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Jeff Bernstein

The impact of no Child Left Behind on student achievement - 0 views

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    The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act compelled states to design school accountability systems based on annual student assessments. The effect of this federal legislation on the distribution of student achievement is a highly controversial but centrally important question. This study presents evidence on whether NCLB has influenced student achievement based on an analysis of state-level panel data on student test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The impact of NCLB is identified using a comparative interrupted time series analysis that relies on comparisons of the test-score changes across states that already had school accountability policies in place prior to NCLB and those that did not. Our results indicate that NCLB generated statistically significant increases in the average math performance of fourth graders (effect size 5 0.23 by 2007) as well as improvements at the lower and top percentiles. There is also evidence of improvements in eighth-grade math achievement, particularly among traditionally low-achieving groups and at the lower percentiles. However, we find no evidence that NCLB increased fourth-grade reading achievement.
Jeff Bernstein

Don't Believe the Hype: Obama's NCLB Waiver More of the Same | Dailycensored.com - 0 views

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    If you're a casual observer of the education debate, today might seem monumental: George W. Bush's controversial No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which created a system of extensive high-stakes testing for students and schools nearly a decade ago, is finally being "revamped" by President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, according to a report in the Washington Post, and across the national press.  Obama and Duncan's move to waive the "cornerstone requirements" of NCLB, most notably ending the impossible "2014 deadline that all students be proficient in math and language arts (Education Week Blog)", might just feel like the end of an era: finally, the failed experiment in draconian testing and scripted classrooms, which bored students and stifled teachers, has come to an end. Yet, NCLB has not been revamped, but rather, rebranded.
Jeff Bernstein

A Decade of No Child Left Behind | The Nation - 0 views

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    As the No Child Left Behind Act turns 10 on Sunday, the bill's future remains uncertain, with Congress and the Obama administration divided over how to update the controversial law. Meanwhile, NCLB has been largely irrelevant to two of the major trends in national education policy-making over the past three years: the push to tie teacher evaluation and pay to student achievement data, and the move toward a Common Core curriculum in math and English. (The main lever pushing those changes is the Obama administration's deployment of billions of federal grant dollars to states that agree to adhere to those priorities.) Nevertheless, NCLB has had a profound effect on what students experience in the classroom and on the way the American public talks about its schools. Here is my assessment of how NCLB has changed American education over the past decade, both for the better and for the worse.
Jeff Bernstein

President Obama Rewrites the No Child Left Behind Act - Up Front Blog - Brookings Insti... - 1 views

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    The White House has announced its plan to grant waivers of the provisions of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to states that agree to put in place the education reforms favored by the administration. Thus states that agree, for example, to adopt the Common Core state standards for what students should learn and to evaluate teachers for tenure based on student test gains will be freed from the consequences facing schools that fail to meet adequate yearly progress goals under NCLB. The reforms the administration seeks as a condition of granting waivers are the same that it put forward in its Blueprint for reauthorizing NCLB, and that it advanced in its Race to the Top competition using the $5 billion in discretionary funds made available to it by Congress under the Stimulus Act.
Jeff Bernstein

John Thompson: No Excuses Reformers Find Plenty of Them for NCLB  - Living in... - 0 views

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    On the 10th anniversary of "the lost decade," produced by No Child Left Behind, we will read plenty of explanations of why the law did little good, and often did great harm to poor children of color. Ironically, the rationale for NCLB was that educators had long used poverty as an "excuse" for "low expectations." I am struck, however, by the low expectations that policy wonks had for themselves, how many excuses they are now making for the failure of NCLB, and how they minimized its unintended negative effects, as they blame others.
Jeff Bernstein

ALEC Reports on the War on Teachers - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher - 0 views

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    As state after state rewrites their education laws in line with the mandates from Race to the Top and the NCLB waiver process, the teaching profession is being redefined. Teachers will now pay the price - be declared successes or failures, depending on the rise or fall of their students' test scores. Under NCLB it was schools that were declared failures. In states being granted waivers to NCLB, it is teachers who will be subjected to this ignominy. Of course we will still be required to label the bottom 5% of our schools as failures, but if the Department of Education has its way, soon every single teacher in the profession will be at risk for the label. This revelation came to me as I read the Score Card on Education prepared by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), authored by Dr. Matthew Ladner and Dan Lips. This is a remarkable document. It provides their report on where each of the states stands on the education "reform" that has become the hallmark of corporate philanthropies, the Obama administration and governors across the nation.
Jeff Bernstein

NCLB: No Chance for Latinos and Blacks - Coach G's Teaching Tips - Education Week Teacher - 0 views

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    No Chance for Latinos and Blacks. That's what came to mind for me when I first heard about NCLB, and that's what still comes to mind nearly ten years later. I'm referring in particular to at-risk Latino and African American public school students like those I taught in Chicago. And though I had few students from other ethnic/racial groups, my thoughts here certainly apply to them too. But don't get me wrong. I've never believed anyone intended to enact a law that would hurt many of the very children it purportedly helps. Too often, however, there's a difference between intent and effect, and there was no doubt in my mind that NCLB would indeed leave many kids behind.
Jeff Bernstein

NCLB waivers give bad policy new lease on life « Rethinking Schools Blog - 0 views

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    The Obama Administration's approval last week of 10 state applications for waivers from NCLB was another missed opportunity to learn from a decade of policy failure. Instead of changing the disastrous direction of federal education policy, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's waiver process allows states to reproduce some of the worst aspects of NCLB's "test and punish" approach while continuing to ignore real issues, like reducing concentrated poverty or providing equitable funding and high quality pre-K for all schools.
Jeff Bernstein

Diane Ravitch: Obama Grants Waivers to NCLB and Makes a Bad Situation Worse - The Daily... - 0 views

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    Secretary Arne Duncan is right about the No Child Left Behind law: It is an unmitigated disaster. Signed into law a decade ago by President George W. Bush, NCLB is widely despised for turning schools into testing factories. By mandating that every student in the nation would be "proficient" by 2014, as judged by state tests, it set a goal that no nation in the world has ever met, and that no state in this nation is close to meeting. The goal is laudable but out of reach. It's comparable to Congress mandating that every city, town, and village in the nation must be crime-free by 2014 ... or their police departments would be severely punished.
Jeff Bernstein

NYC Public School Parents: The state's proposed NCLB waiver responds to none of our con... - 0 views

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    A summary of the public comment and the response by NYSED for their waiver application from NCLB is now posted online; presumably the application will be voted on by the Regents Monday or Tuesday. NYSED says it received "over 50 submissions from "persons associated with Class Size Matters" and over twenty submissions from individuals associated with the principals' letter, signed by over one third of New York's principals, objecting to the new teacher evaluation being developed by the state.  Yet the NYSED summary responded substantively to none of our concerns, as expressed in our earlier letter.
Jeff Bernstein

Sec. Duncan Seems to Regard Constitution as so Much Tissue on Bottom of His Shoe :: Fre... - 0 views

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    "Our earnest Secretary of Education, who famously (and bizarrely) promised Congress a billion-dollar edu-bonus if it reauthorized NCLB by the administration's deadline and to the President's satisfaction, was back at it on Friday. Exhibiting the administration's patented disinterest in the niceties of the U.S. Constitution, he announced that he's getting ready to waive NCLB requirements for states if they agree, as the New York Times put it, "to embrace President Obama's education priorities, a formula the administration used last year in its signature education initiative, the Race to the Top grant competition.""
Jeff Bernstein

Do we really need another NCLB hearing? - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post - 0 views

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    Oh good. The U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce is holding a hearing on Wednesday morning to examine problems with No Child Left Behind's accountability system. And if there is one thing we need, it is one more hearing during which witnesses can repeat the same complaints they have made for years about the fatal flaws of NCLB and its Adequate Yearly Progress accountability system.
Jeff Bernstein

States Leave No Child Left Behind Behind | Mother Jones - 0 views

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    Tired of waiting for Congress to fix No Child Left Behind, Oregon passed its own package of laws similar to NCLB last month that include their own, customized approaches to accountability systems. Why? According to current NCLB measurements, four out of five schools nationwide could be labeled as failures, and could possibly lose all federal funding.
Jeff Bernstein

Will new NCLB law be less test-obsessed? - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post - 0 views

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    It looks like pressure from multiple directions has achieved one victory in the larger battle to prevent a new version of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) from being as test-obsessed as the current law. This victory increases the odd of a new law being a realistic and useful tool for school improvement.
Jeff Bernstein

The plot to overhaul No Child Left Behind - Maggie Severns - POLITICO - 0 views

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    "Republicans are hatching an ambitious plan to rewrite No Child Left Behind this year - one that could end up dramatically rolling back the federal role in education and trigger national blowouts over standardized tests and teacher training. NCLB cleared Congress in 2002 with massive bipartisan support but has since become a political catastrophe: The law's strategy for prodding and shaming schools into improvement proved deeply flawed over time, and its unintended failures have eclipsed its bright spots. Today, NCLB is despised by some parents who blame it for schools "teaching to the test," protested by some on the left for promoting education reform and reviled by Republicans in Congress who say the law represents aggressive federal overreach."
Jeff Bernstein

Principal to Congress: I was wrong when I supported NCLB. Learn from my mistake. - The ... - 0 views

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    "Here is an open letter to Alexander and his committee about the NCLB rewrite that was written by an award-winning principal, Carol Burris of South Side High School in New York."
Jeff Bernstein

Shanker Blog » The Arcane Rules That Drive Outcomes Under NCLB - 0 views

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    "A big part of successful policy making is unyielding attention to detail (an argument that regular readers of this blog hear often). Choices about design and implementation that may seem unimportant can play a substantial role in determining how policies play out in practice. A new paper, co-authored by Elizabeth Davidson, Randall Reback, Jonah Rockoff and Heather Schwartz, and presented at last month's annual conference of The Association for Education Finance and Policy, illustrates this principle vividly, and on a grand scale: With an analysis of outcomes in all 50 states during the early years of NCLB."
Jeff Bernstein

Shanker Blog » NCLB And The Institutionalization Of Data Interpretation - 0 views

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    "Most of the attention to the methodological shortcomings of the law focuses on "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) - the crude requirement that all schools must make "adequate progress" toward the goal of 100 percent proficiency by 2014. And AYP is indeed an inept measure. But the problems are actually much deeper than AYP. Rather, it's the underlying methods and assumptions of NCLB (including AYP) that have had a persistent, negative impact on the way we interpret testing data. I'm not going to get into all of the details here, since I discuss them so frequently (follow the links below), but the most important issues include:"
Jeff Bernstein

Pedro Noguera: We Must Do More Than Merely Avoid the NCLB Train Wreck - 0 views

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    The Obama administration's decision to allow states to request waivers from No Child Left Behind was a step in the right direction, but only a baby step. Four in five schools across the country will be deemed "failing" this coming year if nothing stops the "train wreck" that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said No Child Left Behind (NCLB) will inflict upon the nation's schools. These include schools in which the vast majority of students are proficient in math and English, as well as schools in which students, teachers, and principals are making real progress in the face of formidable challenges: concentrated poverty, large numbers of students with special-needs, and state budget cuts that have severely reduced the resources needed to address the obstacles to learning.
Jeff Bernstein

Grinding the Antitesting Ax : Education Next - 0 views

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    But in all the acrimonious discussion surrounding NCLB, surprisingly little attention has been given to the actual impact of that legislation and other accountability systems on student performance. Now a reputable body, a committee set up by the National Research Council (NRC), the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, has reached a conclusion on this matter. In its report, Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education, the committee says that NCLB and state accountability systems have been so ineffective at lifting student achievement that accountability as we know it should probably be dropped by federal and state governments alike. Further, the committee objects to state laws that require students to pass an examination for a high school diploma. There is no evidence that such tests boost student achievement, the committee says, and some students, about 2 percent, are not getting their diplomas because they can't-or think they can't-pass the test. The headline of the May 2011 NRC press release is frank and bold in the way committee reports seldom are: "Current test-based incentive programs have not consistently raised student achievement in U.S.; Improved approaches should be developed and evaluated."
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