More than 500 researchers sign NCLB letter to Congress: stop test-focused reforms
More than 500 education researchers around the country have signed an open letter to Congress and the Obama administration about how the No Child Left Behind law should be rewritten, saying that they “strongly urge departing from test-focused reforms that not only have been discredited for high-stakes decisions, but also have shown to widen, not close, gaps and inequities.”
Congress is now taking up a rewrite of NCLB, the current version of the Elementary and Secondary School Act (which was supposed to be rewritten in 2007), and the House education committee has already approved legislation that retains an NCLB requirement of annual standardized testing from grades 3-8 and once in high school. The standardized testing-focused reforms at the center of NCLB have been controversial, and the law is seen now as being severely flawed.
The letter, which educational researchers can sign by Feb. 20, references a policy memo written by Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center, an attorney and a professor education policy at the University of Colorado Boulder; and William J. Mathis, managing director of the center and a former Vermont superintendent. Here is the unannotated version, and you can find the fully annotated memo here, at the National Center of Education Policy website. The policy memo says in part:
Today’s 21-year-olds were in third grade in 2002, when the No Child Left Behind Act became law. For them and their younger siblings and neighbors, test-driven accountability policies are all they’ve known. The federal government entrusted their educations to an unproven but ambitious belief that if we test children and hold educators responsible for improving test scores, we would have almost everyone scoring as “proficient” by 2014. Thus, we would achieve “equality.” This approach has not worked.Yet over the past 13 years, Presidents Bush and Obama remained steadfastly committed to test-based policies. These two administrations have offered federal grants through Race to the Top, so-called Flexibility Waivers under NCLB, School Improvement Grants, and various other programs to push states, districts, and schools to line up behind policies that use these same test scores in high-stakes evaluations of teachers and principals, in addition to the NCLB focus on schools. The proposed new Teacher Preparation Regulations under Title II of the Higher Education Act now attempt to expand the testing regime to teacher education programs. These expansions of test-driven accountability policies require testing even beyond that mandated by NCLB.Not surprisingly, current debates over the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), of which NCLB is the most recent iteration, now center around specificMore than 500 researchers sign NCLB letter to Congress: stop test-focused reforms - The Washington Post:
