It’s one of the least understood elements of an already confusing law: the “progress” that No Child Left Behind requires states to measure in schools has nothing to do with how much improvement any given student actually makes from one year to the next.
Under No Child Left Behind as it was originally written in 2001, an eighth grader who reads at a fourth grade level on the first day of school but who reads at a seventh grade level on the last day of school would count as a negative—not a plus—on the school’s report card for whether it is meeting state standards. Conversely, a student who enters the fifth grade reading at a seventh grade level but who actually regresses a year to a sixth grade reading level by the end of school would count as a positive mark when the school is evaluated.
If this doesn’t make any sense to you, you’re not alone—the department of education recognizes the problem and is doing something about it. But if you read articles like this one that cover the story, you’re not likely to get a very clear explanation for what changes are actually taking place.
So what is the truth about the “progress” that No Child Left Behind requires states and schools to show each year?
Until last year (when Tennessee and North Carolina were approved to explore a different way of doing things) there was only one definition of “progress” that a school could meet. If the school did not meet this definition of “progress,” it was judged to be “failing”—and, over time, could face different corrective measures such as mandatory tutoring services, public school choice, and eventually even state takeover and staff reconstitution. This initial definition of progress measured whether a current year’s students in a given grade, say 4th grade, were more likely to be passing the state test in reading, math, and science than last years fourth graders. Put in the most generalized way possible, if the percentage of fourth graders at Robinson Elementary School passing the tests this year is higher than the percentage of fourth graders passing the test last year, the school is meeting NCLB’s definition of “Annual Yearly Progress”. It’s a bit more complex then that, because NCLB also requires schools to show that minority, low-income, and special education students have higher pass rates this year than the previous year, but essentially this definition of progress comes down to a comparison of one group of kids with a different group of kids (e.g., fourth grade Latino children this year with fourth grade Latino children last year).
What are some problems with this way of doing things? For starters, it conflates the notion of “progress” with what we typically think of as a school’s mission—to prepare each child to the fullest of its own ability by improving his or her reading, math, and other skills as much as possible each year. NCLB does not reward a school for improving a child’s math ability by two grade levels in a single year, unless that improvement is the difference between “passing” and “failing” the state standardized test. Simultaneously, it rewards a school that makes only marginal gains—say, a half of a grade level in a given year—if that gain is enough to keep a student passing. As such, a school that has 100% of sixth graders reading at exactly a sixth grade level is doing better under NCLB’s definition of “progress” than a school that has 95% of sixth graders reading at an tenth grade level and 5% at a fifth grade level.
But the complications and problems go even deeper than that. Because NCLB requires schools to show that there are more passing students in each subgroup from one year to another, a school could be judged as “failing” if it had one out of three black fifth grade students pass the math test this year where two of four black fifth graders passed the same test last year. Forgiving the obvious importance of measuring sub-groups so as to ensure that low-income and minority children receive the attention they need, is this really a fair way to judge our schools?
And this is where Secretary of Education Spelling’s announcement last week is so important, even though it received hardly any meaningful coverage. Her announcement was of the expansion of a pilot project for use of a new, more intuitive notion of “progress” to be measured by states through standardized tests. Under this model, which Tennessee and North Carolina began piloting earlier in’06, data would also be captured on how much improvement each student is making in a particular school from one year to the next. In other words, if Timmy was at a third grade reading level last year but gets to a fifth grade reading level this year, the school is recognized for doing an exemplary job, even if Timmy is in the sixth grade and fails his state’s reading test. Additionally, a school is deemed as not succeeding if it has a large group of high-achievers who actually do not improve much from one year to the next.
What remains to be seen is how the two definitions will meet in the middle—if at all. Because a growth model left on its own does inherently little (or worse yet, nothing) to address one of the most compelling goals of the No Child Left Behind Act in the first place: narrow the achievement gap. The whole point of the initial definition of progress was that it could force all schools to try to get all of its students—especially the minority and low-income ones, since those are the students least likely to be passing to begin with—up to the state’s standards. But as with most policies, the devil is in the details… and the details over what we mean by “progress” in NCLB can make all the difference in the world.
