Why Disaggregated Data is Important
An important example of how No Child Left Behind has begun to force a new focus on student achievement for all students appeared in The Washington Post a short time ago. A front-page story explored the fact that the African-American students in a wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C., Fairfax County, achieve at lower levels than African-American students in the Richmond, which is much poorer and more racially isolated. Until No Child Left Behind, Virginia only published statewide reports broken down by student subgroups, so all that anyone could know was that, overall, African-American students in Virginia were not doing as well as White students and that, overall, students in Fairfax County achieved at much higher levels than students in Richmond. But – despite long-standing worries on the part of African-American parents in Fairfax County – they were never able to verify that as a group their children indeed were not faring well.
Now, however, because No Child Left Behind has required that states disaggregate school and district scores by subgroup, it is clear that something is deeply wrong. African-American students do better in Richmond and Norfolk and in other poor jurisdictions than in wealthy Fairfax County, which has much higher per pupil expenditures than they do.
Fairfax County educators are now trying to figure out why that is and are traveling to Richmond to see what changes in instruction, curriculum, and teacher training might be warranted.
This is exactly the kind of response that No Child Left Behind was intended to evoke: educators taking a deep look at the experience of their students, looking around to see who might be doing better, and figuring out how to improve. |
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The federal judge overseeing Connecticut's challenge to the No Child Left Behind law will listen to arguments by the state branch of the NAACP that the suit should be dismissed.
Connecticut's Attorney General argues that the federal court should declare No Child Left Behind invalid because it is an “unfunded mandate” that costs more than the state received in federal aid.
The NAACP argues that that is a dangerous argument to make because it opens the possibility of arguing that all civil rights legislation consists of “unfunded mandates,” from the Voting Rights Bill on. Although U.S. District Judge Mark R. Kravitz didn't officially allow the organization into the case, he said he would consider its arguments as he decides whether to dismiss the matter.
"The NAACP doesn't necessarily agree with every aspect of the No Child Left Behind law," James Edward D'Auguste, an attorney representing the NAACP told the Associated Press. "But the one thing it does agree with is that there are some excellent provisions within the statute designed to increase opportunity for minority students to get a quality education."
(For more background on the lawsuit, see a previous issue of The Alliance Alert -- Vol. 2 No. 2. We should note that William L. Taylor and Dianne Piche of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, one of the founding organizations of The Achievement Alliance, are co-counsel for the state NAACP and individual students in the case.) |
English-Language Learners
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For anyone who has been puzzled by the whole issue of how No Child Left Behind affects children who are still learning English and the schools that teach them, National Council of La Raza has a new paper. (NCLR is a founding member of The Achievement Alliance.)
The paper, “Improving Assessment and Accountability for English Language Learners in the No Child Left Behind Act,” points out that before NCLB, many states simply exempted English-language learners (ELL) from taking state tests or they didn’t report achievement data by ethnicity and language status. This meant that, for all intents and purposes, children who were still learning English were often left out of school accountability plans, which meant that too often they were ignored in classrooms. “Under NCLB,” the paper says, “sanctions are now tied to ELL and Latino student outcomes and, at least in theory, there is clear accountability. Now a part of schools’ bottom line, ELL students will be more likely to have access to rigorous coursework and highly-qualified teachers.”
However, the paper points to considerable problems in implementing NCLB, including the fact that the federal government has allowed states so much leeway in defining how big a subgroup must be before being reported separately (in Maryland the group size is 5; in California, it is 100) that many English Language Learners disappear in school statistics because they do not constitute a large enough group (see above for a further discussion of “n-size”).
In addition, most states have not lived up to their obligation to test ELL students’ content knowledge in their native language. Even if students haven’t learned enough English to take a science exam in English, they could, and should, still be tested to see if they meet the science content standards of their state, and under No Child Left Behind that test should be in their native language “to the extent practicable.” To those who object that there are too many languages spoken in schools to make native language testing available, the paper answers that since 80 percent of ELL students speak Spanish, a large percentage of the issue could be answered by having appropriate tests in Spanish.
Another key problem noted by the paper is the lack of consistency in high school graduation data and high school dropout data which has the effect of obscuring exactly how many students complete high school. This is a particular problem for both Latino students and students learning English, who tend to have higher dropout rates than other groups of students.
To read the full report, which is chock-full of information and a clear delineation of the issues facing No Child Left Behind, including recommendations for how the law should change, go to: National Council of La Raza's web site.
Another report that could resonate for a while in Washington policy circles is one published by The Brookings Institution, “Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance on the Job.”
Written by Robert Gordon of the Center for American Progress, Thomas J. Kane of Harvard, and Douglas O. Staiger of Dartmouth College, the paper attempts to thread through some of the trickier issues of how to make sure the kids who most need the best teachers have access to them. The major recommendation is that first- and second-year teachers be evaluated in part by how well their students do on state tests or other measures of achievement and that they only be granted tenure if they demonstrate that they are at least moderately effective teachers. In addition, highly effective teachers (as measured by student growth) should be paid a $15,000 bonus to teach in schools where more than 75 percent of the students qualify for free and reduced-price lunch, according to the authors.
The paper does not address the issue of ineffective tenured teachers, in part because the waves of new teachers who will have been filtered through this system will soon engulf the tenured teachers, many of whom are getting ready to retire.
To read the full report, go here. |
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Gaming the System
Unfortunately, No Child Left Behind has also elicited a different kind of reaction – gaming the system, a fact that the Associated Press has established in a groundbreaking series of stories on the issue of “n size” that were carried in papers around the country (click here to see an example).
“N size” sounds as if it is an arcane issue, but it actually gets to the heart of whether parents and members of the public can figure out what is going on inside a school.
“N” refers to the number of children who are in a group before the state has to report whether that group meets state standards for Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP. Because some states require that groups be quite large – 50 or 100 – before they report the results, almost two million students are not counted as part of a group.
Some background: Under the No Child Left Behind Act, schools are required to report whether their students meet state proficiency standards in reading and math both overall and for each of the different groups of students served by the school. The groups that have to be counted separately include: students from low-income families, students with disabilities, students who are not English-language proficient, and students in the major racial/ethnic groups. Some states have chosen to add additional groups, but those are the ones required by No Child Left Behind.
The idea is that if a given school has a significant population of students who are, say, African-American, that their results must be broken out separately so that parents and community members can see whether those children are achieving at the same levels as the rest of the students (see above for an example of how that is supposed to work).
States get to decide how large a group needs to be before it is counted separately, and the legislative language only gives general guidelines: data for groups does not have to be disaggregated if “the number of students in a category is insufficient to yield statistically reliable information or the results would reveal personally identifying information about an individual student.” The U.S. Department of Education has not established any rules or regulations to govern this process. States were permitted a wide range of n sizes, from 5 (Maryland) to 200 (Texas) – and some states even rely on percentages of the school population. Most states initially opted for n-sizes in the 25- to 30-student range.
However, in the past year or so the U.S. Department of Education has permitted a number of states to increase their n-sizes. Illinois, for example, recently increased to 45.
The most confusing change was the one Florida was allowed to make. It went from having an n-size of 30 to either 100 or 15 percent of the students in the tested grades, whichever is greater. What that means is that unless students are in a group that is at least 15 percent of the grade (or 100 students), their scores will not be counted except as part of the “all students” category. In California the n is 100, or 50 if 50 is at least 15% of the school, and in Texas the n is 200, or 50 if 50 is at least 10 percent.
This has long been a concern, but it took the Associated Press to actually add up the numbers – and what they found is that more than 2 million students aren’t being counted as part of a racial or ethnic group but only as part of the whole. And that means that it is really impossible to know, for example, how African-American kids are doing in many Illinois schools, how American Indian and Asian kids are doing in many Texas schools, and how Latino kids are doing in many California schools.
One of the most disturbing parts of the Associated Press’s story came in this line of its story: “The U.S. Education Department said it didn't know the breadth of schools' undercounting until seeing AP's findings.”
How could they not have known? Aren’t they the folks who are supposed to be minding the store? Accolades go the Associated Press, but the Department of Education folks should be embarrassed by the fact that it took a news agency to tell them that the store window is broken and looters are flocking. |
"Growth Models"
The Department of Ed seems a little more on top of another possibility for gaming the system – “growth models.”
Many critics of No Child Left Behind have long said that it would be much fairer to schools to give credit for the growth of students even if they have not yet met standards, and the U.S. Department of Education announced late in 2005 that it would allow some states to try to devise an accountability system that would do so.
One thing is certain – growth models are a lot harder to explain to parents and community members than the current system of Adequate Yearly Progress, which is a relatively straightforward measure of whether the percentage of students in a school both overall and by subgroup who meet standards matches the state’s expectations or at least – under the Safe Harbor provision – is moving toward state expectations. (Again, for a detailed explanation of how AYP works, click here.)
Growth models would, at least in theory, track the individual progress of each child and measure what percentage of children are moving toward meeting state standards. So, for example, if a student didn’t meet state math standards in third grade, the question would be whether he or she at least made up some of the distance toward state standards in fourth grade, even if he or she wasn’t on track to meet standards until fifth grade.
Of twenty states which submitted plans to replace Adequate Yearly Progress with measurements of student growth, only eight went forward to the peer review process, and those eight seem to be fairly serious proposals that don’t give up on the idea of getting just about all students meeting state standards at some point. One of the plans that didn’t make it through the department’s filter, for example, was Utah’s, which expected that only 75 percent of its students would ever meet state standards.
Still, there’s lots of room for mischief. In four state proposals – Alaska, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Oregon – the question answered by the growth model would be whether the child is on the path to gaining proficiency within four years, which is a very long time in the life of a ten-year-old. In addition, North Carolina and Oregon would start the clock over for every student who moves from one district to another. If a student moves often enough, he or she might never be expected to meet standards.
To see a detailed chart, prepared by Education Trust, of the eight proposals that are being reviewed by a peer review panel, click here.
(The director of Education Trust, Kati Haycock, and the chair of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, William L. Taylor, are peer reviewers of the growth models. Both organizations are founders of The Achievement Alliance. They did not review this article before it was published nor did they in any way participate in its writing.) |
Passage to India
Susan Traiman of Business Roundtable (one of the founding members of The Achievement Alliance) went to India to look at education from a different perspective. To see her observations, go here. But just to get a sense, here’s a small excerpt:
“The teaching profession is much more highly respected in China than in India or the United States, but all three countries are struggling with how to attract teachers to hard-to-staff schools. Teachers in China are revered by parents and students. In the past, teachers also had this status in India, but with growing materialism it has lost its luster in comparison to more highly paid professions. India's teachers in government schools are government civil servants, hired for life, with no incentives to show up or teach every day. They also have to perform functions that have nothing to do with students, such as taking the census.” |
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