THE ALLIANCE ALERT

An e-mail newsletter of The Achievement Alliance

Vol. 1 No. 5, May 23 & June 6, 2005

In This Issue:

 

MythBuster – Some people say No Child Left Behind doesn’t give schools credit for progress. But that’s what “safe harbor” is for.

 

It’s Being Done – Oakland Heights Elementary School in Russellville, Arkansas, has shown remarkable progress from 2002 to 2004 – how did they do it?

 

What’s New – New York reports good news on student achievement.

 

Other Voices

Why Schools Don't Work for All Kids

What is The Achievement Alliance?

Correction

 

MythBuster

 

A lot of myths about No Child Left Behind are floating around. Here’s one:

 

Myth: Schools can’t get credit for

progress under No Child Left Behind.

The latest example of this myth appeared in an article by Lauren Resnick and Chris Zurawsky, “Getting Back on Course,” which appeared in American Educator, the magazine of the American Federation of Teachers. Here’s what the article said: “No Child Left Behind’s formula for judging whether schools have made Adequate Yearly Progress does not take into account where a school started or how much progress it has made, which means that schools that have made great progress (but not enough to make AYP) will nonetheless be identified as ‘in need of improvement.’”

Resnick is one of the most respected experts in the nation in the field of standards and assessment, and the article as a whole is thought-provoking and interesting, but she got this one wrong.

Let us start at the beginning. Each state sets targets that schools are supposed to meet. They set them according to a formula in NCLB intended to – at least initially -- highlight the lowest-performing schools in each state. (For a full discussion of how targets were set, as well as a full discussion of Adequate Yearly Progress, click here.)  For the most part state targets were set very low in the beginning of the process and are slowly being ratcheted up so that in 2014, the goal is that 100 percent of students will be proficient.

A typical state might have as its target that half of all students were supposed to be meeting state standards in 2004, which also means half of all the kids in each subgroup – African American, Latino, Asian, and White students, students receiving free and reduced-price meals, special education services, and students with limited English proficiency. Some states have even more subgroups by their own choice, but those are the ones required by No Child Left Behind. If all those subgroups meet proficiency standards, and the school tested at least 95 percent of all students and students in the subgroups, and if a school meets its target on some other indicator (graduation for high schools, and usually attendance for elementary schools), then a school meets AYP.

But legislators recognized that some schools started out so far below the targets that even considerable progress would not bring them up to them. So they laid out a “safe harbor” provision as part of No Child Left Behind. What that says is that if a school reduces by 10 percent the number of students who are not proficient and improves on one other indicator (such as attendance or something else chosen by the state) then it will make AYP under safe harbor.

For example, at B.C. Charles Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia, only 57 percent of the school’s low-income students, who make up a little more than a third of the student body, met state reading standards in 2004 – below the state-set target of 61 percent. But under the safe harbor provision, Charles still made AYP because the year before only 39 percent of low-income students had met standards. In other words, in 2003, 61 percent of low-income students did not meet state standards – in 2004, 43 percent. That represents a 29 percent reduction in the number of low-income students who were not proficient, meaning that, since it also improved on one other indicator, Charles met the safe harbor provisions of AYP.

Safe harbor isn’t often talked about, but it is the way progress is recognized. And sometimes that progress is very small and incremental indeed.

For example, Maryland set as its target that 45.6 percent of eighth-graders were supposed to be proficient on the state reading assessment in 2004. At Woodlawn Middle School in Baltimore County, only 20.9 percent of the students receiving special education services met the reading standard in 2004. But the school still made AYP – under safe harbor -- because the previous year only 9.8 percent of the students receiving special education services had met the standard. Let’s break that down to actual kids. In 2003, four students met state reading standards – one on the regular assessment and three on the alternative assessment Maryland has for students with severe cognitive disabilities. In 2004, 9 were proficient – two on the regular assessment and seven on the alternative assessment. With 41 students requiring special educational services in 2003 and 43 in 2004, the progress reported by the school could only be called incremental – and yet it was recognized for that progress by safe harbor.

To our knowledge, no one has calculated the number of schools that have made AYP under safe harbor, so it is impossible to know how widespread its use is. But people who noodle around state data sites do not have difficulty finding schools that have made AYP under safe harbor.

 

 

It’s Being Done

   

In most of Arkansas – in most of the country – Oakland Heights Elementary School’s demographics would spell low achievement levels and large gaps in achievement.

About 70 percent of the children attending Oakland Heights are eligible for free or reduced-priced meals. Most of the school’s 380 or so kindergarten-through-fourth-grade students are White, but about 15 percent are African American and another 15 percent Latino, part of a rapidly growing population of Mexican and Central American families who began arriving in Russellville only a few years ago.  Parents at Oakland Heights – except for the few who are self-employed in fields such as car repair and carpentry – generally process chickens at the nearby Tyson plant or make frozen dinners at the ConAgra plant. “They’re mostly working poor,” says the principal, Sheri Shirley, about her families.

To give a sense of what those demographics usually mean in Arkansas, 76 percent of the state’s White fourth graders met state literacy standards; 59 percent of the state’s poor fourth graders; 64 percent of Arkansas’s Latino fourth graders; and 49 percent of the African-American fourth graders. That’s a 27- point gap between White and African-American students.


At Oakland Heights, however, gaps have narrowed significantly. For example, 80 percent of all students met or exceeded state reading standards in 2004 – 81 percent of the White students; 82 percent of the Latino students; 74 percent of the African-American students; and 78 percent of the poor students. Although the 2004 data represents a dip from 2003, Oakland Heights has a higher percentage of students in some subgroups meeting or exceeding state standards than the rest of the state. For example, 78.4 percent of Oakland Heights’s poor fourth-grade students met state literacy standards – a higher performance rate than all fourth graders in Arkansas, which was 69 percent.

Not that the grownups in the school are satisfied. “The goal is 100 percent,” says principal Shirley. “We still have a ways to go.” But, she adds, “It’s not a matter of can we – it’s a matter of how can we.”

Oakland Heights is in the middle of a dramatic transformation from low-performing to high-performing. To read how the school has made such progress, go to www.achievementalliance.org and look under “Success Stories.”

 

“It’s Being Done” is a project of The Achievement Alliance to identify and describe high-performing, high-poverty and high-minority schools that have met Adequate Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind. These are not definitive studies of the schools, which would require weeks of study and interviews. They are more akin to scouting reports, letting people who are interested know about the work some schools are doing to make sure all our children are prepared to be educated citizens. This section takes its name from the words of a principal who, when told that many think educating all children can’t be done, said, “It’s being done.”

If you would like to nominate a school, send an email to: kchenoweth@achievementalliance.org.

 

What’s New

 

Text Box: Other Voices “The achievement gap is a national disgrace, and equal opportunity is a national command…The first task is to stop the unprincipled attacks on NCLB. At its heart, this is the sort of law liberals once dreamed about….NCLB doesn’t guarantee funding, but it goes one step further by demanding educational results…. “States must show that minority and poor students are achieving proficiency like everyone else, or else provide remedies targeted to the schools those students attend. The law’s unyielding demands have created a powerful tool to raise both expectations and money. “Tough accountability serves kids, particularly the poorest. Studies of high-poverty, high-achieving schools (by Kentucky’s Pritchard Committee, the University of Texas, Ohio’s Board of Education, and others) consistently show that high expectations are critical to good results.” -- Robert Gordon, former advisor to 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, “Class Struggle: How Democrats Can Retake the Initiative on Education,” The New Republic, June 6 & 13. New York State has begun reporting the results from the spring, 2005, administration of the elementary and middle school English and language arts tests, and so far the results are good – especially at the elementary school level. For the first time since the administration of these tests, most African American and Latino fourth-grade students met state standards, and the percentage of students who are reading at the lowest levels dropped. Perhaps most heartening is that achievement gaps shrank.

            Of course, New York City had an aggressive retention policy for third-graders who didn’t meet state standards, so there is an asterisk that should go with that data. Still, the improvements across the board -- and in parts of New York very remote from New York City --  are reason for cautious optimism. In fact, cities such as Rochester, Syracuse and Yonkers posted very respectable gains. The middle school results are more mixed, but even there, middle schools still reduced the percentage of students scoring at the lowest levels.

            Achievement gaps among the demographic groups are still large, but they have shrunk considerably since 1999.

            Below is a slide taken from the New York State Education Department showing the progress made by each of the ethnic demographic groups since 1999. (To see the full slide show, click here).     

 

 

Education Trust’s policy director, Ross Wiener, explains why a proposed bill by Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) to change No Child Left Behind is a bad idea in this Washington Post op-ed article (Monday, June 6).

 

 

Why Schools Don’t Work for All Kids

 

Reported by a recent college graduate: “During my senior year in high school, I took AP Physics, AP Macroeconomics/U.S. Government, AP English, AP Statistics, and Honors French III. Because of curriculum requirements I also took Introduction to Business Law class at the regular level.

“This was a chance to see how the ‘other half’ of our senior class lived. The intellectual rigor of honors and Advanced Placement classes was replaced by unused textbooks and a classroom of computers loaded with rudimentary videogames.  The classroom felt like a glorified playpen designed to keep students out of trouble for 50 minutes until the bell rang.

“The teacher assigned to the class was the well-meaning coach of the women’s basketball team, and as a former collegiate player, basketball was his main interest.  Encouraged by many of his students, the white board at the front of the room was often filled with offensive and defensive plays which underwent constant revision.  The extent to which the teacher was unfamiliar with even the basic concepts of Business Law was illustrated one day when he asked me to give a lecture on a chapter from the dusty textbooks. I read the chapter and talked about it the next day. This was not part of a plan to engage students in the curriculum but rather a single occurrence which was followed by students falling into their usual pattern of video games, homework, or fulfilling their dreams of becoming the next John Wooden.

“I had known that only some students at my high school were given top-level instruction and high-level material to learn. I was lucky enough to be one of those kids, and we were the kids the school bragged about. But that year I learned how different the experience of other kids – many of whom were African American and Latino – was.”

 

 “Why Schools Don’t Work for All Kids,” will appear in every Alliance Alert, and is meant to be a counterweight to the good-news stories in “It’s Being Done.” It is a reminder of why we need radical and systemic change in our schools. Because we do not believe that public humiliation is a good teaching tool, we will not name individual schools or teachers. This practice will raise the issue in readers’ minds whether the stories are true. We promise to be extremely careful to make sure our stories are true, but if you find something unbelievable, please email kchenoweth@achievementalliance.org and we will give any supporting information we can without exposing individuals to embarrassment.

 

 

What Is The Achievement Alliance?

 

The Achievement Alliance has as its purpose providing accurate, nonpartisan information about student achievement and the No Child Left Behind Act, with particular attention to children who have traditionally been left behind – poor children, children of color, children learning English, and children with disabilities. It is a project of the following groups:

            Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights

            National Council of La Raza

            Just for the Kids/National Center for Educational Accountability

            Business Roundtable

            The Education Trust

 

 

 

Correction: In the last edition of The Alliance Alert (Vol. 1 No. 4), the story summary of the improvement of Dayton’s Bluff Achievement Plus Elementary School in the “In This Issue” box should have said that a higher percentage of African American and Asian students attending Dayton’s Bluff meet or exceed state math standards than White students in the state of Minnesota. In an attempt to be concise, it said instead that they “outscored” white students. As the story made clear, we were not talking about test scores but percent of students meeting and exceeding standards. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.

 

 

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