The NEA on the Reauthorization of No Child Left Behind

Not glowing, here.

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Washington Monthly on the Federal Role in Education

A good, quick read by Nicholas Lemann in Washington Monthly on where NCLB could go and why we need national academic standards instead of the state-by-state piecemeal we have now. The take-home paragraph:

As it took Richard Nixon to open diplomatic relations with China, it took George W. Bush to make the federal government a real presence in every public school. Now that the government is there, it should use its leverage mainly to create meaningful standards and a national curriculum. Right now it uses its leverage mainly to require tests. To change that, and to fulfill what Congress in 2001 took to be the promise of No Child Left Behind, would be a presidential achievement commensurate with civil rights, Medicare, and Social Security. Let’s hope the next president sees it that way.

All that said, education is very likely to be far down the list of priorities given the financial dire straits we're in.

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The Federal Role in Education

My post a few days back on federal funding of education research got some good comments, and there's two that I'd like to point out for further discussion. First, from The Teacher at A Voice from the Middle:

Trust me, I think there are a lot of priorities out of wack and that education should get A LOT more funding, but the thing that we tend to forget is that education is not a FEDERAL issue but rather a STATE one. The list you provided is really comparing apples to oranges because everything else on that list is federally focused and there really is no state equivilant.

The Founders felt that education was something best handled by the people in the community involved. I frankly think we need to serious look at getting rid of the Dept. of Education and turn over their entire budgets dirctly to the states specifically for each state's educational programming and research.

This is an interesting thought. I believe that eliminating the Department of Education was a part of the Republican Party platform until just recently--one website I found has Bob Dole making it a campaign promise in 1996--but at the same time it's been under a Republican president in recent years that the DoE has been given the most power that its ever had to wield. And on the surface I can understand the logic behind thinking that local people would know best what would work in local schools.

Where I think the argument falls apart, though, is when you consider the best thing that NCLB has done for us: data. A federal mandate to test and disaggregate is a powerful piece of accountability that many schools have resisted furiously, but it's also the most valuable tool we have for identifying schools in trouble. States may have come up with plans on their own, but without the big stick of the Feds looming in the background I don't believe that there would have been any systemic change.

The next comment came from JL, who I think would be a spectacular blogger:

Fact: The federal government can only do two things in education that states could not do: 1) take money from one state and give it to another. 2) Force a state to do something it would not choose to do if left to its own devices.

Which of these two justifies holding pom-poms for more federal invovlement?

#2.

In Washington we're fortunate to have what I think is a pretty good state level research organization, the Washington State Institute for Public Policy. They've taken a critical look at the WASL, our state assessment, and there's a ton of value in what they do.

What they don't provide is a national perspective, like we get from ERIC (a federal program) or more regionally from groups like the Northwest Regional Education Laboratory. If the education systems of the 50 states were truly balkanized, what incentive would they have to share best practices with each other? That's what a group like NWREL can provide.

Are the feds over-involved in local decisions? Quite possibly. If there's any are where I want Washington DC to take a leadership role, though, it's in the research and dissemination of information.

Thanks for the thoughtful comments!

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A Family Left Behind

Anyone interested in issues of poverty needs to read this article from the Spokesman Review. It’s about a family that lives in a trailer in the woods of northern Idaho and the struggles they’ve had to get anywhere in life. The kids have been homeschooled, in school, then back to homeschooling, the father is a cripple, the mother is overwhelmed.

No child should be left behind, but sometimes you wonder if it can be avoided.

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Well, That’s Useful

From the December 12th Education Week:

Secondary school teachers of special education in Michigan likely have lost their status as being “highly qualified” under federal standards because the state allowed them to take certification tests for elementary teachers.

Those teachers have until June 30, 2009, to become highly qualified, a status they need to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The Michigan Department of Education said it was unclear how many of the state’s 7,000 secondary special education teachers used the elementary exam to become highly qualified.

“At the time, this was believed to be an appropriate means to meet the requirements—until guidance from the federal government directed us to amend the requirements,” state education department spokeswoman Jan Ellis said last week.

7,000 teachers of our most in-need students who now have to jump through more hoops in order to stay in the profession. Who benefits from this?

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The Case of the Misplaced Adjective

I vote liberal, Mrs. votes conservative. I'm sure that we cancel each other out in 95% of elections. A happy side effect of this is that she gets campaign mail from the various Republican groups around the country, and I get a good view at what her side is up to. Consider this, from a fundraising mailer for the National Republican Congressional Committee:

The Democrats want a government takeover of the health care system, amnesty for illegal aliens, billions more for school bloated bureaucracies, punishing regulations on already struggling manufacturers -- And the largest tax increase in history to pay for it all.

Personally, were I the editor, I would have gone with "bloated school bureaucracies" instead of "school bloated bureaucracies." I can't give you any sort of a rule for that beyond saying that if the noun being described is
"school bureaucracies" then the adjective should go before it, but I'm not sure if that's the perfect reasoning or not.

It's also worth noting that nothing has contributed to the school bureaucracy more in the last decade than the No Child Left Behind Act, which created a testing industry that demands time and money of every school in the nation, created paperwork for every one of the nations 2 million teachers vis-a-vis the "highly qualified" standards, and superimposed a 5-tiered intervention system on struggling schools that in some cases supplanted already existing state efforts.

That's your bureaucracy, right there.

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The Strange Case of the Failing Schools

This is going to be very interesting to watch as the reauthorization of NCLB moves its way through the legislative process:

LOS ANGELES — As the director of high schools in the gang-infested neighborhoods of the East Side of Los Angeles, Guadalupe Paramo struggles every day with educational dysfunction.

For the past half-dozen years, not even one in five students at her district’s teeming high schools has been able to do grade-level math or English. At Abraham Lincoln High School this year, only 7 in 100 students could. At Woodrow Wilson High, only 4 in 100 could.

For chronically failing schools like these, the No Child Left Behind law, now up for renewal in Congress, prescribes drastic measures: firing teachers and principals, shutting schools and turning them over to a private firm, a charter operator or the state itself, or a major overhaul in governance.

But more than 1,000 of California’s 9,500 schools are branded chronic failures, and the numbers are growing. Barring revisions in the law, state officials predict that all 6,063 public schools serving poor students will be declared in need of restructuring by 2014, when the law requires universal proficiency in math and reading.

“What are we supposed to do?” Ms. Paramo asked. “Shut down every school?”

With the education law now in its fifth year — the one in which its more severe penalties are supposed to come into wide play — California is not the only state overwhelmed by growing numbers of schools that cannot satisfy the law’s escalating demands.

In Florida, 441 schools could be candidates for closing. In Maryland, some 49 schools in Baltimore alone have fallen short of achievement targets for five years or more. In New York State, 77 schools were candidates for restructuring as of last year.

This is a bit of an addendum to my previous post, I suppose. Is KIPP ready to go out on this kind of scale? Can Ron Clark do more than one school at a time? Does Teach for America have 100,000 future PhD and EdD candidates chomping at the bit to go out and git 'er done?

What to do, what to do, what to do.....

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