No Curriculum Left Behind

The last time I blogged about the nationalization of American education: a year ago, almost exactly. A year ago, it was ratcheting-up-rhetoric. But words have a way of translating into action:

Maryland and several other states are pushing rapidly toward adoption of new academic standards proposed Wednesday for English and math, adding momentum to the campaign to establish common expectations for public school students across the country.

The District also is on track to adopt the common standards drafted by experts in a project led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. However, it is possible that Virginia will not join the apparent surge toward approval.

I should point out that my home state--the "other" Washington--is part of the effort. And what might it mean?

Widespread adoption of common standards would mark a watershed for schools, triggering consequences for curricula, textbooks, testing and teaching. Some critics say common standards amount to a thinly disguised ruse to establish national standards under federal control -- an allegation that state and federal officials deny.

They don't have to be a "ruse" to have the eventual--and seemingly inevitable--effect of a national curriculum. Unless the feds dismantle NCLB, which simply isn't going to happen, there will always be a reason to federalize.

Added: a blog-neighbor questions the Common Core standards.

nationalizing banks the curriculum

These days, everybody's talking about nationalizing banks. What many are missing: the nationalization of American education.

I encourage you to go have a look at what people are posting...because I get the impression that this discussion isn't going to subside anytime soon. If anything, we're just at the beginning of this rhetoric...and perhaps not too far from words becoming actions.

I'm not terribly afraid of national standards designed by experts in assessment and instruction. (Call them... teachers.) I am wary though, of national standards dictated by politicians, textbook makers, ed-school "theorists," corporations, lobbyists, and the like.

I disagree with The Science Goddess only slightly: though there's been a recent uptick in national standards rhetoric, this blog predicted its rise over two years ago. It's one of the ironic legacies of the No Child Left Behind Act, which only went partway, allowing states to maintain their own standards, one of the reasons for the act's failure. Now, we're clawing our way out by reaching for a French-made rope.

L'école Américaine normalisée. Bush, père.

spinning off its axis

In the halls of this blog, I have, at times, feared what I call the "Frenchification" of American education--increased centralization, mostly due to good intentions, the asphalt of hell's highway.

You can turn that fear into full-blown paranoia now.

(I love the way Babelfish translates the question: "What rotates around the ground?")



[via my brother]

the March madness of standardized tests

Blogging neighbor Mark Olson takes on standardized tests, raising some interesting points.

First, Olson argues against "curricular dogma," noting that schools test to a limited knowledge set, when instead they should test whether students can memorize, persevere, reason, and be diligent--in other words, be "studious." Now, I'm not completely sold on the "critical thinking" line that students can largely do without a common curriculum--I'm reading Hirsch's The Knowledge Deficit, and finding it convincing in parts--but I would agree that the skills a standardized test measures are narrow indeed, and, even worse, leading districts to adopt corporate-driven national curriculum, a prelude to what I've called the Frenchification of education.

Second, Olson explains why his proposal won't get too far in the present climate: he blames unions and bureaucrats for perpetuating into the status quo.

I'm not so certain that teachers' unions would be opposed to smarter tests that measured real learning, though. Most of the criticism coming out of the NEA is that the current standardized tests miss out on real merit, take ungodly amounts of time and money, encourage data fudging if not outright cheating, cheapen local control of curriculum, and place unfair burdens on teachers who teach in troubled schools.

Perseverance: our students just survived five sessions of the WASL, and have four more before they can prove their graduation-worthiness. When it comes to standardized tests, bureaucrats and testmakers have the perseverance of Sisyphus.


Sidebar: for a different teacher's take, go here.

does choice matter? Compton vs. Oakland

I'm empirically minded when it comes to school choice: if vouchers lead to better education for all students, then by golly let's adopt vouchers. (I don't buy arguments that they're inherently going to gut public schools. Maybe--and maybe only in some places--but where I live, the public schools are well-established, quality outfits, as they are across most of the country, apocalypticists be damned. If we had to compete for students, we'd do just fine.)

Early returns haven't been terribly favorable toward vouchers, but a contrast between changes in Oakland and Compton might point in a new direction. Lisa Snell and Shikha Dalmia report:

In short, the two districts have similar student bodies, similar challenges, and—until now—a similar history of failure. But Oakland is beginning to break away from this history, and the reason is the weighted-student-formula program it embraced some years ago and fully implemented last year.

Under this program, kids are not required to attend their neighborhood school, especially if it is failing. Rather, they can pick any regular public or charter school in their district and take their education dollars with them; more students therefore means more revenues for schools. Furthermore, as the name suggests, the revenues are "weighted" based on the difficulty of educating each student, with low-income and special-needs kids commanding more money than smart, well-to-do ones. Schools have to compete for funding, but the upside is that they have total control over it.

Compton has stuck to a completely different approach that does not involve empowering parents—or decentralizing control to schools. Instead, it has tried to fix its failing schools by mandating "classroom inputs." To this end, all Compton schools over the last few years have been ordered to reduce class size by 12 percent, improve teachers' credentials, adopt a tougher curriculum, and even clean up bathrooms.

What are the results so far? Oakland schools have shown a remarkable flexibility in responding to student needs, while Compton has stagnated. In 2003-04, for instance, Oakland's high schools offered 17 Advanced Placement classes. Last year, they increased this total to 91, or about one AP class for every 143 students. By contrast, Compton's AP offerings went up by two that year, to one class for every 218 students. Oakland students also are taking high-level math and science courses more frequently. About 800 high school students studied first-year physics last year—nearly triple the number taking the course in the 2004 school year.

More to the point, of course, are student-performance measures. Oakland kids have shown major improvement on the California High School Exit Examination, which all students must pass in English and math before graduating from high school. Sixty-two percent of high school students passed the English-language-arts portion, compared with 57 percent in 2005—a 5-point gain—and 60 percent passed math, a 6-point jump from the year before. By contrast, Compton showed no gains in English—staying stuck at 58 percent—and posted a 2-percentage-point drop in math, from 50 percent to 48 percent.

Similarly, Oakland's score on the state's Academic Performance Index—a numeric grade that California assigns to its schools based on the performance of their students on standardized tests—went up by 19 points. Compton, in contrast, gained only 13 points. Yet even this overstates Compton's performance, because almost all of its gains came at the elementary level, where students are not so intractable. Compton's middle schools lost an average of 6 points, while Oakland's gained an average of 16 points. Meanwhile, half of Compton's high schools lost points on the API score—including Compton High, where now fewer than 6 percent of males are proficient in reading, and fewer than 1 percent in algebra. Conversely, Oakland high schools gained, on average, 30 points. Even Oakland's economically disadvantaged and limited-English students have shown major improvements. In 2006, its economically disadvantaged students gained 60 percent more on the performance index than Compton's, and its English-language learners gained 120 percent more.

Note that it's not that students can take the money and run to the nearest private school. Public funds stay within the public system, so this isn't a classic voucher system. Maybe that's why it works as well as it does.

There's much more--the whole thing is worth reading--but the description of the changes is compelling. I'm provisionally skeptical, only because such short-term results sometimes confuse statistical noise for useful data, but the article points out that San Francisco has used the modified voucher system for six years now, with positive results.

In the broader context, though, opponents will see the last paragraph as only more fuel for conspiracy charges that NCLB is all about gutting public education:

Nationwide, close to 10,000 schools are considered to be failing under the No Child Left Behind Act, hundreds for more than five years. Yet less than 1 percent of students in these schools manage to transfer to a higher-performing school, even though they have that right under the federal law. Political leaders can change this by building on Oakland and San Francisco's modest experiment in school choice. No student deserves anything less.

Ironically, what Snell and Dalmia miss is that NCLB is acutely centralizing--i.e., Frenchifying--education.

parlez vous dérivé?

The Times, always willing to spend other people's money, supports Gregoire's math initiative.

A critical voice on this must be that of Terry Bergeson, the superintendent of public instruction. It is to Bergeson we must all look for leadership as 296 school districts begin aligning their math curricula and installing teachers qualified to teach math. Schools will have to increase their math classes to accommodate students who will have to skip electives and tackle more math.

Gregoire has outlined the road map. Bergeson can lead the way [emphasis added].

Meanwhile the grandest of all unintended consequences, the Frenchification of American education, continues apace.

a WASL alternative to Gregoire's alternative

Gregoire says to the legislature, postpone the WASL requirement for three years. The state's Board of Education says, sure, but only if you adopt specific recommendations:

The math action plan calls for a clarification and revision of state math standards, a revision of the math WASL if necessary to properly test for these standards, a limited menu of math curriculum choices for school districts and improvements in teacher training and recruitment.

A "limited menu of math curriculum choices?" Ack! Next stop, France.