from labeling and punishing schools. Instead we should focus on demonstrating common sense flexibility and supporting teachers and administrators as they work to improve learning. We should reward success and provide assistance to schools that need help.
If we are to prepare our students to compete, we need to provide them adequate resources and an accountability system that truly measures their success.
Tom Dooher is president of Education Minnesota, the union of 70,000 educators.
