I was invited to write an article for the notable publication EdSource in California about the reauthorization of NCLB.

 

I have no illusions that anyone in Congress is paying attention, but this is what I believe needs to be done to end the madness of high-stakes testing and the use of federal law to expand choice instead of equity.

 

My article was a response to Secretary Duncan, who had written a piece called “How Not to Fix NCLB.”

 

I wrote:

 

Instead of talking about “how not to fix NCLB,” here are a few ideas for how genuinely to fix NCLB:

 

Restore the original purpose of the ESEA: equity for poor children and the schools they attend. These schools need more money for smaller classes, social workers, nurses, and librarians, not more testing.
Designate federal aid for reducing class size, for intensive tutoring by certified teachers and for other interventions that are known to be effective.
Raise standards for those entering teaching.
Eliminate the testing and accountability portions of the law and leave decisions about when and how often to test to states and districts.
Rely on the federal testing program – the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) – to provide an audit of every state’s progress. NAEP data are disaggregated by race, gender, ethnicity, language and disability status. NAEP tracks achievement gaps between blacks and whites and Hispanics and whites. Anyone who wishes to compare Missouri and California can easily do so with NAEP data that measures performance in reading and math in 4th and 8th grade every two years.
Testing every child every year in grades 3-8 and 11 is an enormous waste of money and instructional time. Testing samples of students, as the NAEP does, tells us whatever we need to know. Teachers should write their own tests; they know what they taught and what their students should have learned. Use normed standardized tests only for diagnostic purposes, to help students, not to reward or punish them and not to reward or punish their teachers or close their schools.