In American K-12 education, right now, the wind is just beginning to pick up and Ma and Pa are hustling the kids into the cellar. A twister's coming, and its name is No Child Left Behind.
Those who have followed the education debate over the past two years might be forgiven for wondering: how can anyone possibly think this debate is going to get more ferocious? After all, NCLB has generated enough heat and light over the past two years (and especially in the past 12 months) to last a lifetime.
Yet what's coming could make the debates of the past few months seem as tame as a Ladies' Sodality. This summer, it is widely expected, thousands of schools will be labeled "in need of improvement" when their 2004 state test results roll in. These schools will likely represent a cross-section of American K-12 education - urban schools, yes, but also well-heeled suburban schools, rural districts, and everybody in between.
So it is that in the past few weeks, schools and districts - abetted by members of the media who may be constitutionally anti-testing but mostly crave a good story - have begun to work feverishly to distract the public from the funnel clouds on the horizon. The plan, clearly, is to discredit the coming reports by launching a preemptive attack on the foundations and procedures of the law itself - and just maybe land a blow or two on the Bush administration in the process.
One example: a recent series of articles on testing in the Dayton Daily News. (We highlight this series not just because of Fordham's long roots in Dayton but because it's an especially egregious example of its genre.) There is a formula to writing such stories, a series of journalistic tropes that are essential to creating the proper atmosphere of hysteria. I know these secrets, as I was formerly a practitioner of the black art of journalism myself. The DDN articles exhibit all the standard symptoms of self-righteous hyperbole that characterize much NCLB reporting. To wit:
Start with a tearjerker. Testing is a subject tailor-made for plucking heartstrings raw. In this case, we hear of "9-year-old honor student" Kylie Miller on her way out the door to retake the Ohio Fourth Grade Proficiency Test, which she had failed on an earlier attempt. "Mom, don't get mad if I fail again," she calls out. "I'm just dumb." Or high school student Tynisha Edmondson, who earned A's in science class yet repeatedly failed her science proficiency exam. What pathos! Nowhere does the Daily News consider the possibility that "honors" students who fail state proficiency exams - exams that other critics say have been "dumbed down" to a laughably easy passing level - may say more about grade inflation than the exams' validity.
Put the most extreme statements in the mouths of others. This is an old journalistic trick, allowing reporters to editorialize second-hand while avoiding overt statements of opinion. Thus, we are subjected to one Doris Nell, chairwoman of the Lebanon High School English Department, who opines of this testing mania, "I think our era will be looked at as a new type of Spanish Inquisition." Ah yes, we overlooked the NCLB thumbscrews-and-iron-maidens budget line! The set-aside for stake-burnings. We're not sure what Ms. Nell's problem with testing is, since her school does reasonably well on Ohio proficiency exams (see this link), though this performance is perhaps made easier by its lack of racial (97 percent white) or socioeconomic (only 5 percent free- or reduced-lunch eligible) diversity. More to the point, she might reflect on the likely fact that few of her students are being graduated as illiterates and that just possibly "the government" wants to do something for the many Ohio kids who are.
Stack the deck with experts. The Daily News trots out a long list of experts with impressive academic sinecures to bash testing. The very few who speak in favor of testing are testing company executives or the Ohio policy makers who wrote the laws the News is criticizing. This stacking of the deck conveys the impression that only people with an interest in the matter support testing. That's simply not true.
Present numbers out of context. The Daily News laments that, due to NCLB-driven testing requirements, "the annual budget for school testing quadrupled in five years, from $18 million to $75 million." It fails to mention that, in fiscal 2003, Ohio spent just under $8 billion on elementary and secondary education, which means the state spent about one percent of its education budget on testing. As Rick Hess notes in his fine recent book, Common Sense School Reform (click here for more information), it is striking that this nation spends so little to ascertain whether its enormous outlays for K-12 education are having any effect. Consider: sectors such as banking and insurance devote upwards of 10 percent of their budgets to collecting and using data to assess performance. Only in education do we show such curious disinterest in ascertaining whether investments are paying off.
Present a smattering of episodes as a nationwide trend. The Daily News informs us that there is "growing evidence" that testing systems are "deeply flawed . . . in how they're constructed, in how they're graded, and in how their results are used." In support of this, reporters muster three grading lapses: in North Carolina, Nevada, and Connecticut. In the last of these, reports were delayed for several months to work out glitches in the grading mechanism. In the other two, a grand total of 749 students in two states received erroneous results. The errors were eventually caught and fixed. The News also reports that a nonsense essay a reporter wrote was determined to be "effective writing" by a computer program that assesses writing samples for the proficiency tests. He has a point here; computer grading isn't a great way to evaluate essays in the first place, at least not yet. And we do not dismiss the possibility of grading errors in standardized testing. That's why good practice includes extensive field-testing and validity assessments. But these incidents do not a nationwide trend make. No one, not even the Daily News, could devise an error-free system. Keep in mind, though, that it's impossible even to appraise the validity of an accountability system that relies solely on teacher-developed tests. In any such system, a student's fate hinges on one person's evaluation of their progress, a judgment that cannot be independently confirmed. The reasonable response to testing's technical glitches is to identify them and work to reduce them - not to junk the process because somewhere, somehow, it may spit out a flawed result.
Demolish distinctions, reduce complexities, and conflate facts. The writing sample mentioned above is not required by NCLB. The science assessment Tynisha Edmondson has trouble passing is not required by NCLB. The state proficiency test system the Daily News opposes, and which has increased Ohio's testing budget, is far more extensive than NCLB requires. Federal law does not, in fact, require that schools be immediately "sanctioned" if they are labeled underperforming. After two years, students have the right to exit, but is that a sanction for the school or an opportunity for children to learn? Years of "needing improvement" pass before district or state is obliged to intervene forcefully in a school's operations. Nor does the Daily News ever mention that - all together now, and for real this time - participation in Title I, the program that NCLB reformed, is voluntary. Much of the controversy over NCLB stems from the fact that the federal government is now requiring something in return for the money it ships to states. This may be inconvenient for the adults in charge of the system, but it hardly constitutes a crime against the Republic.
The Dayton Daily News is not alone in committing these journalistic sins when it comes to testing, standards, and NCLB. Misconceptions about the law are rife, and newspapers have vied to bash it - with the willing help of educators opposed to testing and to all attempts to hold schools and those who work in them to account for their performance. (We loved Doris Nell's remark that she favors "accountability in a general sense." Sort of like original sin, we guess.) But the effect of these attacks on NCLB is pernicious "in a general sense." What will average readers think when they hear, later this summer, that X percent of schools in their state - maybe even their kid's school - has been labeled "in need of improvement"? Well, if they've read the Dayton Daily News series on testing or hundreds of similar articles these past few months, they will likely think, "Why worry? I think I read somewhere that the tests are wrong or flawed, or . . . something. Anyway, my kid's school is just fine. That can't be a tornado siren I hear, right? Because, boy, is it peaceful out, and isn't the sky the most interesting shade of green?"
Justin Torres is research director of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
"Flunking the test," by Mark Fisher and Scott Elliot, Dayton Daily News, May 23, 2004, http://www.daytondailynews.com/localnews/content/localnews/daily/0523testmain.html (registration required)
"Nonhuman factors," by Scott Elliott, Dayton Daily News, May 24, 2004, http://www.daytondailynews.com/project/content/project/tests/0524testautoscore.html (registration required)
"Parents question fairness of misleading exams," by Mark Fisher, Dayton Daily News, May 24, 2004, http://www.daytondailynews.com/project/content/project/tests/0524testquestion.html (registration required)
"New generation of tests head to schools," by Mark Fisher and Scott Elliot, Dayton Daily News, May 25, 2004, http://www.daytondailynews.com/project/content/project/tests/0525futures.html (registration required)
'DDN' series full of misleading statements," by John Boehner, Dayton Daily News, May 28, 2004, http://www.daytondailynews.com/opinion/content/opinion/daily/0528voicejoboe.html (registration required)
"Superintendent debate: Do we need big tests?" by Jay Mathews, Washington Post, June 1, 2004, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6123-2004Jun1.html