Debates about No Child Left Behind often come down to fractures based on perspective. Many of the educators I've met ground their opinions on the law in their experiences in the classroom. To these educators, NCLB's annual testing requirements have turned schools into factories where innovative lessons have been replaced by rote test preparation. Moreover, the annual tests have placed onerous expectations on students, filling some youth with such anxiety that they shut down or disengage from school entirely.

On the other hand, policy makers analyze the law from a perspective that can be characterized generously as a birds-eye view, or cynically as an ivory tower view. From their vantage point, requiring regular standardized tests in schools is crucial to ensure that schools are successful in their core purpose of advancing student achievement. Moreover, detailed, thoroughly examined data on how our students are doing within each racial and socioeconomic grouping is absolutely necessary if we want to close down the pernicious achievement gap affecting low-income an dminority students.

Now I'll be the first to admit that for most of my time in the education policy arena, I've fallen squarely in the latter camp. But now that I've taught and gone through a year where standardized testing has been a serious challenge, I am better able to understand the nuances of the debate.

The basic problem boils down to a simple fact: students of all ages and all backgrounds are already not inclined to test-taking. Now some tests are easier to stomache than others. Tests that are relevant and reasonable are always better than tests that seem arbitrary and unnecessary. Tests that students feel well-prepared for are also more likely to be taken seriously than tests that seem overly difficult.

On both of these fronts in my school this year, however, NCLB required standardized testing did not fare well with my students. Since passing the tests is not required for grade promotion (which, contrary to popular belief, is usually the case with most of these tests), the students did not see any direct reason to try hard on the tests. Moreover, the tests asked many questions that were inaccessible to the students, particularly on the math and science sections. So students who were already uninspired to try hard on the tests found themselves frustrated with confusing questions.

When that happens, the natural inclination for almost all of my students was to quit trying. There was a lot of random bubble-filling going around my room, and test sections that should have taken an hour only took 15 minutes. And there were a lot of angry students lashing out at teachers and other staff members who they perceived to be the reason why they had to take the seemingly unreasonable tests.

But here's where the rub is. Because the students did not try hard on the test, the data from the tests will not actually be a reliable way to measure our school's success! So the education policy maker's original goal of getting data to evaluate schools will not be met, and the process will only anger children and their teachers in the process. No wonder why there are so many educators who are upset!

Yet to demand that NCLB's testing requirements be shelved also misses the point. Because the real root cause of the controversy over the tests is that many of the students, in my school at least, find them so difficult that refuse to try. Addressing this root cause problem by demanding an end to standardized tests makes as much sense as a shopping mall getting rid of its security cameras when it finds out that there has been an outbreak of theft.

The solution? The best I can think of is for states and the federal government to enhance the ability of schools to reward students who try hard on the test. This means rewarding not just absolute achievement levels, but improvement from one year to the next--a trend that is emerging already. If my students saw that making significant gains on the test could result in them receiving a cash incentive or some other kind of reward, I firmly believe they would have tried harder... and policy makers would have more accurate data with which to judge our school.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 05:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A great blog called "Education Election" has been running courtesy of the National Education Writers Association at http://edelection.blogspot.com/ which I encourage you to check out. It cover news stories in which presidential candidates have discussed education, and adds a good bit of analysis as well.

One intriguing note is that Barack Obama has made news with his positions and proposals for education a total of 37 times since the start of the campaign season, Hillary has been covered 34 times, and John McCain has been covered only 10 times. Though it doesn't mean anything about the content or quality of their views on education, there may be some conclusion that is reachable regarding the priority with which each campaign views education as an election issue.

You don't need to take it from me or the education writers association, however. You can take it from the McCain campaign itself, which has all but admitted that education will not play a major role in his campaign. Indeed, "education" only appeared on the issues section of his website very recently, and he has refrained from virtually any substantive discussion thus far.

Why has the Arizona Senator said so little about schools and school reform? This terrific article by Richard Whitmire on Politico.com explains it well. Basically, McCain has a choice to make. On the one hand, he can do what most GOP nominees have done for the past quarter-century and minimize education as a federal election issue by mostly talking up school choice, empowering parents, and avoiding tougher issues around NCLB and accountability. This is what worked for Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush.

On the other hand, Senator McCain can do what the current President Bush did back in 2000 and 2004, which was to encroach upon traditionally democratic territory by pushing more centrist and aggressive reforms such as charter schools, teacher quality reform, and other ideas that are less appealing to the Republican base but more promising from a student achievement perspective.

Which one will he choose? It looks like the former right now, except for the fact that his chief education advisor is a woman named Lisa Graham Keegan - a real firecracker who has made major waves as chief of schools in Arizona and as the head of a DC based group called the Education Leaders Council (*full disclosure - I worked for Ms. Keegan as an intern back in 2001 and was quite impressed with her passion for finding solutions to help children learn*). Arizona is perhaps the premier state in the country when it comes to putting conservative talking points on school reform into action, as it has widely available charter schools, vouchers, and other parent choice mechanisms in play. The results haven't been conclusive however - one study, at least, has gone so far as to rank Arizona last in K-12 education outcomes.

It will bear watching in the coming months, while the Dems continue to slug it out, whether Sen. McCain sets up an aggressive reform agenda on education, or whether he lets it serve as a back-burner issue to Iraq and national security.

Also, I wanted to leave you with this humorous video from Comedy Central's the Colbert Report that is education-related:

Posted by Aaron Tang at 08:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As millions of eyes have been trained on Pennsylvania for the past six weeks, incredible numbers of http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video_log/ads, speeches, and other forms of political messaging have hit the airwaves. Some of these ads have been though provoking, many have been negative, and all of them have been expensive. But one ad caught the attention of some education advocates last week.

The ad was a radio spot purchased by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in Pennsylvania, for the cost of $329,425. The ad supports Hillary Clinton for president, although previous AFT ads in New Hampshire and Iowa also supported Senators Obama and Edwards.

You can listen to the ad and read the script here. As you listen or read, pay attention to what is NOT said, bearing in mind that the ad was bought by the nation's largest urban teachers union, which has nearly one and a half million members.

If you don't have time to check out the ad, I'll cut to the chase for you. In 57 seconds of talking, the American Federation of Teachers advertisement mentions the word "education" a grand total of zero times. It mentions the word "school" just once - when a woman named Margo announces that she is a public school teacher. Margo's next line should be about Hillary's plan to improve schools, help students learn, refocus our national energies on our children, right? Instead, Margo says that she supports Hillary Clinton because "She's capable, she's experienced, and she's a fighter."

In other words, the major education lobbyist group at play in the Democratic primary is buying ads that are education free. What hope do our children have if even the teachers don't think education is an issue that merits our attention this election cycle?

Posted by Aaron Tang at 04:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Try and make sense of these two sets of facts:

Fact set 1: The state of Missouri reported an 85.8% high school graduation rate for the 2006-2007 school year. In the same year, New Mexico reported a high school graduation rate of almost 90% to the US Department of Education. Multiple states provide similarly high rates in their official reports to the federal government.

Fact set 2: At the middle school where I teach in St. Louis city, no fewer than ten 8th graders have dropped out of school or have been expelled without any intention or re-enrolling elsewhere. This means that our junior high school graduation rate is just over 90%.

How can these two sets of facts co-exist? To be sure, part of it owes to the nature of the St. Louis City school district, which has lower school completion rates than Missouri as a whole. But the main source of the dissonance is something altogether different, and worse: most states are simply lying when they disclose their high school graduation rates.

There is little surprise as to why the states are so willing to lie about their graduation rates--it's just good public relations. Admitting that thousands upon thousands of students are quitting school early does not win points with current residents, potential residents, and certainly not voters. The more perplexing issue is why we (the public, the federal government, America as a whole) have not made a fuss about it.

It might be helpful to start with an explanation for how states are able to under-report high school dropouts so dramatically. The trick lies in how a state defines the dropout rate. New Mexico, for instance, defines its high school dropout rate as the percentage of enrolled twelth graders who do not receive a diploma in a given year. That is a little bit like saying America's armed forces has had a 0% casualty rate in Iraq based on the number of deaths & injuries we've sustained in the past twenty four hours. As anyone who's been in school before can testify, youth start dropping out of the education pipeline as early as 7th grade (I've seen it first-hand)--these dropouts should count against state graduation rates everybit as much as 12th grade dropouts.

Some states have started to fix these obvious errors. North Carolina reported a 95% graduation rate in 2006, but changed its formula last year such that a more accurate rate of 68% was published in 2007. But Missouri, New Mexico, and other states are still fudging the numbers and misleading the public about the success (and failure) of their schools.

All of this is why Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings's announcement that she will be creating a new federally mandated high school dropout rate formula was so encouraging last week. Education shares at least some similarities with the business world (though the comparisons are not completely parallel--a debate for a different blog entry), and perhaps the most important one is the need for rigorous, high quality data collection to drive outcomes. Maybe this will get the ball rolling on the high school graduation issue... and ensure that the 10 students who Missouri (read: the adults in my school) has failed in my middle school are acknowledged and not simply forgotten.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 08:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Triangulation. It is a practice that I never realized took place in schools, at least not to the degree that it happens in my school.

The best way to explain it is to start with why it happens. It happens because incompetent teachers often have a moral compass, despite their lack of interest in enriching the minds of their students. This moral compass manifests itself roughly four times a year, right around the time when grades are due for report cards.

The moral compass cries out to a teacher if the only lessons they have imparted to their 8th grade science class this quarter involve coloring sheets and word searches. It cries out in a panic, "how do I know what grade to give this student!?!" I don't want to fail a student who is actually a good worker, and I don't want to reward a student who is actually a slacker. But how can I tell if I've never given homework, graded in-class work, or asked my students to take a test?" Without any real concept of a student's academic ability, work ethic, or improvement, the inept teacher turns to his colleagues and pulls out a saving tool: triangulation.

Because a teacher at my school can see what grades a student is earning in their other classes, I am sad to report that many of the teachers base their grades solely on the grades that students are earning in other classes. In other words, they "triangulate" and come up with a safe average. If student X is earning an A in social studies, a D in math, and a B in reading, then it would be a safe bet to give them a B- or C+ in science. In this way, a teacher shelters themselves from risk in two directions: students will not complain about their grades if they get the average of what they've received in other classes, and administrators will not be able to question outlying grades.

And the benefits do not stop there! When a teacher choose to "triangulate" his or her grades, there is no need for grading papers, no need for giving out assignments, no real need to even design a lesson plan. Effort becomes unnecessary, and the entire school year can pass by with minimal stress (and minimal learning). These are, all too often, the kinds of teachers we have in our lowest-performing inner-city schools. I know, because I work with several of them.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 05:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)