Advertorial in Education Week, February 22, 2006
Ever since Congress passed No Child Left Behind in 2001, Phi Delta Kappa International, along with a chorus of other professional associations and individual educators and policymakers, has advocated reworking some of the law’s provisions to ensure that the ideal of leaving no child behind is within reach. The U.S. Department of Education has now taken a step toward addressing one of the act’s major challenges, the reliance on standardized tests to evaluate whether schools are doing their job.
Our stance on NCLB always has been a direct reflection of what we have learned over several years of polling the American public. In 2005 respondents in the 37th annual PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools (www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kpollpdf.htm) reaffirmed that most Americans agree with the sentiment behind NCLB. But they disagree with the law’s method of judging schools based on the percentage of students passing a state-mandated test. The public believes that schools should be judged on how much students improve in a given year, and we agree.
One strategy that has been around in the education literature but now, at last, is receiving considerable attention is value-added assessment. While most standardized tests compare students either to their peers or to an established benchmark, value-added assessment compares a student’s current level of achievement with his or her past achievement. In other words, this type of assessment looks for achievement growth, a focus that many researchers and practitioners consider more meaningful in judging the effectiveness of schools and, ultimately, of individual teachers.
A great deal has been written about value-added assessment. PDK’s recent contributions include Theodore Hershberg’s article, “Value-Added Assessment and Systemic Reform,” in the December 2005 issue of the Phi Delta Kappan and an in-depth article by James Mahoney that will appear next week in the March/April issue of PDK’s new magazine, Edge: The Latest Information for the Education Practitioner. (Information on both periodicals can be found at www.pdkintl.org.)
In November we were glad to see the U.S. Department of Education take a tentative step toward including growth-based accountability in the NCLB mix. Some observers view ED’s pilot project, which will approve up to 10 high-quality growth models in 2005-06, as a signal that policymakers may be ready to consider substantive change to improve NCLB when the law comes up for reauthorization next year. At the same time, other observers worry that the pilot project’s prerequisites might be too stringent.
When Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced the pilot project on November 18, she said, “We’re open to new ideas, but we’re not taking our eye off the ball.” We believe that all educators should keep their eyes on the ball. But we also believe that ED needs to put resources behind the research and development needed to identify what really works. There are some hard R&D realities in ED’s pilot. One already apparent in November was that almost half of the states would not qualify because they did not meet the pilot project’s prerequisites.
As educators and policymakers, from the Department level to the local school, work to realize the NCLB ideals, the R&D required to improve the law and to raise student achievement, including pilot projects such as this one, need to be well supported financially as well as philosophically, and broadly accessible to states and schools. These issues also must be part of the reconsideration of No Child Left Behind.
Phi Delta Kappa
International
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