Why the Senate’s proposed No Child Left Behind rewrite doesn’t go far enough
Sen. Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican who is chairman of the Senate education committee, and ranking Democrat Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state recently reached an agreement on a rewrite of No Child Left Behind that, if it were to become law, would significantly reduce the federal role in local public education.
The “Every Child Achieves” proposed legislation would, for example, shift decisions about how to evaluate teachers, what to do about low-performing schools and other matters from the federal government to states and local school districts. But there is something it would not do: eliminate federally mandated standardized testing for grades 3-8 and once in high school.
Here is a piece that looks at the details of the proposed legislation, written by Monty Neill and Lisa Guisbond. Neill is executive director of FairTest, or the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, which is dedicated to eliminating the abuse and misuse of standardized tests. Guisbond is an assessment reform analyst at FairTest.
By Monty Neill and Lisa Guisbond
Despite proposing important steps to reduce the harmful uses of standardized exam results driven by No Child Left Behind, this month’s Senate committee draft legislation – “Every Child Achieves” – fails to address the law’s deeply destructive annual testing mandate. To fix this, Congress must respond to the growing grassroots movement calling for less testing and more learning.
NCLB, the current version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), significantly harmed public education, especially for vulnerable students. This is primarily because of two flawed components: mandated annual testing in reading and math in grades 3-8, plus once in high school; and the punitive sanctions attached to those tests. The consequences include narrowed curriculum, teaching to the test, increased cheating, a wider school-to-prison pipeline, and emotional damage to children.
Unfortunately, the bill proposed by Sens. Alexander and Murray keeps the mandate to test every student every year in elementary and middle school.Advocates for assessment reform will push for amendments to eliminate the every-grade testing requirement, specifically cutting reading and math tests to once each in elementary, middle and high school (“grade span” testing).
The Senate committee bill would allow use of performance assessments as one part of an accountability system. Performance assessments include portfolios, projects and extended tasks, such as research papers and lab experiments. Well-designed and implemented performance assessments promote in-depth, engaging instruction with powerful outcomes for students. However, their positive impact is limited in the context of a test-driven system. Without addressing the problem of testing in every grade every year, therefore, this rewrite would perpetuate an educationally damaging system.
The bill does provide for an “innovation” program, through which up to five states can apply in the new law’s first three years. It would allow states to build systems focused on portfolios and projects that could replace statewide exams for accountability purposes. The systems could include locally-designed assessments that vary across schools and districts but still produce comparable results across the state.
While creating the new assessments, participating districts would not have to use the state test. The best current example is the New York Performance Standards Consortium, a network of 48 public high schools. They require students to successfully complete extended tasks in four Why the Senate’s proposed No Child Left Behind rewrite doesn’t go far enough - The Washington Post:
