The Condition of Public Education

This year's Bracey Report begins and ends with the item that will continue to dominate education news: No Child Left Behind. TO PRODUCE last year's report required me to sift through 21/2 drawers full of materials. This year, there were 31/2 drawers. Attention is being paid to public education; much of it is not benign. On the education news front, budgets and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) dominated. Because readers certainly know the budget situation in their own states, we begin with NCLB, in two parts. NCLB: The AYP Trap Last year's report said of No Child Left Behind, "[It's] a trap, a Trojan Horse . choose your metaphor. " These days, Americans speak mostly in war images, so I now call NCLB a weapon of mass destruction targeted at the public schools in a campaign of shock and awe, which, given the incredible underreaction of educators, I must conclude is working. I first expressed that sentiment in an article that no one would publish in April 2002. (The article can be found at www.america-tomorrow.com/bracey/EDDRA.) No one seemed to believe it then. They do now. At the April 2003 meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), several employees of the U.S. Department of Education approached me to express dismay over NCLB and over working for an ideologically driven department. These are sad times, indeed. One career staffer declared that NCLB should be renamed: NCL-B.S. As all Kappan readers surely know by now, all schools must test all students every year in grades 3 through 8 in reading and math, with science to be added in 2006-07. Schools must demonstrate adequate yearly progress (AYP). For a school to show AYP, all ethnic groups, all major socioeconomic groups, English-language learners, and special education students must make AYP separately. Ninety-five percent of each group must be tested, and, if any one group fails to make AYP, the school as a whole fails. The official phrase is "needs improvement," but headlines across the nation reveal how everyone actually thinks about it: "Most Schools in State Failing," Los Angeles Daily News, 24 July 2003; "State Adds 544 Schools to Failing List -- for Now," Grand Rapids Press, 12 July 2003; "It's Pass or Fail; All or Nothing," Raleigh News Observer, 13 July 2003. Schools must continue to make AYP until, by 2014, 100% of a school's students must score "proficient. " In last year's report, I contended that, while the law allowed each state to define "proficient," that wouldn't last and that the NAEP (National Assessment of Education Progress) definition of "proficient" would come to rule. I claimed that this would happen even though the NAEP achievement levels have been rejected as fundamentally flawed by everyone who has ever analyzed them. This includes the General Accounting Office, the Center for Research in Evaluation, Student Standards, and Testing (CRESST), the National Academy of Education, and the National Academy of Sciences. Even so, in his presidential address to AERA, Robert Linn, co-director of CRESST at the University of Colorado and UCLA, made no attempt to provide or use any definition of proficient other than that rendered by NAEP.1 Educational researchers now assume that proficient means NAEP proficient. Secretary of Education Rod Paige has said that he will use the discrepancy between the performance on NAEP and the performance on state tests to shame schools into better performance.2 Certainly those discrepancies will be there for Paige to point to, and in many instances they will be huge. To see why, we need only look at the Princeton Review's comparisons of performance on state tests with performance on NAEP.3 Ironically, the largest discrepancy is for Texas, the home state of Secretary Paige and President Bush. Texas declared 91% of its eighth-graders proficient in math. NAEP says only 24% of Texas students reach that level. Although there are some states where the differences are small and even four states that have tougher requirements than NAEP (Arizona, Louisiana, Missouri, and Maine), the average difference is 23%, and for 22 states, the difference exceeds 30%. …