At the same time, I understand the logic behind it. The law was enacted in 2002. The proficient targets haven't been set particularly high. Any goal less than 100% would have been tantamount to giving up on some percentage of that year's kindergarten class, to looking the parent of a five year-old in the eye and saying "Twelve years just isn't enough time to teach your child to read and do math at a relatively low level." Settling on a goal lower than 100% also raises the question of how much lower and which children, exactly, would be written off from the get-go. Given the historical relationship between race, class, and educational opportunity in America, it's not hard to guess whose children those would have been.
This raises the question of what would happen if the federal government didn't mandate a uniform timeline for all states. "Why not let the laboratories of democracy take a shot at it?" one might ask. "They're good people; even if they made different decisions, surely they wouldn't game the system in an utterly fraudulent, cynical way...."
Except we know they would. We know this because, as Anna Habash explains in a new report from the Education Trust, that's exactly what many of them have already done when given flexibility to decide how to hold high schools accountable for graduation rates under NCLB.
Here's how it works: States are required to hold high schools accountable for graduation. But unlike with achievement scores, where every school has to meet a proficiency target that starts with where the 20th percentile school was in 2002 and ends with 100% in 2014, states can pick whatever end-goal graduation rate target they like and use whatever improvement trajectory they choose.
That provides two different, exciting ways to render the provision completely meaningless. One is to pick an absurdly low goal. Welcome to the state of Nevada, where all manner of sins are legal and the statewide high school graduation rate goal is 50 percent. In other words, as long as your odds of graduating are better than what you get when you slap down $20 on red at the roulette wheel, you're doing fine. Alaska chose 55.58%, because apparently 56% even was just too heavy a cross to bear. And so on.
Other states have been a little more clever. Instead of setting the bar at knee height, they adopt a putatively high bar but give schools centuries to get there. Maryland, for example, theoretically has a 90% graduation rate goal. But it will accept any improvement as sufficient progress, even 0.01%. At that rate, the state's African-American students will all be graduating by the year 3117, by which time we'll all be cursing in Mandarin Serenity-style and learning will take place via coaxial cables jammed into the back of your head.
The point being, this isn't as simple as it seems. To be effective, accountability policies need to challenge schools to achieve more than they may believe they can achieve, but not challenge them so much that the entire process loses legitimacy. The policies also need to balance realism about the potential to improve the system as it stands with the moral urgency of helping students who are enrolled right now and can't wait to grow up while we fiddle with the only schools they have.
One way way get around the seemingly insoluble 100% problem is to change the back-end responses and incentives as schools approach the final steep climb to the top and pass various points of diminishing returns: the closer you get to 100, the more the consequences of failure become a matter of foregone positive incentives rather than mandatory negative ones. In any case, it's a tricky set of issues for the next Congress and President to address.
5 comments:
I think you're describing a false trichotomy, which is better than a false dichotomy, but still... As I see it, there is a serious problem with the intellectual merit of a proficiency cut score. But though I'm one of these picky academics, others see the 100% standard as silly for their own reasons, even if they don't agree with Jerry Bracey. The result is that ESEA/NCLB has become the target of anyone who smells the various problems with a Rube Goldberg device. My suggestion is not a hands-off approach by the federal government but a sniff-test standard: states pick what they want on how they identify schools in trouble, but they have to run it by a skeptical federal panel. If I remember correctly, that also was the process for the growth-model pilot. Scientific? Heck, no. But it has a certain political logic to it, and it gets the federal Department of Education out of the parent-vs-teenager power struggle that Margaret Spellings and Kati Haycock both seem drawn into. (No, that doesn't mean that states are adolescents, but that those with power are being foolish if they think that a naked power struggle is the wisest use of power.)
Its always nice when you use the word "insoluble." You must know that the accountability dilemmas you summarized are virtually insoluable. But you don't seem to realize that under real world circumstance of our toughest schools, it is virtually impossible to raise test scores and not reduce the graduation rate. There will always be a few outliers and magnet schools that swim upstream successfully, but mostly the only way to address that insoluble problem is to use tricks to render accountability useless.
And of course that doesn't mean that we can't improve or that realists are not committed to students.
I'm glad Sherman used to term adolescents, because that is the best single explanation of the power struggle that Spellings and Haycock won't try to defuse.
But the Ed Trust report on grad rates is even more immature. Its on the level of holding your breath until you get what you want. They did not recommend a single constructive measure, just more accounting, accountability, and focus.
Mike Petrilli, Diane Ravitch, and many others have shown how to cut through the Gordian Knot of accountability that keeps dividing us. The Ed Sector's recommendations on innovation are outstanding. But if you want to patch up the failed NCLB-type accountability system, your great ideas will be flushed down the toilet.
Like it or not, it is the states and localities, and educators who will improve schools or fail to improve schools. The educators have spoken, and most states and localities wilol not be far behind. The budget crisis will be the last straw.
You can continue to quarrel over who lost the war, or face reality.
I thought it was interesting that Sherman would invoke Rube Goldberg.
Here, for the record, is Sherman's proposed accountability system. Compare this to Kevin's description of the existing system above. And draw your own conclusions about clarity, transparency, and straightforwardness.
Sherman Dorn's ESEA accountability plan, 9/12/08:
"A "you pick your own damned tool" approach to assessment: States are required to assess students in at least core academic content areas in a rigorous, research-supported manner and use those assessments as screening mechanisms for intervention in schools or districts. Those assessments must be disaggregated publicly, disaggregation must figure somehow into the screening decisions, and state plans must meet a basic sniff test on results: if fewer than 5-10% of schools are identified as needing further investigation, or more than 50%, there's something obviously wrong with the state plan, and it has to be changed. The feds don't mandate whether proficiency or scale scores are used; as far as the feds are concerned, it's a state decision whether to use growth. But a state plan HAS to disaggregate data, that disaggregation HAS to count, and the results HAVE to meet the basic sniff test.
"A separate filter on top of the basic one to identify serious inequalities in education. I've suggested using the grand-jury process as a way for even the wealthiest suburban district to be held to account if they're screwing around with racial/ethnic minorities, English language learners, or students with disabilities. I suspect that there are others, but I think a bottom line here is the following: independence of makeup, independent investigatory powers (as far as I'm aware, in all states grand juries have subpoena power), and public reporting.
"Each state has to have a follow-up process when a school is screened into investigation either by the basic tool noted above or through the separate filter on inequality. That follow-up process must address both curriculum content and instructional techniques and have a statewide technical support process. At the same time, the federal government needs to engage in a large set of research to figure out what works in intervention. We have no clue, dear reader, and most "turnaround consultants" are the educational equivalents of snake-oil peddlers. That shames all of us."
No single constructive measure? I wonder if john thompson read the full report.
When I did, I learned about a program in Georgia that provide a graduation "coach" at every high school in the state. (One principal I know read about it too and has already called GA to find out more about the coaches so she can replicate it at her school.) I also learned about Mississippi's enlistment of all the stakeholder groups on the issue - including students - to develop strategies for improvement. I also learned that Education Trust thinks that states must protect dropout-prevention programs from some of the inevitable budget cuts that are looming across the country.
But maybe I don't know what a constructive measure really is.
The Georgia program is a state program that predates the Ed Trust report. My state would like to copy the Georgia program but the problem is money. Those are the type of rifleshot shot approaches that we could design and fund along with establishing rifleshot accountability measures. But its harder to get even those common sense programs when most proposal are beggar thy neighbor attacks on other educators and other schools.
Read the whole report, and as in their previous reports, most emphasis is on win-lose measures, primarily designed to defeat opponents.
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