Unintended results
No Child Left Behind is a good example of how government programs - particularly federal government programs - work: An honorable idea is codified, screws things up and then perpetuated.
From Sol Stern's City Journal look at our growing excellence gap:
"NCLB’s accountability system led to another distortion, this one harming top students. Because the law emphasized mere 'proficiency,' rewarding schools for getting their students to achieve that fairly low standard, teachers and administrators had an incentive to boost the test scores of their lowest-performing students but no incentive to improve instruction for their brightest. Robert Pondiscio, communications director for the Core Knowledge Foundation and a former New York City Teaching Fellow, describes how the process worked at his South Bronx elementary school. 'Eighty percent of the kids in my fifth-grade class were scoring at the two lowest levels on the state reading and math tests,' he recalls. (Each student in New York State receives a test score from 1 to 4, with 1 signifying performance far below grade level, 2 below grade level, 3 grade level, and 4 advanced.) 'Early in my teaching career, an assistant principal told me that the kids in my class already scoring a 3 or 4 ‘are not your problem.’ In other words, my goal should be to move the kids scoring at the lower levels up a few points on the scale. I was not specifically ordered to do this, but the message was very clear. My job was to get more kids over the lowest two hurdles, because that’s how the school was rewarded for good performance in the city’s accountability system.'
From Sol Stern's City Journal look at our growing excellence gap:
"NCLB’s accountability system led to another distortion, this one harming top students. Because the law emphasized mere 'proficiency,' rewarding schools for getting their students to achieve that fairly low standard, teachers and administrators had an incentive to boost the test scores of their lowest-performing students but no incentive to improve instruction for their brightest. Robert Pondiscio, communications director for the Core Knowledge Foundation and a former New York City Teaching Fellow, describes how the process worked at his South Bronx elementary school. 'Eighty percent of the kids in my fifth-grade class were scoring at the two lowest levels on the state reading and math tests,' he recalls. (Each student in New York State receives a test score from 1 to 4, with 1 signifying performance far below grade level, 2 below grade level, 3 grade level, and 4 advanced.) 'Early in my teaching career, an assistant principal told me that the kids in my class already scoring a 3 or 4 ‘are not your problem.’ In other words, my goal should be to move the kids scoring at the lower levels up a few points on the scale. I was not specifically ordered to do this, but the message was very clear. My job was to get more kids over the lowest two hurdles, because that’s how the school was rewarded for good performance in the city’s accountability system.'
As a result, Pondiscio says, the few gifted minority students in his class didn’t receive any extra attention—attention that could have given them a better chance to pass the rigorous test for admission to one of the city’s elite specialized science and math high schools. That’s especially sad when you learn that the percentage of black students passing the admissions test for top-ranked Stuyvesant High School has dropped steadily over the past decade. Last year, it fell below 1 percent."
Want to improve education? Get the federal government as far away from it as possible.
I also would have liked to have kept our brilliant state legislators out of the student assessment business for what has now become years and years. It might be as bad a result as the decades they've been progressively taking discretion away from local judges in criminal sentencing.
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It is the nature of government.
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