The South
Carolina Department of Education is seeking comment on its flexibility request
under No Child Left Behind/Elementary and Secondary Education Act. I wrote about this effort in an earlier blog
(click
here).
The request follows
federal requirements (click here to
access the site allowing for citizen comment, waiver materials, etc.). But is this the correct direction to bring about
improvement for our schools?
Dr. Helen F.
Ladd, a professor of public policy at Duke University, wrote a response to some
of these issues recently (November 2011).
You can click
here to read the entire address/report (“Education and Poverty: Confronting the Evidence”) or here to find out more about Dr.
Ladd’s credentials as an educator and researcher.
Dr. Ladd
states, “Current U.S. policy initiatives to improve the U.S. education system,
including No Child Left Behind, test-based evaluation of teachers and the
promotion of competition, are misguided because they either deny or set to the
side a basic body of evidence documenting that students from disadvantaged
households on average perform less well in school than those from more
advantaged families. Because these policy initiatives do not directly address
the educational challenges experienced by disadvantaged students, they have
contributed little -- and are not likely to contribute much in the future -- to
raising overall student achievement or to reducing achievement and educational
attainment gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students. Moreover, such
policies have the potential to do serious harm. Addressing the educational
challenges faced by children from disadvantaged families will require a broader
and bolder approach to education policy than the recent efforts to reform
schools.”
Here are a
couple more quotes from the address/article that I felt were important:
Value-Added Teacher Evaluation
Instruments: “The attention to value added, however, does
nothing by itself to help teachers address the educational challenges that
disadvantaged children bring to the classroom. In that sense it ignores the
correlation between family background and student performance. Even if it were true that value added models
generated valid and reliable measures of teacher effectiveness (which extensive
research shows they generally do not) this focus on teacher effectiveness at
best pushes teachers to work hard toward the goal of raising student test
scores, with no attention paid to other academic and non-academic needs of
children that may impede their ability to learn (Baker et al, 2010).”
Pay for Performance:
“The best U.S. evidence to date indicates that providing financial
incentives for teachers to raise test scores does not lead to the desired
results. In a recent experiment in which randomly assigned math teachers in
grades 5-8 in Nashville were offered large bonuses for raising their students’
test scores, for example, no differences emerged in the test scores of those
teacher offered the incentive and those in the control group (Springer et al,
2010). More generally, the focus on test based evaluation of teachers
provides incentives for them to narrow the curriculum to the tested subjects of
math and reading, and to direct teacher attention to basic skills away from
student reasoning skills. In addition, statistical problems of bias and
unreliability can lead to unfair and arbitrary treatment of teachers, which in
turn lowers morale and reduces the appeal of teaching as a profession (Baker et
al, 2010).”
Holding Schools Accountable: “At the same time, individual schools also
should be held accountable, but only for things that are under their control.
Specifically, they should be held accountable for the internal policies and
practices that help to produce a far broader set of educational outcomes than
student achievement alone as measured by test scores. Schools might be held
accountable, for example, for providing a safe and supportive school
environment and a climate that promotes respect among children and teachers;
for tracking the individual developmental needs of all the children they serve
and for implementing strategies to address those needs; and for delivering the
curriculum in a coherent manner that engages students as partners in the
learning process and appropriately pushes them all to the limits of their
abilities.”
It is something to consider. Will the efforts really address the problems associated with poor school performance?
