In its first major ruling on student free speech in nearly twenty years, the US Supreme Court ruled yesterday against then high school student Joseph Frederick for displaying his now infamous, "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner during an Olympic Torch precession in 2002. Arguing that drug abuse by the nation's youth is a serious problem, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the court's opinion that, "Schools may take steps to safeguard those entrusted to their care from speech that can reasonably be regarded as encouraging illegal drug use."

The case does represent the curtailing of student speech rights, though it was comforting to hear Justice Roberts reiterate the bedrock principle first stated in the Tinker v. Des Moines (1969) case regarding student speech during the anti-Vietnam War era that, "do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." In writing this, Roberts took a giant step towards the center from his colleague Clarence Thomas, who wrote in a concurring opinion that he believed students should not have any free speech rights at all in school.

Justices Alito and Kennedy, in a separate concurring opinion, issued the crucial argument that this ruling should not be construed as to restrict "speech that can plausibly be interpreted as commenting on any political or social issue." This is really the vital issue at stake with the case, since all but the most ardent student speech activists would likely agree that a non-sensical banner joking about drug use is little cause for sounding the first amendment bugle. But if the banner had read, "Students Demand Better Public Schools Now," or, "Students For Representative Democracy," and the principal had tried to intervene, well then that would be an entirely different story.

In the dissenting opinion, Justice Stevens, perhaps the most liberal justice on the court, objected to the majority opinion on the grounds that the banner was not an actual pro-drug message, and that as such, the principal had no right to essentially stop a student from making a joke. In perhaps the most colorful line of the decision, Stevens wrote that most students knew the bong-hits message had no meaning, because most of them "do not shed their brains at the schoolhouse gate." Perhaps that is true, but in the end the Roberts majority saw enough reason for concern to side with the principal and school district.

Is the ruling cause for alarm for the nation's students? Most likely not, so long as youth stick to common sense speech and protest speech that touches on clear political and social themes without mentioning drugs. But it remains to be seen if yesterday's ruling is an isolated decision or one towards a Clarence Thomas - esque erosion of student speech rights reminiscent of the 18th century.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 09:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

No Child Left Behind has turned a great deal of attention onto whether our schools are meeting the standards set out for them in each of the 50 states. Not as much attention, however, has been paid on an equally important topic: what do we do with the schools that are identified as being most in need of help?

Indeed, as we here at Our Education travel and speak with wide audiences of high school students about their schools, few object to the idea that they and their schools should be expected to show proficiency in core subject areas. And though some students do object to the use of standardized tests as the sole instrument for demonstrating this proficiency, many more raise concerns about the next logical question: how can we best help those schools that are found to be failing?

This Education Week article digs deeper into this question and the recent debate over which corrective measures are most appropriate in the federal law to help push failing schools to begin meeting annual yearly progress (AYP) benchmarks. Broadly speaking, the two kinds of incentives that can be offered each have weaknesses. On the one hand, punishing the failing schools with punitive policies and removing resources may only do a disservice to the children being taught in these schools since many of them may require greater investments of time and resources, not less. On the other hand, providing additional resources to schools that fail to meet proficiency targets may create a peverse set of incentives whereby schools choose intentionally to fail since doing so would result in a windfall of support.

Currently, NCLB requires schools who fail to meet AYP targets in two consecutive years to allow students to attend neighboring public schools which are meeting their benchmarks. However, this has happened much less in reality than is actually provided for by the law. If a school fails to meet AYP for 3 years, the district must provided tutoring services to students to help them succeed. And if a school fails for 4 or 5 straight years, the school is eligible for "staff restructuring", which is supposed to include completely shutting down and re-opening a school with new faculty.

But proponent and opponents of the law both agree that more attention needs to be paid to how we go about fixing our failing schools than NCLB's lockstep set of interventions. Members of the Bush administration have suggested creating a voucher program to allow students who attend the five-year failing schools to attend private schools, but there has been significant opposition to this idea in the Congress. Others have responded that a better solution would be to strengthen the public school choice provisions of the law. Still other measures being suggested for when NCLB is re-authorized include a provision to allow districts with failing schools to authorize the creation of charter schools even if city or state caps on charters would prohibit it, and also proposals to allow school districts to nullify certain portions of collective bargaining contracts with teachers to make big changes such as increasing the length of the school day.

At best it seems that each of these ideas has partial support among legislators and education experts. However, as the old adage goes, knowing that you have a problem is half of the solution. Five years ago it wasn't clear in any systematic, objective way which schools were serving children well and which schools were not. Today there is some consensus on it. What remains is for elected officials and educators is to come up with a plan for how to fix what is broken.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are several common misconceptions about the No Child Left Behind Act, but perhaps the most significant one is that it creates a uniform set of standards for all of America's children. While standards are indeed the crux of the law, along with the requirement that schools test their students to see whether the standards are being met, the misconception is that there is any kind of uniformity within the standards for school aged youth. In other words, whether a child is scored as below basic, basic, proficient, or advanced in a subject like reading may have less to do with her aptitude in that subject area and more to do with her zip code.

The reason for this discrepancy is simple: NCLB charges each of the 50 states to set its own standards in core subject areas, and allows the states considerable leeway in interpreting how high--or low--to set their bars. A report released by the US Department of Education just last week underscores the severe inconsistency that has resulted from this state-by-state system of standard setting. It does so by comparing the scores that students need to hit proficiency standards in each of the 50 states against the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), so as to create a common benchmark for performance.

The findings are, in many cases, startling. For instance, in order to be measured as proficient in accordance with the state of Missouri's 8th grade math test, a student would need to earn a score equivalent to a 311 on the NAEP 8th grade math test. Less than a hundred miles away in Tennessee, however, a student can earn a proficient mark on the Tennesee 8th grade math test with a score that would be equal to only 230 on the NAEP test. In other words, most of the kids who are deemed "not proficient" in 8th grade math in Missouri would find themselves suddenly proficient if they head east on US 24 towards Nashville and cross the Tennessee border.

Similarly, while a Massachusetts fourth grader would need to earn a score equal to a 234 on the national 4th grade math test in order to meet the state-determined proficiency standard, a Mississippi fourth grader would be proficient in her state with a score of only 161 on her state's math test.

Ultimately, the differences between state standards were found to be on the magnitude of multiple grade levels, meaning that a 6th grade student measured as proficient in math according to the state of Mississippi would not be able to pass even the Massachusetts 4th grade test! Moreover, the states with the biggest gaps in their standards had differences that were found to be double the national achievement gap between minority and white students! Put another way: states with the lowest bars and lowest standards are actually expecting so little out of their students that even if those children succeed in school in accordance with what is asked of them, they will enter college woefully underprepared compared to their peers from other states. And the underpreparation will take place not because their K-12 schools were incapable of doing better, but rather because their schools were explicitly asked by the state not to shoot higher!

To be sure, the strategies that some are proposing to fix this situation are far from easy to implement, since they would most likely involve the creation of national standards for all children--an idea that is anathema to many who preach the importance of local control in schools. But we are stuck between a rock and a hard place on this one, and it will take a lot of political will and open-mindedness to make the right decision.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A new report released by the Center on Education Policy this week examines the trends and progress that each of the 50 states have experienced in educational achievement since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001. The report--written by a bi-partisan panel of education experts including both proponents and critics of the law--concludes that since the onset of NCLB, student performance on state assessments has in fact improved in a consistent and significant manner.

Despite this seemingly powerful conclusion, however, the overarching take-home point from the report is caution, which will likely temper the ability of pro-NCLB legislators to point to its findings as evidence that the law is decisively working. For instance, the report's authors are quick to declare that the improvement in student achievement on the state tests cannot be solely be attributed to No Child Left Behind, since any number of additional variables may have had substantial impacts on students in the past five years as well. As the authors write, "It is very difficult, if not impossible, to determine the extent to which these trends in test results have occured because of NCLB."

The report also finds that progress in narrowing academic achievement gaps along socioeconomic and racial lines has been hard to discern. While they find that, "there is more evidence of achievement gaps between groups narrowing since 2002 than of gaps widening," they also submit that "the magnitude of the gaps is often substantial."

Robert Linn, a University of Colorado-Boulder professor and outspoken critic of NCLB who was one of the five panel members who chaired the report, makes another observation about the lack of definitiveness to be drawn from the report. While "improvement" was seen in 37 of 41 states that had three years of longitudinal data in elementary math and in 29 of 41 states in reading, the bar for improvement was set at only one percentage point each year. Largely because of this low bar, Professor Linn observed that "even if you look at all the increases, states would still not be hitting 100 percent by 2014," a goal which NCLB has set.

Another cause for caution is that student scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly referred to as the Nation's Report Card, have essentially remained unchanged in the same time period, leading some to question whether the state test score increases are the result of narrowly-focused "teaching to the test" at the loss of broader skills. One response to this concern is that the curriculum in the schools are aligned (at least in theory) with the state tests but not with NAEP, and so the improvements seen thus far may be absent in the NAEP data because schools are aiming to meet the specific state standards in front of them.

Regardless of all of the yellow flags that supporters and opponents of the law both are citing on the study, the good news is that there is little evidence to support a conclusion that NCLB is actually hurting students in terms of academic achievement. More time is needed before we'll know conclusively whether the law's accountability and standards measures are a positive, but in the meanwhile those concerned about America's youth falling further behind will rest assured that this is likely not the case, at least academically speaking.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)