No Child Left Behind will be recognized in time as the most colossal failure in federal education policy, whose disastrous effects were amplified by Race to the Top.
Its monomaniacal focus on test scores warped education. RTT just made it worse and left a path of destruction in urban districts.
And the gains were, as a new study reports, modest and diminished over time.
Anyone familiar with Campbell’s Law could have predicted this result. Social scientist Donald T. Campbell wrote:
“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
Campbell also wrote:
“Achievement tests may well be valuable indicators of general school achievement under conditions of normal teaching aimed at general competence. But when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways. (Similar biases of course surround the use of objective tests in courses or as entrance examinations.)”
Scores on NAEP rose modestly for a few years but went flat in 2015 and again in 2017.
Arne Duncan is traversing the country and TV boasting of his success and asserting that American education is built on lies. He should know. The biggest lie was NCLB. The second biggest lie was Race to the Top. The third biggest lie is ESSA.
The belief that threats and rewards will produce better education is not just a lie. It is stupid.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I bet Common Core’s returns will be negative.
Duncan was terrible for public schools and, therefore, terrible for public school students.
You can’t oppose public schools – treat them like the enemy- and also serve the +/- 50 million children who attend them.
He was serving some imaginary system, a theoretical system, the ed reform vision of a privatized system. Meanwhile the actual school systems all over the country declined, either from neglect or outright hostility towards them by political leaders.
Three anti-public school Presidents in a row have taken a real toll on the actual, existing public school systems.
There was nothing that was more disappointing to me about Obama than his administration’s approach to education. It started with hiring Duncan, his personal friend, and got worse from there.
I laugh when they describe themselves as “innovators”- they slavishly followed every ed reform gimmick that came down the pike as long as it had the seal of approval of an Ivy League university or was proposed or promoted by a billionaire. They’re not “innovators”- they’re conventional- they operate completely within in a tiny elite circle.
YES. Simple math: “You can’t oppose public schools – treat them like the enemy- and also serve the +/- 50 million children who attend them.”
“Scores on NAEP rose modestly for a few years but went flat in 2015 and again in 2017.”
NEAP testing (as you know) is made up of 11 different subject area tests. When the media makes a general reference to “NEAP scores” – which specific tests are they referring to? And which grade levels are they referring to?
The study says: “We estimate the effects of NCLB stringency on reading and math outcomes on the NAEP.”
I went no further. The inferential leaps from multiple accountability demands and the spillover effects of NCLB on NAEP are too long.
I always go straight to the conclusion. And in this case, well, see my comment below.
“NCLB stringency ”
This is related to string theory somehow?
Who knew?
One can look at where the Obama Administration education people went after they left government to give one an idea how completely “market based ed reform” dominated in that administration. They all went to ed reform orgs or they do ed reform consulting or marketing work.
It was an echo chamber. Obama hired Duncan and then Duncan hired people who were already true believers.
When they say they know “what works” and “how to fix” schools they mean it- no dissenting opinions or views are permitted.
It’s even worse with Trump. The truth is we’re paying thousands of people in DC to work on “public education” and those people are ideologically committed to eradicating public schools.
We shouldn’t wonder why they don’t add any value to existing schools. They have made it clear they don’t support the continued existence of our schools. If you want people who might improve existing public schools you probably have to start with people who think they should exist.
AMEN: “The belief that threats and rewards will produce better education is not just a lie. It is stupid.”
No kidding STUPID.
High stakes testing is a horror show because test-and-punish is the same stupid mentality as torture: “It gives us the answers we want or else it gets the hose.” That’s not the way to run schools or Gitmo.
Thug mentality: Do this, any way you can, or else.
The privatizers act much like a slick, barely-within-the-law mafia.
Agree – agree – do this anyway you can…the wasted time spent doing for those above you for their checklists to send to those above them … is time taken away from teaching and reaching students. … so much is fudged and faked just to turn something in to prove what ? Give me a million bucks and I can tell you without spending it that the kids in Beverly Hills and Palisades do better than Watts and East LA and the kids in Marin do better than Oakland. Drop the overtesting and wasted evaluations and spend money in those schools of need on enrichment, after school group study, tutoring and lots of art education.
NCLB did little to improve education, but it ushered in era of bad policy and privatization. The so-called modest gains of ELLs that is mentioned have little to do with NCLB. It has more to do with the typical performance pattern common to ELLs that start out on the beginning level. The first two years of taking the exams, there is very little on the test that is comprehensible. Scores between 0 and 18% are typical. By the third year students are able to demonstrate a much greater understanding in English. These students often score anywhere from 25 to 50% on standardized testing. This pattern shows a very high growth score even though they are still performing what is considered below average. Math scores show large growth scores by the third years as many students start to make up for the lost time of their earlier years of instruction. This is no “miracle.” ELLs can often show huge growth scores by the third year because these students started out at a 0 to 3%. This growth pattern had nothing to do with NCLB. It occurs because of English language acquisition. I have seen this same pattern repeat many times over.
Did NOTHING to improve education. Harmed it, harmed students and teachers.
These tests are a waste of time and money, and the tests based on the CCSS are even worse.
Thanks for speaking the TRUTH. It matters more than ever.
“The biggest lie was NCLB. The second biggest lie was Race to the Top. The third biggest lie is ESSA.”
NCLB was the template for what followed. I wrote about that jargon-filled fiasco as a heads up to colleagues working in arts education who did not know what hit them. http://people.uncw.edu/caropresoe/EDN523/chapmannclb.pdf
Race to the Top was the double whammy with a propaganda mill called the “Reform Support Network” designed to intimidate teachers who failed to comply. USDE outsourced the problem of compliance to people who did not know what to do with this fact: About 69% of teachers had job assignments untethered to statewide tests. The hired hands working for the Reform Support Network offered several absurd solutions. Among these were the idea that teacher should be evaluated on school-wide scores for subjects they did not teach (e.g., math, ELA) and that a writing assignment called SLOs (student learning objectives) should function as a tool for evaluation.
The SLO writing assignment required teachers to specify and predict gains in the test scores of their students from the beginning to the end of the year. Teachers were graded on their SLOs and up to 25 criteria had to be met for writing a “proper” SLO. That absurdity has been marketed since 1999, first in a pay-for-performance scheme for Denver conjured by William Slotnick (Master’s in Education, Harvard). There is no evidence to support the use of SLOs for teacher evaluation. Even so, this exercise is still used in Ohio, among other states. https://studylib.net/doc/7415941/the-marketing-of-student-learning-objectives–slos
ESSA is like NCLB in that the high stakes tests are still there, but they are surrounded with legalese about state “flexibility.” Some parts of ESSA calls for de-professionalizing the work of teacher education (see Title II, Section SEC. 2002).
ESSA became the federal law before our current nine-yacht owner and avowed Christian missionary, Betsy Devos, was appointed to be in charge of the Department of Education. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/betsy-devos-christian-schools-vouchers-charter-education-secretary/
Devos’ incompetence delayed and then mangled the “approval” of required ESSA “state plans“ for this school year, 2018-2019. In the meantime, groups that championed NCLB and Race to the Top publicized their own ratings of ESSA plans (e.g., Bellwether Education Partners, Achieve, and the Collaborative for Student Success). The Collaborative for Student Success is funded by the Bloomberg Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, ExxonMobil, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation–none friends of public education.
I think that compliance checks on ESSA, if any, will be outsourced and that the still pending federal budget will confirm the nine-yacht Education Secretary’s’ real priorities—choice and some of the increasingly weird things recently on her mind. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/essa/every-student-succeeds-act/
Laura,
I am shocked to find an error in your analysis!
Betsy DeVos has 10 yachts, not 9.
I value the correction. Next questions, Only ten? And where are they docked?
SLO – Student learning objectives – a huge amount of busy work done for those above you…time spent away from developing your lessons…
“Three laws in a nutshell”
We left them in the weeds
In race to make a buck
And every child succeeds
In being out of luck
From the study itself:
“5. CONCLUSION
An important contribution of this study is that it introduces simulated failure rates as a
measure of accountability stringency. We are not the first to use simulated instruments for
studying policy implementations.12 However, this method has been underutilized in education evaluation settings and is well-suited for uncovering the connections between states’ adoption of accountability policies and state and student outcomes. This paper is a first step toward understanding how states, schools, and students responded to accountability pressures under NCLB. Further work is needed to provide policy-makers and education researchers with tools for describing and understanding the role that states have in determining schools’ and students’ experiences with accountability reform.”
Plain English version:
By using fiction in our mental masturbation analysis we’ve come to unseen heights of conclusions that mean absolutely nothing. We’re brilliant.
“introduces simulated failure rates as a measure of accountability stringency.”
Let me grab my ” Mad Hatter’s Dictionary of Nonsense.”
The Chalkbeat article’s last part is weird
No Child Left Behind’s replacement, the Every Student Succeeds Act, takes a different tack. Instead of giving each state discretion in how many schools are identified as failing and requiring them to ramp up the consequences over time, the law requires each state to identify 5 percent of schools as low-performing.
Yeah, so ESSA will save the day. Afterall, it doesn’t have the same basic Campbellian problem as NCLB.
There will always be a bottom 5%, and the state education department will have no ideas other than to hand them over to charter corporations. Then start on the next 5%. Then return to the original 5%, which will be turned over to a different charter operator.
There will always be a bottom 5%
….and they will always be in the state and/or Federal education departments.
It features DeVos and her love of guns in schools.
……………………..
“Back-to-Screwed” from MarkFiore on Vimeo.
By Mark Fiore — Things aren’t looking good for education, higher or lower.
The video is available for your viewing pleasure at https://vimeo.com/287367813