Bring back Richard Rothstein! The space his education column formerly occupied in the Wednesday New York Times is often filled nowadays by the grumpy Michael Winerip, who seems bent on proving that everybody in America hates the No Child Left Behind act. His latest contribution was last week's column reporting "pervasive dismay" with NCLB across the land. "As I travel the country," Winerip writes with evident relish, "I find nearly universal contempt for this noble-sounding law."
To be sure, the Gadfly has itself fussed on occasion about NCLB, but commentaries such as Winerip's come close to letting people off the hook by condoning a public-education system that isn't doing a satisfactory job today and resists doing anything differently tomorrow. If the view settles over educator-land that NCLB sets hopeless goals, needn't be taken seriously and can be dismissed on grounds that Uncle Sam isn't covering the full costs of compliance, then much of America should resign itself to twenty more years of flat scores, wide gaps and semi-educated kids. Whereas A Nation at Risk was greeted by a chorus of Pollyannas who asserted that its basic analysis was wrong and that everything was really copacetic in American education, NCLB seems to be attracting a choir of defeatists, especially state officials who say, in essence, "You just can't expect us to do all those things. They're too hard, too disruptive and you're not giving us enough money." Too bad the lead education voice in America's "newspaper of record" is singing along with that choir. The effect is to deny that the problems NCLB seeks to address are grave enough to warrant painful changes in established practices. As Secretary Paige recently told state board members, "In order to make a difference, we have to operate the situation differently. That change is difficult. But change is required." If NCLB fails, America may as well forget standards-based reform, which is the same as forgetting tens of millions of needy kids.
Meanwhile the evidence continues to roll in that standards, testing and accountability work--so long as states stick to their game plans and are undeterred by protesters and defeatists. Massachusetts reports that 90% of the high school class of 2003 has now passed the core English and math sections of the Bay State's demanding MCAS high-school graduation test (with more re-testing opportunities still ahead for those who haven't yet cleared the bar-- see link below for more information). Texas announced the other day that more than 80 percent of its third-graders have passed that state's new and tougher TAKS reading test, a larger fraction than just about anyone expected in the first round of TAKS. (Texas is following its past practice of gradually raising its "cut-score" over several years. In this initial administration of the English-language reading test, 89 percent of 3rd graders passed; 81 percent got scores that would qualify them as passing against the higher standard planned for 2005. Scores on the Spanish-language reading test were a bit lower.)
Are such results flukes or part of a pattern? A heated debate rages as to whether statewide accountability systems boost academic performance or --as a pair of Arizona State University academics, including uber-Pollyanna David Berliner claim--have no effect, or even make things worse. While that debate will persist, the best analyses I've seen of multi-state, multi-year evidence conclude that state accountability systems have the hoped-for effect most of the time. A forthcoming issue of Education Next will present such a review by Eric Hanushek and Margaret Raymond. (An early version of that analysis can be found at http://edpro.stanford.edu/eah/papers/accountability.Harvard.publication%20version.pdf.) It's time to consider whether most protests against standards-based, test-driven state accountability systems have more to do with objections to the concept--and to change itself--than with credible evidence that such systems don't work.
Do not, however, doubt the determination of resisters to stick by the regime under which they have thrived. The most dogged of them may turn out to be the ed schools, which (along with the teacher unions) one might term public education's version of Iraq's "Republican Guards." Feeling beset on many fronts--including NCLB's requirement that every classroom must have a "highly qualified" teacher, Rod Paige's continuing push for "alternative certification," widespread Congressional criticism of ed schools, and anxieties about the upcoming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act--the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education is girding for battle. Earlier this month, president David Imig circularized his deans with an astonishing amalgam of delusion, strategy and spin. Excerpts follow:
"I know that virtually every education school is doing a commendable job. We continue to be the most accountable unit on the campus and are fulfilling our obligations for the NCLB challenges. Our need is to tell our story in more compelling ways to the policy makers and the public. Until we do so, we can expect to see efforts to make education schools even more accountable to Washington&.My purpose in writing is to urge you to make your local U.S. Congressman a friend of your education school&.When you respond, use the language of No Child Left Behind and demonstrate your commitment to that legislation&.Consider inviting your Representative to give the Commencement Address this Spring but insist that they spend some time hearing your newly minted teachers brag about their program and how well it prepared them to teach in challenging schools&."
Instead of trekking around the land to hear state officials beat up on NCLB, maybe Michael Winerip should consider listening to ed school deans praise it. Evaluating their veracity would be fit work for the New York Times.
"A pervasive dismay on a Bush school law," by Michael Winerip, The New York Times, March 19, 2003.
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As mentioned above, 90 percent of Massachusetts students in the class of 2003 have already passed the state's challenging high school exit exam. A new publication from the Partnership for Learning in Washington state looks at what it took to achieve these results and what other states can learn from Massachusetts.
"The Massachusetts Miracle," Education Matters, March 12, 2003.
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Daniel Patrick Moynihan, R.I.P. As this Gadfly was taking wing, word came that Pat Moynihan had died. (He was ill with complications following an emergency appendectomy as well as the accumulated maladies of his 76 years.) Much will be written and said in the days ahead about this extraordinary man--described by the Almanac of American Politics as the nation's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson. I simply want to note that he was my main mentor during my twenties and thirties, my doctoral advisor, my boss in three amazing jobs, my premier guide into the worlds of public policy and education research, my passport to India (and the family I acquired there) and a source of endless inspiration. We didn't see each other much in recent years--my loss--but his influence endures not only in my work but in that of hundreds of others whose lives he touched.
