Teacher Quality

            Finally focusing on the issue of whether teachers are qualified to teach the classes they are teaching, the U.S. Department of Education has given states until the end of September to come up with satisfactory plans to make sure that poor children and children of color at least have their fair share of teachers with experience and expertise.
            All 50 states filed teacher quality plans in July, but the feds said that only nine adequately addressed the issue of what they would do to make sure that each classroom is taught by a highly qualified teacher. Those states were Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, South Carolina, and South Dakota. Four states – Hawaii, Missouri, Utah, and Wisconsin – were found to have completely ignored the requirements, and the rest of the states were essentially given incompletes and told how to revise their plans to comply. The revised plans are due at the end of September.
            The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 required that all students must be taught by highly qualified teachers by the beginning of the 2006-7 school year. Unfortunately, the administration didn’t pay much attention to that provision of the law until this year when it said that, since it was clear no one was going to meet the deadline that at least states should provide what their plans are for meeting the requirement. One of the ways the feds have allowed states to evade this provision of the law is by permitting states to have widely varying definitions of what it means to be a “highly qualified teacher.” The law is clear that new teachers should have a major or equivalent in the subject they are teaching, though some states evade that by issuing emergency certificates. For veteran teachers, however, states were permitted to adopt a wide variety of standards. Some hewed fairly close to the spirit of the law by requiring proof of content knowledge, but most states, in the words of the National Council on Teacher Quality, display a “gossamer-like quality whereby elaborately crafted state plans reveal themselves to be little more than an elaborate restatement of the status quo.” (For the NCTQ’s full 2004 report, “Searching the Attic,” click here.
            Another requirement of the law called on states to close the gap between low-poverty and high-poverty schools in terms of percentage of classes taught by highly qualified teachers in an attempt to ensure that poor children and children of color aren’t assigned more than their fair share of new and unqualified teachers. But most states didn’t even report the data adequately, much less have adequate equity plans. This issue is described in a report by the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights report, Days of Reckoning: Are States and the Federal Government Up to the Challenge of Ensuring a Qualified Teacher for Every Student?, found at CCCR.. While you’re there, read CCCR’s Dianne Piché’s testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on the state plans.
            For another scathing assessment, with state-by-state information, see The Education Trust’s report, “Missing the Mark: State’s Teacher Equity Plans Fall Short” at www.edtrust.org.

(Note: The Education Trust and The Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights are both founding members of The Achievement Alliance.)

A Focus on Standard

            The Commission on No Child Left Behind recently heard that states don’t expect their students to learn enough. "Many students in every state meet state standards, pass state tests, and complete state-required courses, only to require remedial courses once they enroll in college," Michael Cohen, president of Achieve, Inc., told the commission members. The commission, a blue-ribbon panel headed by two former governors, Roy Barnes and Tommy Thompson, has been holding hearings on NCLB around the country in preparation for recommending to the U.S. Congress ways No Child Left Behind should be changed when it is reauthorized. The commission’s August hearing was devoted to the issue of how different levels of quality and rigor of state standards create uneven expectations and achievement for students.
            Standards are the written documents that express what states expect students to know and be able to do, and most states started writing them some time in the 1990s. Until then, content standards were left up to local school districts, which often meant that they were left up to textbook publishers and individual teachers.
            The commission hearing, held in Massachusetts, featured such speakers as Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, American Federation of Teachers vice president Antonia Cortese, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation’s Chester A. Finn.
            Business Roundtable’s Susan Traiman told the commission that business leaders find the wide variation in standards among 50 states to be “absurd” and suggested that the federal government provide incentives to states to align high school exit requirements with postsecondary expectations – which could include going to college or working in a different state from the one in which students attend high school. (Note: Business Roundtable is a founding member of The Achievement Alliance.)

To see more about the commission and the hearing, click here.

More Focus on Standards

          The hearing followed by only a few days the launch by the Fordham Foundation of “The State of State Standards,” which details, state by state, the kind of standards states have set for their students.
          Fordham reported that 37 states have updated at least some of their standards since the foundation’s last report, in 2000 and 27 have revised all of their standards. Those changes didn’t necessarily lead to improvement, however: “Taken as a whole, state academic standards are no better in 2006 than they were six years earlier. And far too many of them are completely unsatisfactory,” the Fordham report said.
          Only three states – California, Indiana, and Massachusetts – improved enough to receive all As for their standards. A few states earned a mixture of As and Bs, but most received much lower grades and the overall national average was C-, which is the same grade Fordham gave the nation in 2000.
          Many states failed Fordham’s test for clarity, concision, depth, and breadth in reading, math, history, geography, and science. Oklahoma’s science standards, for example, received an “F” because, the report said, “Physics [in Oklahoma] is undemanding across the board and, despite its terseness, the physics content still manages to be filled with errors. Chemistry is much the same way. Life science is superficial and the word ‘evolution’ is never used. This is unacceptable, and it alone justifies the F grade.”
          Having established that many states have not adequately defined what their students should know and be able to do, the Fordham Foundation simultaneously issued a second report, “To Dream the Impossible Dream,” which outlines four possible ways national standards might be adopted. One was that the federal government develop national standards and assessments. Another possibility is that individual states join together to adopt shared standards and assessments. As a possible first step in that direction, several consortia of states are working together on such projects as high school diploma standards and standards and assessments for students learning English.

Growth Models Redux

            If done properly, growth models could provide a powerful tool not only for school accountability but also for school improvement. That’s the conclusion of the No Child Left Behind Commission which issued a research report, “Growth Models: An Examination Within the Context of NCLB” (see “Focus on Standards,” above, for an explanation of the commission).
            Growth models have been posited as a better way to hold schools accountable than the current Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) system, which measures whether sufficient percentages of students overall and in different demographic groups are meeting or exceeding state standards. Currently the measurement is done on a grade-by-grade basis so that the performance of last year’s third grade is compared with this year’s third grade. Critics have said that this amounts to comparing apples to oranges because the children are different every year and they say that the demographics of a particular grade could change significantly enough from year to year to make this an untenable measure of a school’s progress. They also say that AYP doesn’t give schools credit for the growth of their students – that is, if students who are three grade levels behind grow by two grade levels in one year but still don’t meet state standards, the school should get credit for that much growth, which does not happen under AYP. Growth models follow the progress of individual students from year to year and determine whether they are on a path to proficiency even if they have not reached it yet. The U.S. Department of Education has permitted Tennessee and North Carolina to engage in pilot projects to test the efficacy of growth models.
            In its report, the commission identified the many requirements that a good growth model would need in order to be useful. Such requirements include a unique student identifier – that is, the assignment of a number to each student that would not change throughout his or her schooling – in order to track progress through the years. Most states do not have such a number, though several are planning on instituting it within the next year or so.
            To read the report on what would be required for a good growth model, click  here.