No Child Left Behind faces its own test
Results are mixed for school assessment law
August 5, 2007
BY LORI HIGGINS
FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER
First of two parts
Mariah Blackmon held up the flash cards for the three first-graders, asking them to recite the word on the front of each one. But when they got to the word "quail," the kids were stumped.
"It's a kind of bird. It's fast. The initial sound is kwah, kwah, kwah," Mariah said, pointing to the picture on the back of the card and emphasizing the sound.
Mariah is 10, and was a fifth-grader and peer tutor at William Beckham Academy in Detroit Public Schools at the end of the 2006-07 school year. She is among a group of students and adults who have become key to boosting achievement as this school struggles to meet the goals of the No Child Left Behind Act. That 5-year-old law governs K-12 education in public schools in the United States, penalizing those that fail to meet academic targets.
The law is scheduled to expire in September, and there is intense scrutiny as to whether NCLB has actually helped improve chronically failing schools.
Michigan officials say the law deepened their involvement in the improvement efforts of struggling schools. Schools face penalties -- such as having to replace staff -- that get worse the longer students don't meet the goals. Some struggling schools have hired coaches to work closely with staff members.
While high schools in the state are struggling to meet the rules, substantially fewer schools overall have been cited for not meeting the academic goals required by NCLB -- from 776 schools four years ago to 544 last year. More than 40% of those schools are in Macomb, Oakland and Wayne counties.Meanwhile, many students are getting tutoring that wouldn't have been available without NCLB. Schools are finding they have to be accountable for all students, not just the ones who score well.
Kerri Briggs, assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education at the U.S. Department of Education, says the achievement gap is closing because schools are paying attention to children who were easily ignored before and educators are looking at data in new ways.
"It's working," she told a group of 200 teachers gathered in Warren last week for a workshop at the GM Technical Center.
Finding faults
But critics find plenty wrong with NCLB. It's not funded appropriately, they say. A common refrain is that its loftiest goal -- that all children be proficient in reading, math and science by 2014 -- is unrealistic. They say the law is inflexible and doesn't give schools enough credit for improved scores. Teachers say their jobs have been reduced to preparing kids to take state tests. State officials say the law lacks consistency from state to state.
That inconsistency, among other factors, makes it difficult to gauge whether NCLB is having equal impact on all of the nation's schools.
Bennie Buckley, an Oak Park parent, doesn't see the improvement.
"I'm not the only one," said Buckley, whose son attends Crescent Academy in Southfield. "Every parent I have talked to has said the same thing -- there are still kids being left behind. How they intend to bring them up, I don't know. It may be working for some, but it's not working for all."
Beckham Principal William Batchelor doesn't get bogged down in controversies over NCLB. He said the school had been working toward improvement before it became law in 2002. Test scores are on the rise, as is hope.
"It's frustrating," Batchelor said of NCLB. "But if it's going to help me to keep moving kids along, I'm not going to waste time cursing the darkness. I'm going to light candles."
The biggest gains in Michigan have come at the elementary and middle school levels. High schools, though, are having trouble meeting the goals, with the number identified as needing improvement growing nearly 40% since 2002. And a March report from the Washington-based Center on Education Policy says a third of the worst-performing schools in Michigan aren't getting better.
Teaching the test
NCLB has caused headaches for educators, particularly classroom teachers who find their days spent preparing students to take high-stakes exams. And it has placed less emphasis on subjects such as social studies, for which no federal goals are set.
"It has raised the bar," said Ann Marie Borders, an elementary teacher at Logan Elementary School in Ann Arbor. "And teachers are seeing a higher level of achievement in some areas like reading and writing."
But Borders has concerns about testing children who don't speak English and expecting children to be ready for the more academic nature of kindergarten.
"I taught kindergarten 15 years ago. Basically we taught consonants ... and if children could put together short vowel words we were very happy." When she returned to kindergarten four years ago, much had changed. Kids are expected to be able to read two sentences on a page at the end of the year, plus know a number of words by sight -- more challenging material aimed at preparing students for state tests.
Many people question just how effective the law has been in spurring school improvement. Many states, including Michigan, can boast about the number of schools falling off the needs improvement list, but critics say states simply set low standards.
And despite the emphasis on tests, there are many ways Michigan schools can be identified for improvement that are not tied to MEAP scores. Some academic powerhouses -- such as Groves and Seaholm high schools in Birmingham -- are on the list because less than 95% of their students took the MEAP, though district officials say Groves made it off the list this year because participation increased. High schools must also have an 80% graduation rate, and elementary and middle schools must have an 85% attendance rate.
Standards for everyone
And, in one of the key provisions of NCLB, schools must also demonstrate that subgroups of students within their populations -- minority, poor and special education students as well as those with limited English speaking skills -- have also met the standards.
The subgroup provision has forced schools, for the most part, to be accountable for students who had been too easy to ignore.
"I don't want people to use special education students as a means of getting out of being held accountable," said Shaton Berry, a Detroit parent raising her two brothers, one of whom is severely autistic and attends Southwestern High School. "But I also don't want them to place the blame" on special education students for not meeting the goals. "You still have a duty to teach those students."
Students like her brother may not be able to live up to NCLB's academic expectations, but they are expected to show improvement on an alternate exam for special education students.
Still, some schools can get away with not counting their subgroup scores as long as they have fewer than 30 of those students enrolled. An issue with NCLB is that it leaves so much up to states to decide. For one thing, states determine what's proficient.
In Michigan, you could be counted as proficient on the fourth-grade math test by answering correctly as few as 43 of the 72 questions. But Ed Roeber, director of the MEAP office, cautions against concluding that a student could essentially do D-level work to pass the test.
Roeber said the test includes a number of difficult items; an easier test would require students answer far more questions correctly.
Sharif Shakrani, codirector of the Education Policy Center at Michigan State University, said that for all its intents, the law has only resulted in cosmetic changes. But despite that, he thinks the strengths of NCLB outweigh its weaknesses.
Signs of progress
At Beckham Academy in the final weeks of the school year, there was plenty of evidence of the commitment to improve. In hallways, in vestibules, in the gymnasium, in offices, in classrooms, there were small groups of students working intensely with adults and peer tutors like Mariah. No other mission is as important as the one to improve MEAP reading scores.
"I want them to grow successful so people ... won't think they're dumb," said Mariah.
In a small classroom at Beckham, the murmur of young voices echoed across the room as students read short stories to their adult tutors. Mary Ector, a retired Detroit Public Schools teacher, listened closely as a second-grader read about a cow on the road.
"Good job, you only had one mistake," Ector tells the girl after she completed the first page. "Now, take your time and read at your own speed."
On this day, Ector is testing to see what group to place the second-grader in for the 2007-08 school year. The school uses Reading First, a federal literacy program that groups students based on ability and pairs them with an adult.
Down the hall in the main office, there was a huge sign that boasts about the school's latest MEAP scores. For the first time, the kids exceeded state averages in writing in several grades, and in reading in fourth grade. The promising results have Batchelor thinking they could actually meet the federal academic goals this year.
And recent results from the Iowa Test of Basic Skills showed great gains among Beckham students, said Elaine Bray, literacy coach.
"They do a lot," said Donna Tidwell, whose son Damein was a fifth-grader at Beckham. "Not just for the struggling children, but for the accelerated students as well. It's like he's excited to come to school."
Rising hopes
Beckham opened in 2001, a new building that replaced the aging Goodale Elementary School on the same site. Ironically, Goodale was once highlighted in a federal report as one of nine high-poverty, high-performing schools in the nation. But there was so much fluctuation in staff in the last decade that the school's performance suffered.
Beckham first struggled with scores of all students; now the low scores of special education students haven't met the target. But Batchelor isn't focusing efforts just on those special education students. Substantially more students must pass the MEAP to reach the threshold for meeting state and federal goals increases in the 2007-08 school year.
Even the peer tutors are seeing improvement with the students they work with.
"Some of the kids, they are getting very good," Dedrick Miller, then a fifth-grader, said of the first-graders he tutored. Particularly one girl, he said. "First she didn't know a lot of her ABCs. Now she's saying words like 'absolutely.' "
That's a far cry from where things began, Dedrick said.
"Some kids -- they need a lot of help."
Contact LORI HIGGINS at 248-351-3694 or lhiggins@freepress.com.
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