NCLB Was A Failure: PBS Reporter John Merrow Condemns Myopic Fixation on Testing | janresseger

NCLB Was A Failure: PBS Reporter John Merrow Condemns Myopic Fixation on Testing | janresseger:

NCLB Was A Failure: PBS Reporter John Merrow Condemns Myopic Fixation on Testing

Posted on May 15, 2014 by janresseger

This week John Merrow, the PBS education reporter and columnist, insists that we tell ourselves the truth, even though some of our leaders want to keep pretending that test-based school reform is our path to universal academic prowess.  You’ll remember of course, that 2014 is the year the No Child Left Behind Act projected all American children would be above average.  Except it didn’t work.

Writing about the flat, unimproved scores among high school seniors released last week by the National Assessment for Education Progress, Merrow challenges our society’s complacent, bipartisan support for test-and-punish accountability—the school reform philosophy enshrined in federal law in January, 2002.  He writes: “Any thinking person, Republican or Democrat, looking at those numbers squarely in the face would have to question the path we are on.  No one in power seems to want to do that.”

For a particularly lucid analysis of the NAEP scores that were released last week, Merrow refers us to Guy Brandenburg’s blog.  Brandenburg writes:  “Perhaps you read or heard that the 12th grade NAEP reading and math scores, which just got reported, were “flat.”  Did you wonder what that meant?  The short answer is: those scores have essentially not changed since they began giving the tests!  Not for the kids at the top of the testing heap, not for those at the bottom, not for blacks, not for whites, not for Hispanics.  No change, nada, zip.  Not even after a full dozen years of Bush’s looney No Child Left Behind Act, nor its twisted Obama-style descendant, Race to the Top.”

The NAEP 12th grade test has been administered only since the mid-1990s, which means there are not four decades of scores, as with the 4th and 8th grade versions, but the data that hasNCLB Was A Failure: PBS Reporter John Merrow Condemns Myopic Fixation on Testing | janresseger: