(19) The Age of Accountability

This is another post to give you a bit more context for the times. I'll be back to writing about my class and school next time.

When I began my teaching career in 1996, the US was entering into a new era of educational reform. While No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was still a few more years in the making, the development of a "standards based education" was beginning to become established. To me, this was good thing and it helped begin to set academic expectations for teachers to consider at Calliope School.

Five years later, NCLB not only mandated that each state establish academic standards for each grade level, but required that students in underrepresented subgroups (limited English proficiency students, students with disabilities, students eligible for free and reduced price meals, and white, black, Asian Pacific Islander, American Indian, and Hispanic students) make sufficient growth to meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). If growth wasn't made on annual assessments, schools and school districts faced punitive sanctions including being taken over by the state. The implementation of NCLB, its general approach,and lack of funding, have been the center of controversy since its inception and for valid reasons. However, it was (and is) important legislation for urban schools because it forced districts to focus attention on the most overlooked students.

Even though there has been a great deal of discussion over the many internal and external factors that cause a school to fail, I was curious to learn why, even in a low performing school, instruction varied so drastically from classroom to classroom. Why was it that students could be on grade level in one class, then move on to the next grade only to lose a lot of ground? One possible answer lied in the space between Mrs. Prentiss and Mrs. Williams.

More about Mrs. Williams next.

(21) 2010

I wanted to go back to the future for a moment and tell you about a conversation that I had last week with an urban school district superintendent. His district is located in California. I was meeting with him to talk about a plan for reaching academic growth targets set by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and to support the district's overall reform efforts.

First, a few NCLB reference terms. Program Improvement (PI) is used to describe schools that have not met one or more academic targets for two consecutive years. Targets are set for overall student achievement and for children who belong to specific subgroups. The PI designation forces districts to make targeted efforts to turnaround failing schools or face consequences that may include school reconstitution or in extreme cases, state takeover of the entire district. A school's individual Academic Performance Index (API) is a score (ranging from 200-1000) used to rank and compare schools across districts and the country. A score of 800 or more means you are generally safe. A Similar Schools Ranking compares schools with similar demographic characteristics.

This is how our conversation went:

The Super (waving his arms in front of himself in a slow Tai Chi, swirling motion): Now Sabine, I want you to picture our district. (pause) Now, picture it as if all our schools are in Program Improvement - because that's how I see it.

Me (What was I thinking, but didn't say aloud): Huh? Not all your schools are in PI, actually only four out of the thirty schools in the district are designated PI. But I replied only with an, "OK...."

The Super: Look, I don't worry about API scores. We can't keep up with the national standards. I look at our Similar Schools Ranking. That's where I want to see progress.

Me (Again, what was I thinking, but didn't say aloud): Are you actually serious? You, the superintendent, the leader of this entire HUGE school district is telling me not to worry about students making any real academic growth. You just want to look a little better than all of the other crappy schools and districts that you are grouped with! You cannot be serious! I continued not to say anything. There's really no point arguing with a superintendent, so I said, "OK."

Here's my take on the current implementation of NCLB in the U.S.:

NCLB was created with good intentions. It does focus attention on students who have historically been underserved. It created a framework for defining basic minimum academic standards in each grade level. I don't have a problem with the annual testing. I'm not a fan of using standardized tests as the sole measure of skill or ability, but they do provide a snapshot of students at a point in time.

What concerns me about NCLB, is that it requires the leaders of failing districts to fix things, to fix themselves, usually without outside assistance. This is like asking a dysfunctional family to just snap out of it. The lack of funding for NCLB is an obstacle, but frankly, if you are a district in trouble, it's safe to say that you are probably also having issues managing your resources. I'm just not sure pouring more money into the mix is a wise idea.

The bottom line here is that we are left with district administrators - like the Superintendent here - who are under a tremendous amount of pressure to get out of the hole. They're stressed out, their jobs (and mortgages) are on the line and they're looking for a quick fix. In order to get Language Arts and Math scores up (two subjects more heavily weighted), some elementary schools have had to forsake Science, Art, Music and Social Studies. The instruction of state standards are broken down into unrelated "capsules" of information. Teachers are sometimes even forced to teach directly from 'scripts' so that instruction is uniform across the district. One teacher colleague describes her elementary school as a former Soviet state where the principal comes on the loudspeaker and gives inspirational speeches at times during the course of day on how her students WILL meet the standards and how they WILL NOT continue to be a FAILING school.

As we think about the latest federal legislation designed to support low performing schools such as Race to the Top, let's just ask ourselves, whose standards are we racing toward? When we consider the School Improvement Grants (SIG) that are currently being offered to persistently low performing schools throughout the country (up to $2 million per year per school), you have to evaluate the wisdom of handing large sums of money to districts with "persistently low performing" systems of management.

A penny for your thoughts?

Image credit: from the motion picture, Back to the Future, 1985 & 1989