NCLB 1.0 vs. NCLB 2.0 | Eastern North Carolina Now

    School officials missed the opportunity Hood gave them.

    Commissioner Hood Richardson is still trying to get the school system to disclose how No Child Left Behind (NCLB) works. Good for him. Bad for the school system.

    Richardson displayed the school system's response at the last meeting. It was a stack of paper nearly a foot tall. That was the school system's response. You'd think a bunch of lawyers ran the school system. The last time I saw a stack of useless paper like that it was from a subpoena that had been issued in a case based on whether school system hiring practices were impermissibly racially motivated. "Flood them in extraneous information and maybe they will not see the bad stuff." Reminded me of when I was chair of the College of Education's personnel committee. We were sitting to hear tenure cases. My task was to move the committee along expeditiously. That was pretty hard to do when the applicants submitted several boxes of information. I remember one rolled their material in on a hand truck. Maybe that's what Hood has to look forward to next from our educational leadership in the county.

    But it is really much simpler than all that. NCLB is a failure. It will soon be replaced by the Obama version. We've already written about that.

    Hood rants against the labeling associated with NCLB. He is correct about that. NCLB improperly labels a school a success or a failure because groups it labels do not score high enough on the prescribed tests. This produces what I used to teach in my research class as a "violation of the smell test." The t-scores or correlation coefficients may say one thing but if your commons sense tells you the conclusion is wrong you best look at it more closely. When you look at NCLB what you actually see is that it's purpose was good, even if the results got corrupted by disingenuous educators.

    One of the purposes of NCLB's use of "subgroups" was to keep schools from hiding low performing students in a large group that had relatively more high performing students. On average the large group looked pretty good. But when you broke down the large group into subgroups you found significant categories of students who were in fact being "left behind." So School A could have 50 kids who were not learning how to read but the average for the school might be, say 70% proficient and in School B the average percent proficient might be 80% but when you broke it down School B might have 70 kids in a subgroup not learning to read. School A was labeled "bad" while School B was labeled "great" when in reality it was failing more students.

    Another (and we think the worst) flaw in NCLB was that it set intolerably low standards. It gave the schools an entire generation of students before the school was held accountable for getting most students who were capable up to a minimum level. When we needed real transformational improvement in our schools we had education leaders issuing NCLB results touting "success" by citing tiny incremental changes in test scores that would have never ever have achieved a minimum level of performance needed in this day and time.

    Yet another flaw of NCLB is its reliance on aggregate measurements. Because it relies on the state's standardized testing program it relies on "average" scores. I've told the story many times but it is still just as enlightening as the first time it was told. I once went for a conference with my daughter's guidance counselor. It was towards the end of her sophomore year. The question I wanted answered was simple: Is she going to be able to get admitted to the college of her choice? The counselor pulled out stacks of computer printouts (almost as tall as the stack they gave Hood) and began to tell me about how the school had performed on various subjects. I was interested and learned a lot about the school but finally I said: "I really am not here to learn about how well last year's students did on average, I am here to find out how well my daughter is doing and what she needs to do to be able to get into the college she wants to attend."

    Most parents feel the same way. The focus of NCLB on average scores (or percents) does not tell us much about how successful the school is being at educating our son or daughter.

    But the real irony of NCLB is that it set up a system of leaving behind a really significant group of students...our best and brightest.

    NCLB, using North Carolina's testing program, is based on getting students up to a minimum level of performance. "Proficiency" they call it. Or Level III. It does not even measure or reward a school or teacher for any progress beyond just the bare minimum. Because of this our top performing students get shortchanged by the emphasis the system places on minimum performance. Smart principals quickly realized that to do well on NCLB you needed to identify your "Level II students" and focus on getting them up to Level III. So the top students in Level IV got ignored. Fortunately, they do pretty well in spite of the school. But it is a shame to ignore them relative to the resources that NCLB has poured into the lower achievers.

    NCLB has it flaws as Hood very accurately smells. And as our previous article says there is hope Secretary Duncan will change NCLB 2.0 to focus on individual student progress and hold school and teachers accountable for every child, not just the low performing ones.

    His stated intent to use student performance as one measurement of effective teaching is another hopeful sign. It will be if indeed he can survive the onslaught that has already begun by the teachers' unions against the idea of holding teachers accountable for student performance. We're not optimistic President Obama can withstand the scorn of the NEA and the AFT, but maybe what shakes out of the final mix will be an improvement.

    And Duncan's emphasis on charter schools is also a hopeful sign that NCLB 2.0 will be an improvement over Version 1.0.

    A number of detractors try to lampoon Hood's instincts. And we have some very good debates with him, but what we admire and respect about him is that his instincts are usually pretty close to being on target. He is exactly spot on when he challenges the school officials to defend NCLB and he was precisely correct to reject that foot tall stack of paper as being an acceptable response. It is a real shame that our school officials did not seize the opportunity Hood's questioning offered them to engage the commissioners in a healthy debate about how we should be improving our schools. It was but another missed opportunity by our school system.

    Delma Blinson writes the "Teacher's Desk" column for our friend in the local publishing business: The Beaufort Observer. His concentration is in the area of his expertise - the education of our youth. He is a former teacher, principal, superintendent and university professor.