Part III: All Asbury Park Children Left Behind

Considering Asbury Park schools have failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for the fifth year under the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandate and as a result run the risk of major restructuring, it seems an appropriate time to take a critical look at NCLB and its impact on at-risk youth.

Luckily my partner Amy just wrote a graduate school paper on that exact topic.   The whole paper is available here (with references included, I removed them below for ease of reading), but I will break it down into digestible parts in this post.

After extensive research, Amy’s take home point is that NCLB is designed and implemented in a way that has a significant negative impact on the population it is designed to help, at-risk students. Not only does NCLB lack guidance on how to help failing children and schools, it shines a very bright light on the populations that are failing.  With no additional resources or guidance on how to raise the achievement of these populations, the easiest way for schools to improve test scores is to remove these students from their rolls.   The result is the dropout crisis that plagues Asbury Park and other US inner city schools.

Perhaps most disturbing, the federal policy ignores the real problems that cause the achievement gap – unemployment, unsafe communities, insecure housing, poor health care and nutrition, lack of public  transportation – while scapegoating the schools.  Reformers claim, if we could just fix the schools, everything would be alright.  It seems clear that the reverse is true.

Here is the last page of Amy’s that really gets to the heart of the matter:

Not only does the research point toward factors beyond the construct of our schools, but 77% of the general public also believes the achievement gap is primarily due to “other factors” while only 19% think it is “mostly related to quality of schooling”.

It seems clear that risk factors for failure in, and dropping out of, school exist in all parts of a student’s life.  Further, the chance that a student drops out increases as these factors accumulate.  At best, a policy like NCLB is simply poorly designed. NCLB not only increases the in-school factors for dropping out, such as high stakes testing, grade retention and discipline problems, but tends to ignore the impact of socio-economic status has on dropouts.  At worst NCLB is a well-informed and brilliant strategy to perpetuate a systems of social and racial oppression.

In Richard Rothstein’s book, “Class and schools: Using social, economic and educational reform to close the back-white achievement gap” he argues that if we can’t close the gaps in income, health, and housing there will be little prospect of equalizing achievement.  Others go further in saying that NCLB and its blaming of schools and teachers for student failures, diverts attention away from more appropriate focuses of government attention; unemployment, affordable housing, public transportation, health care, etc.

These policies outline a system of finger-pointing which frames schools as the root of our social problems.  Therefore, creating the illusion that government attempts to fix schools are actually efforts to do something about our social problems .  Looking at NCLB from this perspective helps unpack the social ramifications of schools that fail to make AYP.

Even with all the best practices in place, schools cannot solve all of society’s ills. It is clear that public education in our country needs reform.  NCLB clearly does not do that.  In reality it puts our most vulnerable students, those whom it aims to help, in the cross hairs of high stakes testing.  In doing so, ultimately undermining the schools ability to reach them.

Beyond school reform, we need an honest dialogue regarding the cycles of oppression and racism that plague this country.  We must see through the smoke screen of school reform and deal with the real world problems facing our youth.  When we reach the 2014 deadline for NCLB and the achievement gap has not been closed, will politicians still pretend we have a teaching and learning problem? Or will they be honest and deal with poverty, oppression and racism in a holistic and real manner?

Well said Amy!  Below breaks down some of the relevant parts of her paper in a much abbreviated form. I skipped most of Part II since it deals with the negatives associated with dropouts.  They seem pretty obvious to me.  Part III suggests how to reform schools but highlights research that show that we will still have an achievement gap unless we deal with society’s  ills directly.  Beyond the page above, I left most of that analysis out.  Please check out the whole paper if time permits.

Part I: No Child Left Behind & the “Dropout” Crisis

1. Stated Goal: At-Risk Youth

NCLB aims to decrease the achievement gap and improve student performance so that 100% of students will meet math and language arts standards by 2014

NCLB passed as part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 2001 with the clear mandate to target increases in achievement of 4 subgroups collectively referred to as “at-risk” youth.  This group includes minority children, students with disabilities, poor children, and English language learners.

2. Maintains Inequalities

…under funded schools, serving the largest numbers of the “at-risk” youth, typically with the largest class sizes and fewer, lower quality instructional materials, minimal extra curricular activities, smaller libraries, less counselors, and lower-quality academic courses. Most importantly, these schools still have the least qualified teachers which is directly correlated with poor test scores which is intended to be a key point of reform in NCLB.

3. Confuses Measurement and Reform

Not only are the schools that house most of our “at-risk” population under-funded, they are tested and punished rather than fixed. NCLB spends the vast majority of its money, between 1.9 and 5.3 billion on testing.

Once schools are labeled as failing to reach AYP it makes it much harder for those schools to attract and keep highly qualified teachers.  More importantly, the money that is needed to fix these schools it taken away when a school fails to reach AYP.

4. It Uses a Bad Measuring Stick

…practical concerns include the freedom given to each state to implement testing regimes with varying content, performance standards and assessment.  Since 2001, there is clear evidence that some states are lowering their performance standards so their schools are not labeled as “failing”.

It is also interesting to note that on norm-referenced tests, which are commonly employed by states due to the specific annual requirements of NCLB, it is impossible to attain 100% proficiency levels.  These norm-referenced tests, by definition, must have 50% of the student score below the norm. Even if different tests were used, the time provided for student achievement to increase is unrealistic.

Children learn and demonstrate learning in different ways and at varying rates.  These diverse ways of learning should be viewed as assets to schools, not liabilities. Using a single achievement measure of educational quality is at best selling our students short.  At worst this policy is a political and economic manipulation to preserve the advantages of one group, those who do well on that single measure, over others.

Most importantly, there are legitimate questions around the assumption that standardized tests are the most reliable way to assess student learning.  Results indicate that standardized test scores correlate more to family income than any other factor .  Therefore, NCLB essentially functions to discriminate against a specific socioeconomic bracket of our young people.

5. Narrowing of the Curriculum

NCLB, with its myopic focus on math and language arts, has forced schools to abandon robust curricular initiatives and real school reform in favor of test prep strategies and materials.

Instead of teaching critical thinking, problem solving, and real world applications of learning, teachers end up employing “drill and kill” model of test preparation.  Most disturbingly, this narrowing of the curriculum reduces the chance that students who learn in different ways will have the opportunities to display what they have learned and showcase their distinctive talents.

6. The Illusion of Choice

NCLB promises to free “at-risk” populations from their failing schools by giving them the choice to attend private or charter schools through a school voucher programs or transfer to more successful public schools; a promise which ignores the fact that almost all schools serving “at-risk” populations will be failing by 2014.  This leads some to believe that this provision of NCLB is a prelude to privatizing the education system.

The idea of choosing to attend alternative schools implies in some way that schools in these poor communities are not worth fixing and that there is something better about the middle class, primarily white schools.

On a more practical note, often there are no open seats in non-failing schools. When space is available, questions arise about who is going to foot the bill. Most importantly, the success of private and charters schools often is based on the schools’ ability to employ a diversity of indirect student selection techniques and parental involvement.  In most cases, those students “at-risk” are eliminated from the successful school.

7. The Anatomy of the “Push Out”

…some states that have reported a narrowed gap and can not attribute the change to increased achievement, but rather a system that incentivizes the removal of low achieving students.

…shown a very strong negative correlation between high stakes accountability and graduation rates. Furthermore, results from standardized test are often used to retain students in a grade. These two factors together, the increase in high stakes testing as a graduation requirement and increased retention rates, are the number one and number two predictors of student drop-out.  Both factors surpass discipline problems and suspensions as a predictor, which fall third on this list.

Most disturbing is the disparate impact NCLB high stakes testing has on “at-risk” populations.   Less than half of the nations schools require high schools exit exams. However, 75 percent of students of color attend public schools in states that require exit exams to graduate.

Although official statistics record student drop-out rates, a more accurate description is to say that these students are really victims of a system by which they are “pushed-out” by one means or another. This begins with the implementation of high-takes testing and the associated threat of sanctions. The threat of sanctions scares schools into ridged zero tolerance discipline systems and narrows the curriculum.  At this point schools have the top three reasons for student drop-outs working in conjunction – high stakes testing leading to increased grade retention and disciplinary action.  Disaggregated data functions to show school administrators exactly where the problems lie.

Student whom feel pressured to pass the test as a means of protecting their teachers jobs or the future of their high school and are not actively encouraged by adults to stay in school but rather, often times, counseled to leave.

School administrators have many push-out options:

1. Push-out into special education so scores are not counted.                                                     2. Retain students in a grade so grade level scores will look better.                                                                                                                                                        3. Exclude lower scoring students from admission.                                                                        4. Actively encouraging students to leave school.

Students feel the push-out pressure in a number of ways:

1. Suspended or expelled.                                                                                                                    2. Discouraged and ashamed of test results and consequently act out until removed.                                                                                                                                                 3. Retained a grade.                                                                                                                              4. Bored with test–driven curriculum and disrupt class.                                                               5. Denied a diploma as a result of test scores.