
{"id":1323,"date":"2007-11-21T12:58:45","date_gmt":"2007-11-21T20:58:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/2007\/11\/21\/no-child-left-behind-upon-closer-inspection\/"},"modified":"2007-11-21T12:59:51","modified_gmt":"2007-11-21T20:59:51","slug":"no-child-left-behind-upon-closer-inspection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2007\/11\/21\/no-child-left-behind-upon-closer-inspection\/","title":{"rendered":"No Child Left Behind: Upon closer inspection"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><strong>Steve Peha &amp; Margot Carmichael Lester<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p>No Child Left Behind is up for reauthorization. Those in favor of NCLB say it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s improving public education; those against say it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ruining public education. Upon closer inspection, neither position seems right. And the fact that we have but two extremes to choose from indicates that we have closed ourselves off to more promising solutions.<\/p>\n<p>As NCLB heads into its seventh year, no one can say for sure whether schools are better or not. State test scores are up, but national test scores aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t nearly so rosy. Instructional consistency has improved, but that improvement has come at the cost of an insidious teach-to-the-test mentality that could be making teaching worse. For each positive, there seems to be a corresponding negative. And the issue of NCLB\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s effectiveness may be no less cloudy seven years from now than it is today.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Amid this confusion, it appears that Congress will take a mend-it-don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t-end-it approach and reauthorize NCLB with small changes. This choice represents a lost opportunity to address the program\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fundamental weaknesses and to explore better ways of improving our schools.<\/p>\n<p>Testing can and should be a part of education reform. But it shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be the foundation of reform, because test data can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t tell us why some schools are successful and others are not. Instead, reform should be based on an inspection system that tells us more than test scores can about how schools are doing and what they need to do to improve.<\/p>\n<p>In a school inspection system, people who understand the instructional and operational aspects of successful schools would visit buildings and prepare evaluations that include analyses of test data along with other important factors. Such a system would give us a more accurate view of our schools than we will ever achieve through test-based approaches like NCLB.<\/p>\n<p>An inspection system would give us three things NCLB does not:<\/p>\n<p>First, it would identify fundamental patterns of success and failure within schools and draw explicit causal relationships between those patterns and quantitative data like test scores and graduation rates. This would not only tell us what was happening in our schools, it would tell us why.<\/p>\n<p>Second, it would document these causal relationships and disseminate findings so that unsuccessful approaches could be phased out while successful approaches are encouraged.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, inspectors acting in consulting roles could assist struggling schools in replicating approaches used by effective schools.<\/p>\n<p>With a system of reform based on inspection \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and a process of improving our schools based on identification, documentation and replication of successful models \u00e2\u20ac\u201d we wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t need to wait seven years to discover that we still don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know what works and what doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t. With each year that went by, new patterns of success would be validated through a process of reproducible field research. This would not only increase the efficiency of reform, it would gradually bring an end to the destructive partisan bickering that has characterized education in our country since the Reading Wars began more than a generation ago.<\/p>\n<p>NCLB takes a needlessly narrow view of school quality. But we compound the problem by taking a needlessly narrow view of school reform. The question we should be asking isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Is NCLB working?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d but, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153What reform would work best?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>To date, no other approaches to reform have been tried. How likely is it that we got it right the first time? Or that tinkering at the margins with things like growth models and sub-group sizes will produce results that are significantly better?<\/p>\n<p>It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time to discard the either\/or mindset around NCLB that currently dominates the dialog. We can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t end education reform. But making small changes to what we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re doing now isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t going to help us either. We need to take what we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve learned in these last seven years and apply it to the challenge of designing a better model of education reform. Such a model, based on school inspections, would be a practical, powerful and permanent solution to the problem of improving our schools.<\/p>\n<p><em>Steve Peha and Margot Carmichael Lester own Teaching That Makes Sense Inc., an education reform, advocacy and consulting company based in Carrboro. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Steve Peha &amp; Margot Carmichael Lester No Child Left Behind is up for reauthorization. Those in favor of NCLB say it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s improving public education; those against say it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ruining public education. Upon closer inspection, neither position seems right. And the fact that we have but two extremes to choose from indicates that we have closed&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1323\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}