[CSPS] NCLB: rationing education

[Jonathan Coopersmith]

It's not teaching to the test, it's teaching the borderline kids to the test

Rationing Education

By Jennifer Booher-Jennings
Thursday, October 5, 2006; A33

In dire circumstances -- a battlefield, a devastating natural 
disaster or an overcrowded emergency room -- we accept the rationing 
of scarce resources as a necessary if regrettable choice. We triage. 
We divide patients into three groups: the safe cases, those suitable 
for treatment and the hopeless. And we ration resources in an effort 
to do the most good for the largest number.

But there are areas of life where we have rejected the idea of 
triage. Public education, an institution charged with disbursing 
equality of opportunity for all children, is certainly one of them. 
In our loftiest moments, we see public education as one place where 
we dispense with the blunt, utilitarian logic of triage and seek 
equal treatment for all. But try as we might, deep inequalities 
persist and belie our rhetoric.

It's ironic that the No Child Left Behind Act, intended to right the 
injustices suffered by poor and minority children, has in fact caused 
more rationing of education. Five years ago this law made 
accountability our nation's educational blueprint. Schools must 
increase passing rates on annual tests so that all students are 
proficient in reading and math by 2014. The idea is that what gets 
measured gets done. If educators are not held to task for helping the 
most disadvantaged students, their attention will remain elsewhere.

The past five years have proved the law's framers right beyond 
anything they could have imagined. The problem is a classic case of 
misaligned incentives. No Child evaluates schools by the percentage 
of students passing state tests. Imagine that students must answer 70 
percent of the questions correctly to pass. Schools get no credit for 
moving a student from a 15 to a 69, or from a 70 to a 95. Yet if 
educators nudge a student from a 69 to a 71, the school's passing 
rate increases.

The stakes for schools are enormous. So it isn't surprising that many 
educators game the system by reaching first for the low-hanging 
fruit, the students closest to passing. Dubbed the "bubble kids," 
because their scores put them on the bubble of the passing mark, 
these students give schools the biggest bang for the buck. In 
response to this incentive, many schools have rationed out 
practically all of their resources to these students. Meanwhile, the 
lowest-performing students, the "hopeless cases," languish. So do 
their high-performing classmates, who are relegated to the waiting 
room while the bubble kids are cured.

One Texas teacher I interviewed poignantly captured this dilemma as 
we discussed Ana, a low-performing student in her class. "Ana's got a 
25 percent," the teacher said. "What's the point in trying to get her 
to grade level? It would take two years to get her to pass the test, 
so there's really no hope for her. I feel like we might as well focus 
on the ones there's hope for."

It would be easy to question the ethics of educators engaged in 
triage, but they are doing exactly what the No Child Left Behind Act 
asks them to do. Policymakers, not teachers, must be held accountable 
for implementing a policy that rewards schools for privileging some 
students at the expense of others.

The solution is to tweak incentives to encourage educators to improve 
the achievement of all students. Congress will have the opportunity 
to revisit this issue as the act comes up for reauthorization early 
next year. Unfortunately, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings 
recently scoffed at the idea of making significant changes, saying, 
"I talk about No Child Left Behind like Ivory soap: It's 99.9 percent 
pure." Can any law, particularly one that is 670 pages, be so flawless?

We need to look closely at the act's impact on the lives of real kids 
and educators. Both the co-author of "The Bell Curve," Charles 
Murray, and the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University (strange 
bedfellows indeed) have recently argued that the losers in a system 
based on passing percentages are minority students. It is an approach 
that not only creates perverse incentives to focus on students close 
to passing but also underestimates the size of the achievement gap, 
creating the illusion of progress where none exists. Duke University 
economists have shown that when schools focus narrowly on passing 
rates, the gap between high-achieving white students and African 
American students grows.

Numerous other studies from the trenches reveal the painful 
compromises teachers make to maximize passing rates. The research 
substantiates the proposition that unrelenting attention to passing 
rates turns educators' attention away from the law's intended 
beneficiaries, the lowest-performing students, and hurts 
high-performing students as well.

One policy change that would go a long way toward addressing this 
problem is simply measuring educational growth. When students improve 
on their previous performance but don't clear the passing threshold, 
schools still deserve credit. We also need incentives for educators 
to further improve the performance of students already passing state 
tests. As it stands, they have no reason to invest in average and 
high-performing students.

The mechanics of a growth-based accountability system are tricky. But 
education researchers have spent the past 40 years figuring out how 
best to measure school effects, and we know enough to devise a better 
system. Thus far, the Education Department has allowed only North 
Carolina and Tennessee to test growth models to meet the No Child 
Left Behind Act's requirements. We need to add more states to that list.

If we don't get the incentives right this time, we face five more 
years of lost opportunities for America's children.

The writer is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Columbia University.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/04/AR2006100401538.html?nav=hcmodule

Jonathan Coopersmith
Associate Professor
Dept. of History
MS 4236
Texas A&M University
College Station, Texas  77843-4236
979.845.8584
979.862.4314 fax

Secretary
History & Philosophy of Science Section (L)
American Association for the Advancement of Science
www.aaas.org 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://philebus.tamu.edu/pipermail/csps/attachments/20061005/edf04ff1/attachment.htm