The News and Leader reports that Springfield Public Schools has not met proficiency tests established by President Bush’s Every Child Left Behind. Of the 38 districts in six counties, only seven met the benchmarks. Those seven districts were small schools serving no more than 800 students.
The News-Leader doesn’t offer any helpful information: no analysis or evaluations of what is really going on, just a note that things are not good. That is not good enough. I want to know which districts in Missouri are meeting proficiency tests and which are not. I want to know how many minority, English Language Learners, and special education students are in those districts and what their scores are. I want to know how Missouri compares to other states. Is this a Missouri problem or a national problem?
There are some goodies in the N-L story. We know that students who are learning English as a second language (called English Language Learners or ELL) are taking the same Communication Arts exams as native speakers. ELLs who live here less than a year are exempt. That shows what the writers of the Every Child Left Behind knows. It takes about seven years for a person to become proficient in another language. Obviously, districts with large numbers of ELL are going to have some lower scores.
The story also points out another major flaw with Every Child Left Behind: almost all children with disabilities are taking the same tests as everyone else. There is but a small fraction of children with severe disabilities who qualify to take an alternative test. If these students need help and accommodations with daily assignments, then common sense would tell us that they will also need accommodations to take standardized tests in order to actually asses what they know and have learned.
Notice that in 2014, 100 percent of the students will be expected to show proficiency. One hundred percent is an unreasonable expectation for any endeavor. Have we forgotten what the term “average” means. There are going to be students who are below average, average and above average. Now we are back to that common sense thing of which Every Child Left Behind has abandoned.
All this will do is force the schools to put pressure on teachers to teach the test. That is what is happening and will continue to happen. Is that what you want? I do not. How did you do on standardized tests as a kid? I hated them and didn’t care. Have things changed so much? Standardized tests cannot be the sole (some would argue it should not be the main) assessment tool. To see if a child is making progress in Communication Arts, we can simply look at his or her language arts portfolio. We can assess how the student has learned to use adjectives and adverbs, write more interesting and complex sentence structures, and look at their spelling tests. What kinds of creative stories, essays, poems, plays and journal entries are they writing? There are other, better, ways of assessing proficiency other than standardized tests. Our President, the husband of a high quality school teacher, should know that. In our fervor to make 100 percent of children proficient at the same level we are leaving every child behind, but hey, it looked good on the political trail.
I say all of this, but my comments should not be interpreted as a defense for the current educational philosophy of our schools. The basis for Every Child Left Behind is that American school children should do better. I can’t argue with that; I can just argue with the approach taken to address the problem. We spend entirely too much time teaching basic skills as opposed to teaching the concepts behind those skills.
The News-Leader doesn’t offer any helpful information: no analysis or evaluations of what is really going on, just a note that things are not good. That is not good enough. I want to know which districts in Missouri are meeting proficiency tests and which are not. I want to know how many minority, English Language Learners, and special education students are in those districts and what their scores are. I want to know how Missouri compares to other states. Is this a Missouri problem or a national problem?
There are some goodies in the N-L story. We know that students who are learning English as a second language (called English Language Learners or ELL) are taking the same Communication Arts exams as native speakers. ELLs who live here less than a year are exempt. That shows what the writers of the Every Child Left Behind knows. It takes about seven years for a person to become proficient in another language. Obviously, districts with large numbers of ELL are going to have some lower scores.
The story also points out another major flaw with Every Child Left Behind: almost all children with disabilities are taking the same tests as everyone else. There is but a small fraction of children with severe disabilities who qualify to take an alternative test. If these students need help and accommodations with daily assignments, then common sense would tell us that they will also need accommodations to take standardized tests in order to actually asses what they know and have learned.
Notice that in 2014, 100 percent of the students will be expected to show proficiency. One hundred percent is an unreasonable expectation for any endeavor. Have we forgotten what the term “average” means. There are going to be students who are below average, average and above average. Now we are back to that common sense thing of which Every Child Left Behind has abandoned.
All this will do is force the schools to put pressure on teachers to teach the test. That is what is happening and will continue to happen. Is that what you want? I do not. How did you do on standardized tests as a kid? I hated them and didn’t care. Have things changed so much? Standardized tests cannot be the sole (some would argue it should not be the main) assessment tool. To see if a child is making progress in Communication Arts, we can simply look at his or her language arts portfolio. We can assess how the student has learned to use adjectives and adverbs, write more interesting and complex sentence structures, and look at their spelling tests. What kinds of creative stories, essays, poems, plays and journal entries are they writing? There are other, better, ways of assessing proficiency other than standardized tests. Our President, the husband of a high quality school teacher, should know that. In our fervor to make 100 percent of children proficient at the same level we are leaving every child behind, but hey, it looked good on the political trail.
I say all of this, but my comments should not be interpreted as a defense for the current educational philosophy of our schools. The basis for Every Child Left Behind is that American school children should do better. I can’t argue with that; I can just argue with the approach taken to address the problem. We spend entirely too much time teaching basic skills as opposed to teaching the concepts behind those skills.
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