Pass or fail are words that carry a lot of weight in education scoring. But there’s a third word that comes to mind in Vermont education scoring: Stuck.
That would be “stuck” with No Child Left Behind, the Bush-era education accountability law passed in 2002 that almost everyone in the learning field agrees deserves a failing grade.
Vermont in May decided not to apply for a federal waiver from NCLB’s mandates and testing requirements under an option offered by the Obama administration. After months of discussions with federal officials, the Board of Education decided to turn down the U.S. Education Department’s proposal to offer states flexibility with the law, saying the waiver wasn’t that beneficial and wouldn’t ease the testing requirements that are at the heart of criticism of NCLB.
As the saying goes, 100 percent proficiency “ain’t gonna happen.”
That decision put Vermont back to square one with regards to the rigorous requirements of NCLB, which requires all students to be proficient in reading and math – based on tests – by 2014. And that’s where Vermont, and many other states, are stuck.
As the saying goes, 100 percent proficiency “ain’t gonna happen.”
In fact, according to a wide array of Vermont experts, it’s almost a certainty what will happen is that 100 percent of Vermont’s 307 schools will be judged “failing” by NCLB standards.
Some 72 percent are already failing today, according to the Vermont Education Department, though Deputy Commissioner John Fischer says that term is a misguided label if there ever was one.
“We are now trying to work in this system that is clearly broken,” he said.
A new testing system based on “common core” standards
At the same time Vermont is coping with that “broken” system, it is gearing up for a whole new testing regimen due to kick in in the 2014-15 school year. In an effort led by the National Governor’s Association, Vermont has joined 27 states in the innovative Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), which is developing the tests on a so-called “common core” of standards.
SBAC will result in a fully computerized testing system that will give scores almost immediately, so schools can go to work right away on any problems the tests reveal instead of having them continue for half a year until results are released, as is now the case.
SBAC will provide a better measure of broad-based learning, be adaptive for students with special needs, and provide a better yardstick of both gaps in students’ learning and higher levels of achievement, says Gail Taylor of the Vermont Education Department.
“It’s being written with a wide variety of involvement all across the country,” she says.
SBAC will replace the NECAP (New England Common Assessment Program) tests now given to Vermont students in math, reading, writing and science each year.
Universal “failure” at public schools
Until then, however, Vermont and many other states face the inexorable march of their schools toward near-universal failure – at least by NLCB measures that call for “adequate yearly progress” by a set of arbitrary federal standards for the state’s 82,000 K-12 pupils.
That also means schools that continue to be branded failing face a growing scale of punishments.
“It’s fundamentally flawed. It was destined for every school in the United States to fail,” says Steve Dale, who heads the Vermont School Board’s Association.
Vermont is hardly alone in this situation. New Hampshire already has a high failure rate, around 65 percent of its schools, according to a recent story in the New Hampshire Telegraph. The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, an educational think tank that has long opposed the methodology of NLCB and called for reform, predicts that most schools in the entire country will be judged failing by 2014.
Talk to educators, principals, superintendents, school board and education officials in Vermont, and it’s clear they think it is the misguided law itself, not Vermont schools, that is failing in myriad ways.
“It’s fundamentally flawed. It was destined for every school in the United States to fail,” says Steve Dale, who heads the Vermont School Board’s Association.
Vermont Department of Education Commissioner Armando Vilaseca says using a one-day test such as NECAP to assess the full range of student skills and learning not “credible,” saying it’s “very shallow and not accurate.”
The knock against NCLB has many facets: It is forcing schools to teach to tests instead of teaching broad-based learning; narrowing curriculums to the exclusion of arts and music and other important subjects; forcing administrative sanctions that are ineffective and unrealistic; giving a snapshot and not the big picture of each student’s progress; and stigmatizing schools as “failing” that are mostly doing a good job, thanks to federal measuring rules that don’t fit a rural state with small schools and classes (and don’t account for larger societal issues.)
Under NCLB, if most of the students at a school are getting a passing grade and meeting the “adequate yearly progress” standards, a school can still fail. That’s because the law requires all students, including those in categories designated by the federal law, such as special education, low-income and English as a second language students, to score proficiently on the tests.
“It’s very disappointing. No local school likes to be labeled ‘failing,’” says Dale, adding that “is hugely demoralizing and a disservice to principals and teachers and to schools boards, and it is misleading to the public.”
“This term has now become meaningless. It’s not reflective of reality,” he says.
List of “failing” Vermont schools will grow
Still, the question remains, what happens now that the waiver plan – which 19 states have been approved for – is no longer an option.
The answer, in laymen’s terms, could best be categorized as “muddle through,” considering new tests are coming in two years and Congress is almost certain to wait until after the November elections to make any changes to NCLB. Or wait even longer, considering the fact NCLB has been waiting for reauthorization since 2007.
The list of Vermont schools rated as failing will continue to grow under a method Fischer calls “let’s fire and shame our way to improvement and see what works.” NCLB forces compliance because a state’s Title I education funds for programs aimed at low-income children are at risk if states fail to take action under NCLB. In Vermont’s case, that’s around $50 million, Fischer says.
NCLB sets out a gradation of sanctions that grow increasingly more harsh for consistently failing schools. At first they call for supplemental services and curriculum assistance to be provided to help failing schools, but continued missed benchmarks can mean school restructuring, staff and principal replacement, district reorganization and even taking over operation of the school.
“We’ve never done that,” says Vilaseca, though the state came close with Mississquoi Valley High School in 2008, requiring the school to hire staff and eventually a new principal to improve dismal test scores.
Under NCLB, states have some discretion when applying the harshest sanction, Vilaseca explains. There is widespread agreement in Vermont that NECAP scores don’t give a complete picture and that replacing a principal in a small state where school administrators are hard to come by and local control is a sacred precept. Instead, Vermont has chosen to intervene by means of “technical assistance,” helping schools change curriculums, improve their teaching and staffing and make administrative changes.
Explains Deputy Commissioner Fischer: “Our first option is not to fire the principal, even if we had a line of principals waiting.”
“We’re looking to endorse and approve strategies that have a more productive effect,” as Vilaseca puts it.
Fischer says when schools are failing to teach well there are many “complex issues” usually involved, often reflecting economic and societal conditions that go beyond the education system that NLCB simply doesn’t take into account.
Dale, of the Vermont School Board’s Association, wholeheartedly agrees, saying it makes no sense to fire a principal who may be doing a good job based on a set of arbitrary progress standards.
“The idea of turning them over makes no sense,” he says.
Vermont experts completely endorse the idea of measuring achievement and working to improve education. It’s NCLB’s methods that they flunk.
Fischer points out that under NLCB, a failing school can actually improve its test scores but still fail because it didn’t meet the cumulative federal benchmark. The fact that virtually all the state’s schools are heading for failure is a clear sign that something is wrong with the way NLCB seeks to improve education.
“As it is with every complex problem, there is a simple solution, but it’s usually the wrong solution,” Fischer says.
According to the department, about 30 of the 307 Vermont schools have advanced to the more punitive levels of sanctions by failing to make adequate yearly progress for at least four years.
Still, Vilaseca says the number of schools that are really “failing” in the sense most people would consider it is “very few.” He notes 87 percent of Vermont students graduate from high school within four years, one of the highest rates in the nation.
A side effect of NLCB is that it is straining staffing among the 150 employees in the department. The state has teams to assist failing schools but as more and more schools are deemed failing it is harder to meet the need, Fischer says, The department also has to divert funds to those schools failing under NCLB.
Until NCLB is reauthorized and SBAC tests are employed, however, the state and education community will have to live with schools being identified as “failing,” even at high-achieving districts, because one subset did poorly in NECAP tests, says Fischer.
Teaching to the test
The larger issue, and more consequential damage, say many teachers and administrators, is that NCLB has driven schools to dramatically whittle down their curriculums, hitting arts and music and geography and many other courses where students find inspiration and motivation.
Ken Page, who taught reading before becoming a principal and is now director of the Vermont Principal’s Association, is one of many who laments how NCLB’s focus on English and math has subtracted artistic avenues at schools.
“The word accountability is pretty problematic,” Owen says. A “whole bunch of people outside this conversation” are trying to bring new perspectives to the debate over testing.
“Those are the things that make school interesting to kids,” he says.
While NCLB brought an appropriate focus on standards and achievement in schools, it missed the boat with a “one size fits all” model that doesn’t account for small rural schools with as few as 100 students and for the whole breadth of vital educational subjects.
“It dramatically changed how we look at schools,” he says, but not in a good way. “The view of school has become tremendously narrowed,” he says.
You won’t find disagreement on that from music teacher Steve Owen of Calais, who blogs passionately on education issues at http://educationworker.blogspot.com/ and was chosen for a fellowship in 2010 as teaching ambassador by the U.S. Department of Education. Owen says NLCB’s emphasis on testing subjects has led to reorganized school days and crowding out of subjects that aren’t tested, to the detriment of elementary and high school education – all in the pursuit of NLCB’s impossible goal of 100 percent student proficiency, which he calls “a statistical improbability.”
Owen says across the U.S. there is a “growing protest movement against standardized tests,” use of statistical analyses of student achievement and applying consultant’s buzz words to the learning that goes on in schools.
“The word accountability is pretty problematic,” he says. A “whole bunch of people outside this conversation” are trying to bring new perspectives to the debate over testing.
So too are some people inside the conversation, even some folks who helped create NCLB. Diane Ravitch, who worked for President George W. Bush, has leveled a damning condemnation of the law she helped create, saying accountability based solely on test scores has been a disaster. The former assistant secretary of education is scathing about NCLB in her 2010 book, “The Death and Life of the Great American Education System, echoing Vermont’s education community in criticizing how “teaching to the test” has left science, social studies, history, geography, foreign languages, art and music in the dusty school back corridors.
New test could save the day
Despite their experience with NCLB, many in Vermont’s education community hold out hope that the new SBAC assessment system will provide a fairer measure of student learning and return some balance to educational subjects.
A key aspect of SBAC is that it is intended to measure positive “growth” in student learning, taking into account where a student started from, instead of calling for them to meet an arbitrary measure, says Vilaseca. Under NLCB, “because every year the targets increase, it is really hard to make it,” he says.
Taylor, who oversees the testing programs for the state, says the SBAC is much more “21st century” oriented, with a higher focus on career and college-oriented testing, focusing on not just on students’ knowledge of content but how they can apply their skills.
Having the new assessment based on common core standards also means that 48 states have agreed to test on the same material, so states can compare apples with apples when it comes to test scores. NLCB now makes no accommodation for states like Vermont, which set higher standards that are harder to achieve on tests than other states.
SBAC also allows states to enter up to 15 percent of their own educational focus into the testing regimen, a level of flexibility that NLCB did not have.
According to Fischer, the state’s effort in drafting a waiver request was not a fruitless endeavor, since it paved the way for a state consensus on how best to assess student learning and how to close any achievement gap. Part of that is focusing on an assessment system that includes a broader focus than just one snapshot test in two or three subjects, he says.
Yet Fischer is also forthright in saying that it is not acceptable that in 2012, fewer than half of Vermont students tested proficient in science and math.
“By any measure, we have some math issues in the state,” he says. The hope is that in the future, applying a failing label and punitive measures under NCLB will be replaced by evidence-based methods shown to improve not just scores, but teaching.
“We’re working with some conceptual models that have been proven to work,” he says.
Vilaseca shares that optimism but admits its tempered by the knowledge that federal officials sometimes seem accommodating but end up focusing on aspects that have little to do with education. He cites a preoccupation with test security at the federal level, which is hardly an issue for small Vermont schools. Vermont is part of a 14-state rural consortium that is working with the U.S. Department of Education to make sure the unique characteristics and issues in states with small rural schools are taken into account.
Fischer says federal officials appeared stunned to discover through Vermont’s waiver application discussions last spring that some Vermont elementary schools have 100 students or less.
“That just boggles their minds when we tell them that,” he says.
For Vermont parents and students, Vilaseca says the message is that the stress on accountability in education “is not going away” – nor should it.
But he’s hopeful that the new testing system and any federal changes will set a broader measure of student progress than a single snapshot taken one day out of the year.
“This is an evolutionary process. It’s a step up from where we are now, and I am sure it will improve in the future,” he says.
