Can We Unlearn the Test-and-Punish Lexicon No Child Left Behind Taught Us and Demand Reform?

I have been reading Beyond ESSA, a new report from the National Education Policy Center and the Beyond Test Scores Project, a new report on an old, old subject: the deep and abiding problems with test-based school accountability. (Find the full report at the end of Valerie Strauss’s July 13 column.)

The researchers begin: “Since 2002, when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was reauthorized as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), all states have been required to use student standardized tests scores as a means of holding schools accountable. Although the most recent reauthorization, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), thoughtfully addressed some glaring problems that had arisen under NCLB, its reauthorization (in 2015) was greatly overdue and it ultimately preserved most of NCLB ‘s test-focused approach… Despite some modifications made in the transition from NCLB to ESSA, federal law requires states to take a high-stakes and often punitive approach.”

The report names a number of problems with test-and-punish school accountability, including the following: “The theory of change underlying the past two decades of accountability has presumed that more pressure on educators and school leaders will lead inexorably to better results. This has not come to pass… (W)hen coupled with the narrow design of present assessment and accountability systems, focusing chiefly on standardized test scores, which often indicate more about out-of-school factors—these stakes can lead to actions that are directly opposed by the communities ostensibly being served. School closures, for instance, have disproportionately affected Black and brown families, as well as low-income families who have often fought to keep their schools open.”

The report, written by academics seeking to make instruction and assessment more equitable, prescribes six reforms to improve public school accountability and make it fairer for students and communities: align assessments with “goals for high-quality curricula and instruction; design a system with reciprocal accountability; ensure that representative community members play a meaningful role in the system; move toward a broader array of school quality indicators; ensure interpretable and actionable results; (and) design a system that will evolve and improve.”

These seem to be worthy reforms, particularly the recommendation for reciprocal accountability: “We embrace the idea of reciprocal accountability, meaning that while the system holds schools accountable for the education of students, it must correspondingly hold elected officials and other leaders accountable for providing schools with what they need to succeed. Leaders, and those who put leaders in power, cannot reasonably demand unidirectional accountability; a system’s demands on schools must be linked to the provision of capacity, support, and resources.” A consideration of reciprocal accountability seems particularly important this week when a Republican-dominated U.S. House subcommittee has proposed slashing Title I and increasing funding for the federal Charter Schools Program in the federal budget.

I wish I thought members of Congress and legislators across the states were prepared to consider and act on these experts’ recommendations for ending test-based public school accountability. I worry that now, two decades after No Child Left Behind, the language and biases of test-and-punish school reform have seriously poisoned our understanding of what’s happening in our nation’s public schools. Before the kind of reforms endorsed by this report could possibly be introduced, let alone passed in Congress and most of the state legislatures, all of us including the academicians who have studied school accountability need seriously to confront the assumptions that now constitute the conventional wisdom.

Here are merely some of the widespread prejudices and biases that have been exacerbated as we have all become accustomed to two decades of ranking and rating schools and school districts and public school teachers by students’ standardized test scores:

Despite that research has demonstrated a strong correlation between community economics and a school’s or school district’s overall ranking based on standardized test scores, many people and many legislators now simply accept that public schools in poor communities are failing schools.

Across America’s metropolitan areas, the school grades and ratings being awarded by the states (as a requirement of the Every Student Succeeds Act) have accelerated racial and economic segregation as families rush to the highest scoring suburbs they can afford. Despite research showing that test scores are a poor measure of school quality, it will now be far more difficult to break down hardened prejudices about school district quality.

Without grasping the complexities of standardized testing, we have come to fear that test scores tell us something about the overall trajectory of American public education.  Many of us seem to believe that COVID caused some sort of long-term national educational decline even though prominent psychometricians like Gene Glass tell us that COVID did what one might expect from a pandemic—cause a serious blip in scores and not any kind of catastrophic decline.

No matter that researchers may have documented that students’ test scores reflect many factors and are not a valid reflection of the quality of teachers, our legislators tell us over and over again that teachers should simply be able to produce higher test scores.  The human part of teaching—the work of the teacher and the child—doesn’t seem to be part of the thinking anymore.

If you listen to state legislators proposing to mandate that school districts adopt the science of reading and purchase expensive curricula and materials developed by this reading theory’s proponents, you learn quickly that those in the statehouse want a method that claims to be scientifically teacher-proof and that doesn’t depend on the kind of training primary schoolteachers have received in the state colleges of education.

Never have schoolteachers been held in such low esteem.  The Wall Street Journal told us last Friday that, “Twenty-five states proposed bills this year to increase teacher pay. Nine succeeded.”  I will add that one of the nine states which did raise the minimum teacher salary was Ohio, which upped the starting teacher’s salary from $30,000 to $35,000 annually—hardly what we envision for a highly respected profession.

Beginning with No Child Left Behind two decades ago, America developed a new education accountability lexicon. We learned how to think about schools as measured by aggregate standardized test scores. Because we rarely have an opportunity to go inside the schools to observe the classes or study the curricular offerings, we have no idea whether those ratings and rankings mean anything at all, and we really don’t know what is happening in our community’s schools.  How long has it been since any of us had an opportunity to observe a primary school classroom where children are learning to read or a high school class discussion in which the teacher has genuinely stimulated the students to reflect critically on a work of literature?

The lexicon of test-and-punish school accountability has been with us all for such a long time that we use it without thinking. Maybe it’s time for a national re-read of Diane Ravitch’s Reign of Error, David Berliner and Gene Glass’s 50 Myths and Lies that Threaten America’s Public Schools, and Daniel Koretz’s The Testing Charade. Unless we all prioritize making explicit the deception perpetrated by the No Child Left Behind Act—its punitive operation and the ensuing linguistic and moral problems embedded in the educational lexicon it has created—there will not be the political will to force politicians to enact the kind of reforms being suggested by academic experts.

How Clinton Democrats Joined Philanthrocapitalists to Create Corporate School Reform

I remember my gratitude when, back in 2010, I sat down to read Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System, which connected the dots across what I had been watching for nearly a decade: the standards movement, annual standardized testing, the operation of No Child Left Behind’s test-and-punish, Mayor Bloomberg’s promotion of charter schools in New York City, and the role of venture philanthropy in all this.

Now over a decade later, many of us have spent the past couple of months worried about pushback from the charter school sector as the the U.S. Department of Education has proposed strengthening sensible regulation of the federal Charter Schools Program. We have been reminded that this program was launched in 1994, and we may have been puzzled that a federal program paying for the startup of privately operated charter schools originated during a Democratic administration.

Lily Geismer, a historian at Claremont McKenna College, has just published a wonderful book which explains how the New Democrats—Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and the Democratic Leadership Council—brought a political and economic philosophy that sought to end welfare with a 1996 bill called the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act” and envisioned privately operated charter schools to expand competition and innovation in the public schools as a way to close school achievement gaps. Geismer’s book is Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality. The book is a great read, and it fills in the public policy landscape of the 1990s, a decade we may never have fully understood.

In the introduction, Geismer explains where she is headed: “Since the New Deal, liberals had advocated for doing well and doing good. However, the form of political economy enacted during the new Deal and, later, the New Frontier and Great Society understood these as distinct goals. The architects of mid-twentieth century liberalism believed that stimulating capital markets was the best path to creating economic growth and security (doing well). The job of the federal government, as they saw it, was to fill in the holes left by capitalism with compensatory programs to help the poor, like cash assistance and Head Start, and to enact laws that ended racial and gender discrimination (doing good). In contrast, the New Democrats sought to merge those functions and thus do well by doing good. This vision contended that the forces of banking, entrepreneurialism, trade, and technology… could substitute for traditional forms of welfare and aid and better address structural problems of racial and economic segregation. In this vision, government did not recede but served as a bridge connecting the public and private sectors.” (p. 8)

Geismer devotes an entire chapter, “Public Schools Are Our Most Important Business,” to the Clinton administration’s new education policy.  She begins by telling us about Vice President Al Gore’s meetings with “leading executives and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley. The so-called Gore-Tech sessions often took place over pizza and beer, and Gore hoped for them to be a chance for the administration to learn from innovators of the New Economy…. One of these meetings focused on the problems of public education and the growing achievement gap between affluent white suburbanites and students of color in the inner city…. The challenge gave venture capitalist John Doerr, who had become Gore’s closest tech advisor, an idea…  The tools of venture capital, Doerr thought, might offer a way to build new and better schools based on Silicon Valley’s principles of accountability, choice, and competition… Doerr decided to pool money from several other Silicon valley icons to start the NewSchools Venture Fund. NewSchools sat at the forefront of the concepts of venture philanthropy. Often known by the neologism philanthrocapitalism, venture or strategic philanthropy focused on taking tools from the private sector, especially entrepreneurialism, venture capitalism, and management consulting—the key ingredients in the 1990s tech boom—and applying them to philanthropic work… Doerr and the NewSchools Fund became especially focused on charter schools, which the Clinton administration and the Democratic Leadership Council were similarly encouraging in the 1990s.” (pp. 233-234)

Quoting John Doerr, who founded the NewSchool Venture Fund in 1997, Geismer gives us a taste of the kind of rhetoric we heard so often from the corporate school reformers: “‘The New Economy isn’t just about high-tech products,’ Doerr liked to say. ‘It’s about the politics of education, constant innovation and unlimited growth’ and a nonhierarchical meritocracy where ‘the best ideas win.'” (p. 238)

We learn about Al From, who founded and led the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), and From’s commitment to charter schools: “Privately, From stressed to the president that charter schools, along with welfare reform, were the most important ways to show his willingness to challenge ‘the old liberal Democratic Party orthodoxy’ and special interest groups like organized labor. Charters could appeal to the white moderate suburbanites whom the DLC believed to be critical to Clinton’s (1996) reelection effort.”  And Clinton bought the new strategy: “The 1996 State of the Union was most notable for Clinton’s declaration that the ‘era of big government is over.’ Elaborating on that theme, he also dared ‘every state to give all parents the right to choose which public school their children will attend; and to let teachers form new schools with a charter they can keep only if they do a good job.'” (p. 244)

When, in 1997, Clinton held an event to celebrate charter schools at the San Carlos Charter Learning Center in California, the school’s founder, Don Shalvey, met another entrepreneur, a guy who had already sold a software company for $750 million, Reed Hastings, who later founded Netflix.  The two raised millions of dollars to sponsor a ballot issue that would raise the state’s cap on the number of charter schools. Eventually, without ever mounting the ballot referendum, they reached a compromise with California’s legislature to pass a bill to “increase the number of charters in the state from 250 immediately and add an additional 100 each year after that.” (p. 251)

Beyond Shalvey and Hastings’ efforts in California there were various strategies to grow the scale of the charter movement. In 1994, Clinton’s Department of Education launched the Charter Schools Program, “which provided new seed capital for opening charter schools.” (p. 243)  And there was the ongoing work of the NewSchools Venture Fund: “The NewSchools board and staff especially concentrated on ways to accelerate the scale and impact of the charter school model… NewSchools developed a model of creating a charter network called a charter management organization (CMO), which would be nonprofit but draw on market-based ideas and practices. NewSchools worked closely on this idea with Hastings and Don Shalvey… Shalvey did most of the legwork in developing University Public Schools (it would later change to Aspire), which he envisioned as a ‘scalable model’ that would bring ‘the customer focus and sense of responsibility of a top-notch service organization or consulting firm to public education.’ The name derived from its goal that all the low-income students who enrolled would go on to college or at least ‘aspire’ to do so… NewSchools provided the initial funding but tied the money to student performance and achievement.” (p. 256)

As the movement grew, so did problems for the public school districts where the charter chains located: “For most of the 1990s, charters represented a small portion of the total schools in most urban districts. The growth of CMOs and the new philanthropic investment changed that in the next decade as NewSchools helped to launch or expand twenty CMOs… For the first time, public schools in struggling urban neighborhoods found charter schools making a significant dent in their enrollments and funding. With the perpetual scarcity of funding and resources allocated for public education, it would have particularly deleterious consequences for many urban schools.” (p. 259)

Geismer summarizes the impact of the educational experiment Clinton launched: “Whether successful or not, charters remain effective symbols of the control that wealthy private forces have come to wield over public policy and the ways that the ethos of the New Democrats had a direct impact on the public sector. The Gates Foundation and the tech entrepreneurs of the NewSchools Venture Fund did not just get a seat at the decision-making table but wielded the financial power to control educational policy at the local, state, and federal level.” (p. 260)

More broadly Geismer examines the tragic limitations of Clinton’s experiment in using “the resources and techniques of the market to make government more efficient and better able to serve the people. Clinton and his allies routinely referred to microenterprise, community development banking, Empowerment Zones, mixed-income housing, and charter schools as revolutionary ideas that had the power to create large-scale change. These programs, nevertheless, uniformly provided small or micro solutions to large structural or macro problems. The New Democrats time and again overpromised just how much good these programs could do. Suggesting market-based programs were a ‘win-win’ obscured the fact that market capitalism generally reproduces and enhances inequality. Ultimately, the relentless selling of such market-based programs prevented Democrats from developing policies that addressed the structural forces that produced segregation and inequality and fulfilled the government’s obligations to provide for its people, especially its most vulnerable.” (pp. 9-10)

I definitely encourage you to read Lily Geismer’s Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality.

New Research Yet Again Proves the Folly of Judging Teachers by Their Students’ Test Scores

The Obama Administration’s public education policy, administered by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, was deeply flawed by its dependence on technocracy. In the 1990s, Congress had been wooed by researchers who had developed the capacity to produce giant, computer-generated data sets. What fell out of style in school evaluations were personal classroom observations by administrators who were more likely to notice the human connections that teachers and children depended on for building trusting relationships to foster learning.

Technocratic policy became law in 2002, when President George W. Bush signed the omnibus No Child Left Behind Act. Technocratic policy reached its apogee in 2009 as Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top grant program became a centerpiece of the federal stimulus bill passed by Congress to ameliorate the 2008 Great Recession.

In an important 2014 article, the late Mike Rose, a professor of education, challenged the dominant technocratic ideology.  He believed that excellent teaching cannot be measured by the number of correct answers any teacher’s students mark on a standardized test. Rose reports: The “classrooms (of excellent teachers) were safe. They provided physical safety…. but there was also safety from insult and diminishment…. Intimately related to safety is respect…. Talking about safety and respect leads to a consideration of authority…. A teacher’s authority came not just with age or with the role, but from multiple sources—knowing the subject, appreciating students’ backgrounds, and providing a safe and respectful space. And even in traditionally run classrooms, authority was distributed…. These classrooms, then, were places of expectation and responsibility…. Overall the students I talked to, from primary-grade children to graduating seniors, had the sense that their teachers had their best interests at heart and their classrooms were good places to be.”

In her 2012 book, Reign of Error, Diane Ravitch reviews the technocratic strategy of Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top. To qualify for a federal grant under this program, states had to promise to evaluate public school teachers by the standardized test scores of their students: “Unfortunately, President Obama’s Race to the Top adopted the same test-based accountability as No Child Left Behind. The two programs differed in one important respect: where NCLB held schools accountable for low scores, Race to the Top held both schools and teachers accountable. States were encouraged to create data systems to link the test scores of individual students to individual teachers. If the students’ scores went up, the teacher was an ‘effective’ teacher; if the students’ scores did not go up, the teacher was an ‘ineffective’ teacher  If schools persistently had low scores, the school was a ‘failing’ school, and its staff should be punished.” (Reign of Error, p. 99).

Ravitch reminds readers of a core principle: “The cardinal rule of psychometrics is this: a test should be used only for the purpose for which it is designed. The tests are designed to measure student performance in comparison to a norm; they are not designed to measure teacher quality or teacher ‘performance.'” (Reign of Error, p. 111)

This week, Education Week‘s Madeline Will covers major new longitudinal research documenting what we already knew: that holding teachers accountable for raising their students’ test scores neither improved teaching nor promoted students’ learning:

“Nationally, teacher evaluation reforms over the past decade had no impact on student test scores or educational attainment. ‘There was a tremendous amount of time and billions of dollars invested in putting these systems into place and they didn’t have the positive effects reformers were hoping for.’ said Joshua Bleiberg, an author of the study and a postdoctoral research associate at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University… A team of researchers from Brown and Michigan State Universities and the Universities of Connecticut and North Carolina at Chapel Hill analyzed the timing of states’ adoption of the reforms alongside district-level student achievement data from 2009 to 2018 on standardized math and English/language arts test scores. They also analyzed the impact of the reforms on longer-term student outcomes including high school graduation and college enrollment. The researchers controlled for the adoption of other teacher accountability measures and reform efforts taking place around the same time, and found that their results remained unchanged. They found no evidence that, on average, the reforms had even a small positive effect on student achievement or educational attainment.”

Arne Duncan is no longer the U.S. Secretary of Education. And in 2015, Congress replaced the No Child Left Behind Act with a different federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), in which Congress permitted states more latitude in how they evaluate schoolteachers. So why is this new 2021 research so urgently important?  Madeline Will reports, “Evaluation reform has already changed course. States overhauled their teacher-evaluation systems quickly, and many reversed course within just a few years.”  Will adds, however, that in 2019,  34 states were still requiring “student-growth data in teacher evaluations.”

In 2019, for the Phi Delta Kappan, Kevin Close, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, and Clarin Collins surveyed teacher evaluation systems across the states.  Many states still evaluate teachers according to how much each teacher adds to a student’s learning as measured by test scores, a statistic called the Value-Added Measure (VAM).  Practices across the states are slowly evolving: “While the legacy of VAMs as the ‘objective’ student growth measure remains in place to some degree, the definition of student growth in policy and practice is also changing. Before ESSA, student growth in terms of policy was synonymous with students’ year-to-year changes in performance on large-scale standardized tests (i.e., VAMs). Now, more states are using student learning objectives (SLOs) as alternative or sole ways to measure growth in student learning or teachers’ impact on growth. SLOs are defined as objectives set by teachers, sometimes in conjunction with teachers’ supervisors and/or students, to measure students’ growth. While SLOs can include one or more traditional assessments (e.g., statewide standardized tests), they can also include nontraditional assessments (e.g., district benchmarks, school-based assessments, teacher and classroom-based measures) to assess growth. Indeed, 55% (28 of 51) of states now report using or encouraging SLOs as part of their teacher evaluation systems, to some degree instead of VAMs.”

The Every Student Succeeds Act eased federal pressure on states to evaluate teachers by their students’ scores, but five years since its passage, remnants of these policies linger in the laws of many states.  Once bad policy based on technocratic ideology has become embedded in state law, it may not be so easy to change course.

In a profound book, The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better, the Harvard University psychometrician, Daniel Koretz explains succinctly why students’ test scores cannot possibly separate “successful” from “failing” schools and why students’ test scores are an inaccurate and unfair standard for evaluating teachers:

“One aspect of the great inequity of the American educational system is that disadvantaged kids tend to be clustered in the same schools. The causes are complex, but the result is simple: some schools have far lower average scores…. Therefore, if one requires that all students must hit the proficient target by a certain date, these low-scoring schools will face far more demanding targets for gains than other schools do. This was not an accidental byproduct of the notion that ‘all children can learn to a high level.’ It was a deliberate and prominent part of many of the test-based accountability reforms…. Unfortunately… it seems that no one asked for evidence that these ambitious targets for gains were realistic. The specific targets were often an automatic consequence of where the Proficient standard was placed and the length of time schools were given to bring all students to that standard, which are both arbitrary.” (The Testing Charade, pp. 129-130)

After Six Months, What Has Trump-DeVos Department of Education Accomplished?

Six months into the Trump Administration, it is time to consider what’s happened in public education policy under the leadership of Betsy DeVos at the U.S. Department of Education. Here are brief updates.

Office of Civil Rights (OCR)—Just this week, Betsy DeVos announced that she is “returning” the OCR “to its role as a neutral, impartial, investigative agency.”  Caitlin Emma explains at POLITICO, “In a July 11 letter to Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, DeVos asserted that the department’s civil rights arm under the Obama administration ‘had descended into a pattern of overreach, of setting out to punish and embarrass institutions rather than work with them to correct civil rights violations and of ignoring public input prior to issuing new rules.”  When a complaint is filed, DeVos has established new procedures to look at individual violations without an in-depth exploration of whether the specific alleged violation is an indication of systemic problems during the prior three years.  DeVos has also stopped pushing hard to protect the rights of transgender students, and seems to be weakening Title IX enforcement around sexual abuse.  This week, DeVos has run into huge pushback from Senator Patty Murray, who has demanded the resignation of Candace Jackson, the acting OCR chief, who recently commented that 90 percent of sexual assualts on campus “fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not right.'”  Senator Murray and many others are concerned about two issues here. First, the Office of Civil Rights is not intended to be a neutral investigative agency. It is charged with investigating civil rights complaints and ensuring that the law is enforced to protect students whose rights violated. Second, the head of the Office of Civil Rights is not supposed to be expressing her own bias in advance about complaints that are likely to be brought to the agency.

Higher Education—DeVos is delaying two Obama-era rules that were designed to protect students from unscrupulous recruitment by for-profit colleges, particularly trade schools that depend for nearly 90 percent of their operating funds on federal grants and loans. Default rates are alarming, which means that the Obama-era rules were also designed to protect taxpayers. DeVos’s Department of Education is delaying enforcement of these rules as a prelude to rewriting them.

• Gainful Employment Rule—Writing for Inside Higher Education, Andrew Kreighbaum explains: “The rule was crafted to put a spotlight on programs producing graduates with extremely high ratios of debt to income—and to eventually remove access to federal aid if they don’t improve.”  Many of these programs have been lying about what students are likely to earn once the students have earned certificates, and students are then unable to make their loan payments. The gainful employment rule required schools to publish the average debt to income ratio students were likely to experience after graduation. Kreighbaum reports: “When Betsy deVos announced the delay of key provisions of the gainful-employment rule… she said the Obama-era regulation would limit the kinds of education students could pursue.”
• Borrower’s Defense Rule—Here is the purpose of this Obama-era rule, according to POLITICO‘s Michael Stratford: “The rule, known as ‘borrower defense to repayment,’ sought to make it easier for defrauded student loan borrowers to seek debt forgiveness.  They also prohibit colleges from requiring students to resolve complaints against their school through arbitration rather than in court… Obama’s regulations were meant to clarify and make uniform the standard for which borrowers could seek forgiveness—for example when a school makes a ‘substantial misrepresentation’ to students.  The rules also set up a more formal system for allowing the Education Department to stick the predatory colleges, rather than the taxpayers, with the cost of loan forgiveness. But the government would still pick up the tab where the school became defunct.”  Bill Chappell, a reporter for NPR, explains that the rule, “was negotiated after two large for-profit chains—Corinthian Colleges and the ITT Technical Institute—shut down hundreds of campuses following regulatory crackdowns in recent years.  The rule would allow borrowers to have their loans forgiven if a state has successfully taken action against a for-profit school.” In early July, eighteen states and Washington D.C. filed a lawsuit against education secretary Betsy DeVos to prevent the delay in enforcement of this protection for students preyed upon by unscrupulous for-profit institutions.

Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)—When Betsy DeVos is asked about school accountability, she flips the subject to her own libertarian bias by saying something like, “I suggest we focus less on what word comes before ‘school,’ whether it be traditional, charter, virtual, magnet, home, parochial, private, or any approach yet to be developed, and focus instead on the individuals they are intended to serve. We need to get away from our orientation around buildings or systems or schools and shift our focus to individual students.” DeVos defines school accountability very simply as “school choice.” By choosing the school that works for their kids, DeVos says, parents are holding schools accountable.

But that doesn’t seem to be how staff in the Department of Education are responding to the school improvement plans being submitted by states as required by ESSA (the December 2015, reauthorization of the federal education law—the replacement for the 2001 No Child Left Behind).  When Congress reauthorized the law, it left in place the requirement for annual testing but at the same time gave more latitude to the states to set goals and make plans for school improvement. What all this meant wasn’t worked out before the Obama administration was replaced by Trump-DeVos.  States have, as required, been submitting drafts to be reviewed by the Department of Education, and staff have been sending back the plans with recommendations that states be more rigorous in the goals they set and how they are going to get there.

Hence, a conflict has arisen between the Republican administration and the Republican Congress. Alyson Klein, Education Week‘s federal education reporter explains: “Sen. Lamar Alexander, R.Tenn., one of the main architects of the Every Student Succeeds Act, thinks Jason Botel—the acting assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, and one of the education department’s key point people on ESSA—should take a closer look at the law he’s been charged with implementing. ‘I think we have a case of an assistant secretary who hasn’t read the law carefully,’ Alexander, chairman of the Senate education committee, said in an interview.  ‘The heart of the entire law… was that it’s the state’s decision to set goals, to decide what ‘ambitious’ means, to make decisions to help schools that aren’t performing well.'”

There remains enormous controversy over NCLB’s test-and-punish, sanctions-based philosophy of school accountability. Many, including this blogger, believe NCLB damaged the most vulnerable schools and communities and failed to support school improvement. But the issue currently is that despite Betsy DeVos’s relentless, libertarian claim that parents are responsible for accountability through school choice, her staff are taking what the chair of the Senate HELP Committee believes is an overly punitive approach to ESSA enforcement. We can expect the debate over school testing and accountability to continue.

Federal Money for Private School Tuition via Vouchers, Tuition Tax Credits, and Education Savings Accounts—While Betsy DeVos speaks like a broken record about school choice, the only federally funded school tuition voucher program of any kind remains in Washington, D.C.  A House appropriations committee released a budget draft on July 12 that seems to leave out for the next year an expansion of the kind of widespread programs DeVos has championed.  Here is the Washington Post’s Emma Brown: “The House GOP also appears to have largely rejected Trump’s proposals to expand private-and public-school choice, according to education advocates who have studied an Appropriations Committee bill released Wednesday afternoon… Trump had sought $1 billion to encourage public school districts to adopt choice-friendly policies, and another $250 million to expand private school voucher programs.  The GOP budget bill appears to leave out both.”  The public school choice program left out of the House bill is for Title I Portability, a program that was debated and rejected by Congress during the 2015 reauthorization of the federal education law.

The D.C. voucher program, dating back to 2004, was reauthorized by Congress in May as part of this year’s 2017 federal budget deal. As part of that deal, Congress reauthorized the program until 2019 and imposed the requirement that the schools that receive the vouchers must become accredited by 2021.  D.C. Vouchers currently serve 1,100 students with vouchers of up to $8,452 for elementary or middle school and up to $12,679 for high school, according to Mandy McLaren and Emma Brown for the Washington Post.

McLaren and Brown reported earlier this week that, “it’s impossible for taxpayers to find out where their money goes: The administrator of the D.C. voucher program refuses to say how many students attend each school or how many public dollars they receive. It’s also not clear how students are preforming in each school. When Congress created the program in 2004, it did not require individual private schools to disclose anything about student performance… Congress sends about $15 million each year to a nonprofit administrator of the program that, in turn, gives scholarships to District children for use at private schools.”

After the Washington Post sent inquires to the 47 private schools that participate, 15 responded by reporting the number of students they serve. While Sidwell Friiends has been enrolling one or two voucher students each year, Beauvoir elementary, whose campus is on the grounds of the Washington National Cathedral and whose tuition is $35,000 per year, enrolls none.  “But at the Academy for Ideal Education—which offers ‘stress free, holistic learning that helps students integrate the right and left hemispheres of their brains,’ according to its website—27-30 students are on vouchers… Thirty-nine of 45 students—87 percent—of students at Academia de la Recta Porta International Christian Day School… are on vouchers… Eighty-one percent of students at Calvary Christian Academy, in a church in Brentwood, pay tuition with vouchers… Critics also say some students with special needs have a hard time using vouchers.  Private school profiles published by Serving Our Children, the voucher administrator, show that one in five do not serve students with learning disabilities; half don’t serve students with physical disabilities; and two-thirds don’t serve students learning English as a second language.”

To summarize—Betsy DeVos has said she intends to “neutralize” the Office of Civil Rights, which can only be interpreted as weakening its role. DeVos is delaying rules to protect borrowers who have been defrauded by unscrupulous for-profit colleges.  While DeVos promotes school accountability through parental school choice, her staff are busy demanding continued test-and-punish accountability from the states. And finally, the D.C. voucher program remains the only federally funded tuition voucher program, despite that DeVos has declared the expansion of several kinds of school vouchers to be her priority.

Congress Has Just Done Away with ESSA Accountability Rules: This Is Not a Tragedy

In 2001, Congress passed No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a new reauthorization of the 1965 federal education law. NCLB imposed test-based accountability on all of America’s public schools. Because NCLB and its punitive, test-and-punish mechanism became so controversial, it took nearly 15 years for Congress to agree on what was supposed to be its routine five-year reauthorization. Finally late in 2015, Congress came up with a replacement called the Every Student Succeeds Act, but it really left much of NCLB intact—including annual high-stakes standardized testing and a sanctions-based—instead of a school improvement, investment-based—strategy for improving public education.

In new 2017 academic evaluation of the No Child Left Behind Act, Duke University’s Helen Ladd reports, “Perhaps the most positive aspect of NCLB is that it generated huge amounts of data on student achievement in math and reading… A second positive component of NCLB, especially in the eyes of civil rights groups, is that schools are held accountable not only for the aggregate test scores of their students but also for the average test scores of subgroups of students whom they might otherwise ignore… A third arguably positive element of NCLB was its requirement that all teachers be ‘highly qualified.'”  In reality, however, there were serious problems with all these three things Ladd calls the law’s accomplishments. First another national test without high-stakes and punishments—the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP)—already gathers plenty of data about our schools; second, NCLB never succeeded, as intended, in improving the achievement of the students in the subgroups it was supposed to help; and third, the law’s requirements for teachers, which later under the Obama administration, came to include strategies to fire teachers who couldn’t raise scores fast enough, have left the teaching profession demoralized.

Ladd also summarizes what she believes were the law’s serious flaws: “An initial problem with the test-based accountability of NCLB is that it is based on too narrow a view of schooling… NCLB… has narrowed the curriculum by shifting instruction time toward tested subjects and away from others… Further, NCLB has led to a narrowing of what happens within the math and reading instructional programs themselves… NCLB also encouraged teachers to narrow the groups of students they attend to… A second flaw is that NCLB was highly unrealistic and misguided in its expectations… A third major flaw is that NCLB placed significant pressure on individual schools to raise student achievement without providing the support needed to assure that all students had an opportunity to learn to the higher standards.”

The 2015, Every Student Succeeds Act that replaced NCLB didn’t really change most of these problems. It was still a test-and-punish law even though it turned responsibility over to the states to design the sanctions.  States were required to create their own school accountability plans and then get them approved by the U.S. Department of Education. The Obama Department of Education under Secretary John King spent last year writing and implementing rules for how the states are supposed to proceed with their required ESSA plans, and currently, a little over a year after the law’s passage, the states are in the process of developing the plans which they are supposed to submit to the U.S. Department of Education either in April or next September.

Except that Congress just threw out the rules. The House acted in February, and the Senate just voted last week, under something called the Congressional Review Act, to eliminate the Obama administration’s ESSA accountability rules.  It is expected that President Trump will sign the legislation.

And actually not a great many people are upset.  That is because NCLB and ESSA have been so misguided and so unpopular.

Here is how Dana Goldstein, in the NY Times, describes some of the rules Congress just eliminated: “The Obama regulations pushed states to weight student achievement measures, such as test scores and graduation rates, more heavily than other factors in labeling schools as underperforming.  The regulations also required schools to provide parents and the public with an annual report card detailing schoolwide student achievement data and other indicators of success.  Among the most contentious of the Obama rules was the one that required schools to test at least 95 percent of their students.”  I believe the state report cards are a terrible idea, as they are almost guaranteed to produce low rankings for the schools in the poorest communities.  And there are a couple of problems with what’s called “the 95 percent rule.” The rule was very likely designed to prevent schools from sending home on test day the students likely to post low scores—English learners or students lagging academically, for example. But the same rule is also said to be aimed at preventing parents from opting their children out of testing as a protest. ESSA says it permits opting out, but the 95 percent rule seems contrary to what the ESSA law itself says.

Alyson Klein, Education Week‘s federal education reporter, further explains changes in the 95 Percent rule : “Under the NCLB law, schools that didn’t meet that (95 percent) threshold automatically failed to make ‘adequate yearly progress,’ or AYP.  Under ESSA, there’s no such thing as AYP.  So states get to decide how to factor test participation into a school’s overall rating… The Obama administration wanted schools to take the testing participation requirement in the law seriously, so that states, districts, and educators could have data on how English-learners and students in special education were doing relative to their peers. So it used the now-dead-in-the-water regulations to call for states to take pretty dramatic actions for schools that didn’t meet the 95 percent threshold.  The choices laid out in the regs included lowering the school’s overall rating or putting it on a list of schools deemed in need of improvement… Now that the regs are being killed? We go back to ESSA, as it was written originally. Schools still must test 95 percent of their kids. But their state gets to decide what happens if they don’t meet that target.”

If this still sounds to you like too much worrying about test-and-punish and ranking and rating schools, you are not alone.  Here is Peter Greene, a Pennsylvania social studies teacher who blogs under the name Curmudgucation: “Lamar Alexander pointed forcefully at the rules hidden under the desk blotter and said, ‘Get that junk out of here.’ This week featured an assortment of testimonials both in favor of and opposed to the regulations. Conservative voices strongly favored the end of those regulations, finding them too restrictive and not allowing for states to opt out of the whole business. Well, some conservative voices—other conservative voices said, ‘Let’s keep at least some of them.’  Other voices said, ‘Hey, the history of States Rights when it comes to education is not exactly a history fraught with great success.’ And a smattering of voices said, ‘Good God—when Congress changes the rules every six months, it makes it really hard to run actual school systems.’  As I said at the top, there are no heroes to root for in this movie. The Obama regulations were far over and above the actual law and simply attempted to extend the same failed, unsupportable policies of the past fifteen years; they needed to go away. The regulations we get in their place will most likely provide the freedom for wholesale abuse, fraud, and social injustice in education….”

Diane Ravitch used her blog post on this matter to sound like the academic historian that is her identity at New York University: “No Child Left Behind introduced an unprecedented level of federal control of education, a function traditionally left to the states. The federal contribution of about 10% of overall education funding enabled the government via NCLB to set conditions, specifically to require that every child in grades 3-8 must be tested in reading and math every year. Based on test scores, teachers and principals have been fired, and schools have been closed for not reaching unrealistic targets. NCLB was an intrusive, misguided, evidence-free law that was uninformed by knowledge of children, communities and pedagogy. Arne Duncan twisted the screws on schools with his absurd Race to the Top. Education is not a race, and there is no top.  But once again the standardized tests became the measure and the purpose of education. After 15 years of NCLB and RTTT, there is a great deal of wreckage, demoralized teachers, and widespread teacher shortages. And if the point of all that testing was to reach the top of international tests and/or close the achievement gaps among groups it didn’t happen.”

We shall have to wait to see what Betsy DeVos’s Department of Education does about re-creating any rules and also what her staff does about enforcement. Bigger issues remain, however, than the ESSA rules. President Trump has said he will expand military spending with deep cuts in domestic discretionary spending.  Programs threatened by these plans may be Title I and funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Protecting these programs must be a priority for those of us who worry about serving America’s most vulnerable students. And then there is  Donald Trump’s and Betsy DeVos’s other priority: privatizing education. These, not the ESSA regulations, are the key concerns.

Everybody Should Read This New Policy Brief: Lessons from NCLB for ESSA

In the context of President-elect Donald Trump’s promise that his education plan will be based on the ideology of increased privatization, it is refreshing and instructive to read the new research-based (seven and a half pages of footnotes for a 15 page paper) policy brief from the National Education Policy Center on Lessons from NCLB for the Every Student Succeeds Act.  The style is charming and the paper non-technical.  Anybody who cares about the role of the federal government in education ought to read it. It could profitably be the basis of conversation in a community group or a PTA.

Here is how its authors, Bill Mathis and Tina Trujillo begin: “If Lyndon Johnson were alive today, he would undoubtedly be discouraged to see what has become of the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) that he signed into law fifty years ago as part of the War on Poverty… (O)ur lawmakers have largely eroded ESEA’s original intent.  Moving from assistance to ever-increasing regulation…. (a)t each step, our educational policies became more test-based, top-down, prescriptive, narrow and punitive, and federal support to build the most struggling schools’ capacity for improvement faded.”

How does the new version of the federal law, the Every Student Succeeds Act (passed last December) compare to its No Child Left Behind predecessor?  “(A)t its core, ESSA is still a primarily test-based educational regime. Annual standardized testing in reading and math is still mandated in grades 3-8 and once in high school. Science testing at benchmark levels of schooling remains. The criteria for requiring schools to write improvement plans have been revised, yet standardized test scores continue to comprise the largest share of these criteria. Identification of schools in need of improvement continues to depend mostly on scores, but now also includes one or more other academic and quality indicators. Formerly rigid prescriptions for school reforms have been relegated to districts and states, although the expanded range of potential reforms still encourages and funds charter schools and requires other NCLB-like ‘corrective actions.’  State accountability systems must be federally approved and mechanisms such as turnaround-driven layoffs, conversions to charter schools, and school closures are likely to continue even though they have not been proven to consistently improve schools in struggling communities. Punishments for continued low test-performance persist. The most substantial difference is that the power to decide which test-based consequences for under-performing schools resides once again in the states, not the federal government.”

After an introduction, the short brief is organized into five sections: NCLB and ESSA: Commonalities and Contrasts—First-Order Lessons for ESSA—Lessons for State Accountability Systems—Recommendations for Policymakers and School Practice—and The Moral Imperative: Adequate Inputs and the Opportunity Gap.  Whether you are a parent, a citizen, a teacher, a state policymaker or a member of Congress, there is important information her for you, and the presentation is lucid and non-technical.

Mathis and Trujillo believe the primary lesson from No Child Left Behind is that, “We cannot expect to close the achievement gap until we address the social and economic gaps that divide our society… Low test scores are indicators of our social inequities…. Otherwise, we would not see our white and affluent children scoring at the highest levels in the world and our children of color scoring equivalent to third world countries. We also would not see our urban areas, with the lowest scores and greatest needs, funded well below our higher scoring suburban schools.”

What about the rationale often used to justify all the testing mandated by No Child Left Behind?  “One of the frequently heard phrases used to justify annual high-stakes disaggregated assessment is that ‘shining a light’ on deficiencies of particular groups will prompt decision-makers to increase funding, expand programs, and ensure high quality.  This has not happened.”

The authors refute the idea that high-stakes, test-based accountability improves learning. And they present research to show that the school turnarounds prescribed by NCLB caused “disruption, decreased efficiency, and human capital and organizational commitment losses” instead of helping children.  They reject test-based teacher evaluation, a strategy used by 74% of schools that received School Improvement Grants: “Evaluating teachers by test scores breaks down in several logical and empirical ways.  First, students must be randomly assigned, which is demonstrably not the case in school practice. Some teachers teach remedial classes while others teach advanced placement students.  Further, a given teacher could be (and has been) rated a success in one year and a failure in the next simply based on the students assigned. Second, the error rate inherent in this approach is so high that it simply precludes its use in high-stakes circumstances. Third, there is no general teaching factor that is universally applicable to all cases. This renders the model invalid for general application. Fourth, alternative explanations of gains (or losses) caused by factors outside the teacher’s control have typically not been properly considered. The use of value-added measures provoked the unusual response of a cautionary statement by the American Educational Research Association as well as a warning from the American Statistical Association.”

Recommendations for states?  “Above all else, each state must assure that students have adequate opportunities, funding and resources to achieve state goals.” “States must shift toward an assistance role and exercise less of a regulatory role.”  “States and districts must collaborate with social service and labor departments to ensure adequate personal, social and economic opportunities.”

And there is one special opportunity afforded by the Every Student Succeeds Act that was absent from No Child Left Behind: “Under ESSA, school performance will now be measured using a system that incorporates one or more non-academic indicators—chosen separately by each state. These non-academic indicators provide states their strongest new tool for maximizing educational equity and opportunity and bringing attention to the nation’s broader educational purposes.”

Here is the moral assessment that concludes this short, readable brief: “The nation has become a majority of minorities and the common good requires all students to be well educated.  Yet, we have embarked on economic and educational paths that systematically privilege only a small percentage of the population. In education, we invest less on children of color and the economically impoverished. At the same time, we support a testing regime that measures wealth rather than provides a rich kaleidoscope of experience and knowledge to all… The greatest conceptual and most damaging mistake of test-based accountability systems has been the pretense that poorly supported schools could systemically overcome the effects of concentrated poverty and racial segregation by rigorous instruction and testing.”

Please Testify in State Hearings on ESSA Plans: Point Out the Road Away from Test-and-Punish

Last December’s newly reauthorized federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, uses the power of the federal government to continue holding states and schools and school districts accountable for raising students’ test scores. However, Congress turned some of the control for how all this will work back to the states, who no longer have to follow so many federal prescriptions but who still have to present an accountability plan and tell the U.S. Department of Education what they are going to do to improve the lowest scoring schools. Gone are No Child Left Behind’s demands that schools make Adequate Yearly Progress; gone are mandatory turnarounds such as school closure and privatization for so-called “failing” schools; gone is the federal requirement that states use students’ standardized test scores as a substantial portion of formal teacher evaluations.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) demands that states come up with their own accountability plans which they must submit for approval to the U.S. Department of Education. What this means is that there is a window for change, but it must bubble up spontaneously across the 50 states. If public school supporters are to achieve any kind of policy that is more supportive and less punitive, we are going to have to organize and begin working for long-term change in the culture of punitive, test-and-punish accountability that has been normalized over the past two decades.

Where to start?  A good rule to remember, if you get a chance to testify to any kind of hearing on the plan ESSA says your state must develop, is that the hearing is a good place to present the core principles that underpin your understanding of the mission and importance of well funded and equitable public schools.  The U.S. Department of Education itself accepted comments, about 20,000 of them, until the beginning of August on the rules it is developing to implement the new Every Student Succeeds Act.  One of these comments, submitted by the Vermont State Board of Education, raises some of the most important concerns as states develop the plans they will be submitting.  Although we don’t yet even know whether the federal Department of Education will correct the Department’s draft rules to ameliorate the problems the Vermont letter identifies, Vermont’s State Board of Education models a way to speak to some of the most basic problems in current accountability-centered school policy.

The Vermont letter begins by attacking the very premises of test-and-punish school reform: “Our Board is proud to represent a state where the people support a strong state funding system, enjoy schools that foster high student performance and register narrow equity gaps as compared with the nation. Nevertheless, the opportunity gap is our most pressing concern and is the number one goal in our strategic plan. With these traditions and values in mind, we have strong concerns and reservations about ESSA. Fundamentally, if we are to close the achievement gap, it is imperative that we substantively address the underlying economic and social disparities that characterize our nation, our communities and our schools. With two-thirds of the score variance attributable to outside of school factors, test scores gaps measure the health of our society more than the quality of the schools. Consequently, the continuation of a test-based, labeling and ‘assistance’ model (broadly seen as punishment) has not only proven ineffective, but has had a corrosive effect on the confidence of the people.  The encouragement of privatization has been harmful to local democracy, has further segregated a too fragmented nation and has diluted rather than focused valuable resources.”  No matter the politics of your state, and even if you think the people in your legislature or Department of Education are faithful testers-and-punishers, in the testimony you present you should repeat what the Vermont Board says here.  We must begin proclaiming these values and repeating them across every state.

What specific concerns with the Every Student Succeeds Act does the Vermont letter raise?

• “Education and Accountability is More Than Test Scores: The Narrowness of the Measures”  The Every Student Succeeds Act requires that states submit plans that continue to be grounded in standardized-test-based evidence of student achievement—emphasizing each school district’s graduation rate and test scores in two subjects: “The plan relies on what we can easily measure, rather than on what is important. By requiring that test scores in two subjects and graduation rates be given preferential weight, we discourage schools from supporting truly broad opportunities to learn and the skills necessary for a healthy society. In a world where violence and terrorism command the news, the education of our youth to participate in a strong civic life in a democracy is a fundamental skill.” ESSA requires an emphasis on test scores, but the law itself permits states to be creative in the way they comply with the requirement that they begin using multiple measures to evaluate school quality.  As part of their accountability plans, states must each choose one or more additional factors (in addition to reading and math scores and graduation rates) by which they will evaluate schools. Here are just some examples of indicators states might choose to report: students’ attendance rates, the percentage of students with access to advanced coursework, students’ access to counselors and other support staff, the school district’s provision of foreign language and fine arts courses, per-pupil expenditures, number of children in pre-Kindergarten, the percentage of English learners who become proficient, and evidence of substitution of restorative rather than no-excuses discipline programs.

• “Summative Labels/Ranking Schools by a Single Score—ESSA requires states to inform the public on the state of education…. But the proposed federal rules propose combining all measures into a single score.  The result is an invalid measure with a false precision claiming to be transparent… (D)angerously, with this single measure being so highly test-based, the interaction of test scores with background factors systematically and invalidly penalizes the disadvantaged. The result is that our neediest children are stigmatized through negative labels while we deny them the essential resources… Limiting our vision to scalable attributes, risks the danger of not measuring valuable and important school factors.” It is to be hoped that widespread opposition to the Department of Education’s proposed draft federal rule that required a single summative score—despite the absence of such a requirement in the law itself—will soon have pushed the federal government to amend its draft rule. But single summative ratings are already the norm in many states which award schools and school districts a single grade—A, B, C, D, or F.  The states with school district grading systems are already in the habit of awarding “A” ratings to their richest suburban school districts and “F” ratings to poorer urban and rural schools. The statewide ESSA hearings are an important place to protest the use—in federal and state policy—of one overly simplistic and invalid summative rating or letter grade as a way to rate and evaluate schools.

Vermont’s additional comments relate to the way ESSA’s rules will affect its homogeneous population and very small rural school districts.

There is one important issue in ESSA’s rules which the Vermont State Board does not address, but which ought to be part of any testimony on your state’s ESSA plan. ESSA formally eliminates the federal policy, imposed via No Child Left Behind waivers, that states had to agree to rely on students’ standardized test scores for a significant percentage of formal evaluation of teachers. To get their waivers, states agreed to this provision by passing their own state laws that now need to be amended or overturned. We must testify against state laws that persist in tying our state teacher evaluation systems to standardized test scores even though the federal government no longer makes test-score-based teacher evaluation a requirement.

The American Educational Research Association and the American Statistical Association have both declared the “value-added model’ algorithms for evaluating teachers to be unreliable and unstable from year to year. There are many factors that affect growth in standardized test scores beyond any one teacher’s work. Test score-based evaluation of teachers has also served as a perverse incentive that drives good teachers in the poorest school districts to move to more affluent places where they will be said to be able to “produce” higher scores. There are far more effective ways to evaluate teachers including well established peer assistance and review programs. Teacher evaluation cannot be merely mechanical and must involve efforts not only to judge teachers but also to help them be more effective. There is wide agreement that plans to support and evaluate teachers must involve coaching, mentoring, time for collaboration, and support and evaluation by strong school leaders.

Consider the following definition of teaching by a seasoned trainer of teachers and a writer about education, Mike Rose: “Teaching done well is complex intellectual work, and this is so in the primary grades as well as Advanced Placement physics. Teaching begins with knowledge of subject matter, of instructional materials and technologies, of cognitive and social development. But it’s not just that teachers know things. Teaching is using knowledge to foster the growth of others… Thus teaching is a deeply social and emotional activity. You have to know your students and be able to read them quickly, and from that reading make decisions to slow down or speed up, stay with a point or return to it later, connect one student’s comment to another’s. Simultaneously you are assessing on the fly Susie’s silence, Pedro’s slump, Janelle’s uncharacteristic aggressiveness. Students are, to varying degrees, also learning from each other, learning all kinds of things, from how to carry oneself to how to multiply mixed numbers. How teachers draw on this dynamic interaction varies depending on their personal style, the way they organize their rooms, and so on…. So teaching Hamlet or The Bluest Eye, the internal combustion engine, photosynthesis, or the League of Nations involves knowing these topics and bringing them into play in one of the more complex cognitive and social spaces of our culture.”

If we get an opportunity to offer testimony to try to help shape our state’s response to the new federal school accountability law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, we ought to try move our society beyond a reductive obsession with test scores and blame to the kind of more human understanding Mike Rose describes of the meaning of education for our children, our teachers, and our society.

Monty Neill of FairTest Comments on ESSA Rules: You Can, Too

The rule-making process for the implementation of the new, federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), is a little deep into the policy weeds for most readers of this blog.  But until August 1, 2016, the U.S. Department of Education is accepting public comments on the rules it has proposed, and some organizations with the expertise carefully to analyze the law itself and the Department’s proposed rules have been drafting and submitting comments.  FairTest, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, has submitted a formal comment, and yesterday Valerie Strauss published in the Washington Post an explanation from Monty Neill, the organization’s executive director, about concerns at FairTest about ESSA.

Monty Neill is very familiar with the federal education law’s accountability philosophy and provisions.  In his piece yesterday in the Washington Post, he shares concerns about the rules now drafted by Secretary John King’s Department of Education, rules that will govern enforcement of school accountability. Overall Neill believes that the Obama administration’s Department of Education has proposed rules that yield too much power back to the federal government and undermine the ways in which Congress tried to return power to states for school accountability in the new law.  And test-and-punish accountability is far too prominent in the proposed rules.

Neill writes, “While the accountability provisions in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) are superior to those of No Child Left Behind, the Department of Education’s draft regulations intensify ESSA’s worst aspects and will have the effect of perpetuating some of NCLB’s most damaging practices. The draft regulations over-emphasize testing, mandate punishments not required in law, and continue federal micromanagement. When the department makes decisions that should be set at the state and local level in partnership with local educators, parents, and students, it takes away local voices that ESSA restores.”  In his Washington Post column, Neill names five provisions in the draft rules that he believes need to be eliminated or amended.  I agree with Neill’s concerns, but I am reordering a bit as a way to indicate my own concerns about their importance.

1. The proposed rules require (according to Neill’s third concern) that states come up with performance indicators for their schools and… combine the multiple indicators each state selects into a “single ‘summative’ score for each school.”  Neill writes: “As Rep. John Kline, chair of the House Education Committee pointed out, no such requirement is included in ESSA.  Summative scores are simplistically reductive and opaque. They encourage the sort of flawed school grading schemes promoted by diehard NCLB defenders.”  I will add my own concern here.  Congress, under much pressure from teachers and other supporters of public school improvement, left room for states to include some indicators of unequal opportunity-to-learn—disparities in resource inputs, not just test score outcomes. The requirement in the proposed rules demands that while states can choose indicators by which they judge school quality, they must, before they submit the rating, combine all the indicators into school-by-school “grades.”  Those overall “grades” will very likely mirror the current school grades (based merely on test scores) being awarded by too many states today.
2. The law requires that states continue to identify the lowest scoring 5 percent of schools and the schools whose subgroups of students continue to test poorly.  The proposed rules (and here is Neill’s second concern) require states also to identify three or more levels of performance to differentiate the performance of schools across the state.  FairTest proposes that the regulations should scrap any reference to performance levels and allow states themselves to decide how to identify low-performing schools.
3. For Neill, the top concern is the the proposed rules’ limitation of parents’ right to protest by opting their children out of testing. (I have moved it to third place.)  Here is how Neill describes his concern: “Most egregiously, the department would require states to lower the ranking of any school that does not test 95 percent of its students or to identify it as needing ‘targeted support.’  No such mandate exists in ESSA.”  Neill recommends that, “The department should simply restate ESSA’s language allowing the right to opt out as well as its requirements that states test 95 percent of students in identified grades and factor low participation rates into their accountability systems.”
4. In the new rules, the Department of Education requires that a state’s academic indicators for accountability carry “much greater” weight than its “school quality” indicators (Neill’s fourth concern).  Neill recommends that the department leave the language of the law in place—that academic indicators count for more than (not much more than) 50 percent of a state’s school quality indicators.  Personally, I would like to see school quality indicators given perhaps additional weight, though that would depend on what school quality indicators are being used.  Ideally the federal government would be pressuring the states to invest in the poorest schools for equity and thereby improve the quality indicators in the poorest schools, but Congress itself, as it wrote the new ESSA, neglected to use the law as an opportunity to create incentives to promote states’ investments for equity.
5. Finally  the implementation time line for accountability seems short (Neill’s fifth concern): “The department would require states to use 2016-17 data to select schools for ‘support and improvement’ in 2017-2018.  This leaves states barely a year for implementation, too little time to overhaul accountability systems.” Remember that the new law assigns to the states the responsibility for creating improvement plans for schools that struggle.

Although this all may seem overly technical, reading Neill’s concerns helps clarify at least some of the ways that ESSA remains, on the whole, a test-and-punish accountability law. While ideally states would find ways to invest in, improve, and support the schools in the poorest communities, the places where test scores—the primary measurement states will continue to use—are lowest, the danger is that states will continue to punish teachers and close and charterize so-called “failing” schools across America’s big city neighborhoods where poverty is concentrated.

You can submit your own comments to the U.S. Department of Education until August 1. Neill provides the instructions here: “The regulations are at https://www.regulations.gov/#!documentDetail;D=ED-2016-OESE-0032-0001.  To submit comments on the regulations, go to https://www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=ED-2016-OESE-0032.  FairTest even has a sample action alert response that you may copy and paste in to the Department’s comment form if you want to simply support FairTest’s comments.

Federally Mandated Test-and-Punish Didn’t Go Away with NCLB

As you very likely remember, No Child Left Behind, the much hated 2002 version of the federal education law—the one Jonathan Kozol once called “the federal testing law”— was reauthorized last December. Now instead we have the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).  There is widespread agreement that nearly fifteen years’ of test-based accountability has failed to raise overall student achievement; flat and declining scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress confirm that failure. Neither has the annual testing and disaggregation of scores resulted in the diminishing of achievement gaps. But the federal government doesn’t shift direction so easily.  Here is a quick update on what is happening as the rules that will implement the new law are being developed.

There is one bright spot: In the new law, Congress eliminated any federal mandate to tie teacher evaluation to students’ standardized test scores.  The U.S. Department of Education had made it a requirement that states applying for federal waivers from the worst punishments of NCLB could qualify for waivers only if they agreed to pass state laws to tie teacher evaluation to what have been called Value Added Measures—VAM algorithims that try to calculate the amount of learning each teacher “adds” to the overall education of each student.  The American Statistical Association, the American Educational Research Association and a number of academic researchers have demonstrated that VAM scores not only fail to measure many qualities of excellent teachers, but also are inaccurate and unstable from year to year.  It is possible that Congress listened to the experts—more likely that it listened on this one issue at least to the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers and many others who pointed to obviously flawed low VAM ratings for many award-winning teachers and to the collapse of morale among teachers across the United States.

While Congress eliminated the federal push to evaluate teachers by students’ scores, it could not undo the teacher-evaluation laws passed in recent years across the states to qualify for federal waivers. Hawaii, at least, has now begun to undo the damage, according to a mid-May report from the Hawaii Tribune-Herald: “Educators in Hawaii just became a little more powerful.  The State Board of Education unanimously approved recommendations Tuesday effectively removing standardized test scores as a requirement in the measurement of teacher performance…. The recommendations… will offer more flexibility to incorporate and weigh different components of teacher performance evaluation, although the option to use test scores in performance evaluations remains.”

Apart from teacher evaluation, however, not much about test-and-punish has really changed. Last week, the U.S. Department of Education released proposed rules for the implementation of ESSA and there has been considerable argument from Republican leaders in Congress who want to turn more authority over to states, while the Obama administration wants to keep the federal government strongly involved.

Here is the explanation of Emma Brown of the Washington Post: “The law requires states to continue administering standardized math and reading tests to students in Grades 3 through 8 and once in high school.  But it also gave states a new opportunity to include other non-test measures, such as access to advanced coursework and rates of chronic absenteeism, in judging schools.  Under the regulations released Thursday, states would be required to wrap all of those various indicators into one simple rating, such as a letter grade, to provide parents with clear, easy-to-understand information about school performance… The previous education law, No Child Left Behind, prescribed sanctions for schools that failed to meet test score targets.  The Every Student Succeeds Act takes a different approach, allowing states to decide how to intervene in struggling schools as long as those interventions are ‘evidence based.'”

One thing is clear from press reports: the conversation remains centered pretty much in the weeds of the details of outcomes-based accountability—measuring schools’ success in meeting demands for higher test scores.  Here is how Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post describes the proposed rules to implement ESSA: “The proposed regulations, among other things, would require states to ensure that school districts are implementing ‘accountability’ systems based on multiple measures.  The states have a lot of discretion on how those systems should be constructed but not total, with the federal government requiring that states ‘assign a comprehensive, summative rating for each school to provide a clear picture of its overall standing’….”

As the new law was debated in Congress last fall, the National Education Association lobbied hard for at least the inclusion of “input” measures as part of school evaluation to make it possible to consider each school’s real capacity to meet the demand for higher scores. This would have shifted the measure of accountability toward the consideration of a school’s resources.  The goal was to find a way to let districts expose inequity in things like class size, number of counselors and support staff, and financial resources available per-child from district to district.  States can still include such measures as part of their multiple-measure-accountability ratings, but it is unlikely to happen unless Congress pushes harder.  After all, that would shift the blame—and test-based accountability is a blame game—to the states that refuse to distribute funding equitably and persist in shorting the school districts that serve the poorest children.  And while states are now federally required to intervene in low-scoring schools, there is no evidence that the focus will shift from punitive interventions like closing or charterizing schools and firing educators, and no evidence that states will feel pressed to invest in the poorest schools.

One thing is clear.  In its proposed rules, the Obama Department of Education strongly discourages opt-outs by parents protesting the testing regime.  Strauss explains: “With a testing ‘opt out’ movement that has been growing in recent years, the department spells out a series of punitive options states should take in an attempt to get schools to ensure a 95 percent student participation rate on federally required state-selected standardized tests.” It remains unclear what the consequences would be for higher rates of opting out.  Strauss continues: “Under NCLB and now under ESSA, at least 95 percent of eligible students are required to take the state-chosen standardized test used to hold states and school districts ‘accountable.’  Last year, some states did drop below 95 percent, and in recent months the Education Department has been sending letters to states with ‘suggestions’ of how to handle schools that can’t drum up 95 percent support.  It also said federal funds could be withheld from states that did not deal effectively with opt outs.”  Although it is clear that the Department of Education discourages opting out, what the federal government will do about it remains unknown.

Public comment will be accepted on the draft rules until August 1, 2016.

Some Worrisome Pitfalls in the New Federal Education Law

Here, from Stan Karp at Rethinking Schools, is a savvy and crisply written assessment of federal policy in education—what the replacement of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) with the Every Students Succeed Act (ESSA) will mean.

In maybe the clearest and most succinct explanation I’ve read, Karp summarizes what No Child Left Behind did to our nation’s schools between its passage in 2001 and its long awaited reauthorization in December, 2015: “NCLB marked a dramatic change in federal education policy—away from its historic role as a promoter of access and equity through support for things like school integration, extra funding for high-poverty schools, and services for students with special needs—to a much less equitable set of mandates around standards and testing, closing or ‘reconstituting’ schools, and replacing school staff.  NCLB required states to adopt curriculum standards and test students annually to gauge progress toward reaching them. Under threat of losing federal funds, all 50 states adopted or revised their standards and began testing every student, every year, in every grade from 3 to 8 and again in high school. By any measure, NLCB was a failure in raising academic performance and narrowing gaps in opportunity and outcomes… NCLB succeeded in creating a narrative of failure that shaped a decade of attempts to ‘fix’ schools while blaming those who work in them. The disaggregated scores put the spotlight on gaps between student groups, but the law used these gaps to label schools as failures without providing the resources or supports needed to eliminate them.”

Karp explains how Arne Duncan doubled down to make things even worse with the waivers from NCLB’s worst punishments. The waivers were granted to states that met Duncan’s conditions by passing punitive state laws: “If they agreed to tighten the screws on the most struggling schools serving the highest needs students, they could ease up on the rest, provided they also agreed to use test scores to evaluate all their teachers, expand the reach of charter schools and adopt ‘college and career ready’ curriculum standards and tests.”  Forty states passed laws to implement these punitive policies and they got the NCLB waivers, but the results hurt public schools: “More than 4,000 public schools were closed across the country.  Teachers and their unions were under siege.  More than 300,000 teachers lost their jobs.”  And test scores did not rise.

Karp does not expect the new Every Student Succeeds Act, passed in December to be much better: “ESSA is more like a change in drivers than a U-turn.  The major elements of test and punish reform remain in place, but they are largely turned over to the states.”  The new law provides modest openings for positive change, but it merely permits state legislatures to revise the laws they passed to meet Arne Duncan’s conditions. While change is now possible, there are only a few places where the public is currently organized to insist on a major turnaround.

And writing for the Campaign for America’s Future, Jeff Bryant highlights what he believes are the new law’s greatest weaknesses from the point of view of traditional public school districts, with a primary weakness being continued strong support for charter schools that is embedded right in the law itself: “Under ESSA, charter schools will continue to receive a hefty allotment of federal tax dollars in perpetuity… (T)he Department of Education’s Charter Schools Program has received over $3 billion from the feds to help launch new charter schools around the country. That outlay got an $80 million increase over last year and is slated for $333 million more in 2016.  ESSA also makes the charter school grant money part of the federal law rather than subject to annual authorization, which stabilizes the cash flow until the law is changed.” Bryant quotes Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools,  who says ESSA provides “more flexibility and independence for charters.”

Bryant Interviews public school policy experts who remain hopeful that advocates can push the Department of Education and Congress to interpret ESSA’s requirements in a way that addresses serious funding inequity and discrimination that remain in our public system.  But Bryant worries that the new ESSA will neither provide mechanisms to hold charter schools accountable for strong academics nor prevent conflicts of interest and financial malfeasance. Charter schools are by definition far less regulated than their traditional public counterparts: “(T)he ominous specter of charter school industry expansions provided for by the new law can’t be ignored. Somehow, the creators of ESSA seem to believe this will all be sorted out at the state and local level.”

Like Bryant, Stan Karp worries: “For more than a decade states, under federal pressure, have been expanding the reach of test-driven reform, closing schools, and promoting charters and privatization. Rolling back these trends will not be easy. The new law does not reverse the decline in federal education funding or require states to end the inequities at the heart of most state school finance systems. There is little money for progressive reforms, like integration or community schools, and more for regressive ones like unchecked charter expansion….”