Dubya's school reforms pay off http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/07/26/EDGTRDSD4M1.DTL Debra J. Saunders Tuesday, July 26, 2005 FOR YEARS, nothing helped. America's children weren't reading as well as they should. An achievement gap showed black and Latino students trailing behind their white counterparts in reading and math. Educators and politicians agreed Something Must Be Done, but they made halting progress. Until now. This month, the National Assessment of Educational Progress -- also known as the national report card -- released good news on long-term educational trends in America. Reading competency for 9-year-olds has reached its highest level since NAEP began measuring progress in 1971. What is more, the achievement gap is narrowing. The gap between black and white 9-year-olds tested for reading was 44 points in 1971 to 26 points in 2004, while the gap between white and Latino students narrowed from 34 points in 1975 to 21 points in 2004. Half the gap-narrowing has occurred since 1999. Of course, educrats are scrambling to make sure that no credit goes to President Bush or his No Child Left Behind program. The American Federation of Teachers issued a statement through an official, who noted that efforts that led to the higher scores predate the Bush presidency. The AFT is right. The reforms that boosted scores predate the Bush presidency. That said, when he was governor of Texas, Bush had the good sense to jump on the right horse. He believed in pushing basic literacy, even if he wasn't as strong on pushing phonics as I would have liked. He pushed for better testing to hold failing schools accountable. The approach paid off. When Bush was governor, black eighth-graders in Texas led the country in math and reading. While Bush was on the right horse, some teacher groups and top educrats were leading a stampede of bad horses, carrying American children headlong toward ignorance. They eschewed phonics, dispensed with multiplication tables, denounced testing -- unless it gave credit for wrong math answers with clever essays -- and preferred failed bilingual education programs to English immersion programs for children learning English. Look at any reform that has boosted student performance -- phonics, direct instruction, English immersion -- and the chances are, the educrats were against it. When parents revolted against whole language -- which teaches children to read language as a whole, without teaching them to decode words -- the educrats argued against a return to phonics, which they dismissed as "drill and kill." When reformers pushed for tests that could show which curricula worked best, educrats denounced testing. If children steeped in phonics scored well on reading tests, they were not impressed; it is because the children were brainwashed, not literate. And if whole-language learners scored poorly, well, it was because they were so creative. When Bush and company demanded accountability, they complained that standards would hurt poor children -- as if undereducating poor and minority students didn't hurt poor and minority kids. The educrat lobby in California opposed the switch from bilingual education to English immersion. Fortunately, California voters, not educrats, had an opportunity to switch to English immersion programs, and now more immigrant children have mastered English. Over time, classroom teachers have seen their students make progress. Many have come to see the wisdom in emphasizing phonics -- it may be boring for teachers, but it helps kids learn to read better. Bush packaged his approach under his promise to fight "the soft bigotry of low expectations." For years, educators blamed parents, demographics, money -- you name it -- for poor student performance. Bush didn't want to hear the excuses -- and his Texas swagger paid off. As Hoover Institution fellow and sometime Bush adviser Bill Evers noted, "There's no doubt that high expectations and trying to hold the system accountable from top to the bottom is having an overall positive effect." And so the educrats are left with weak criticisms. They complain that No Child Left Behind is underfunded -- even as Bush budgets money for the Department of Education. They argue that students have no motivation to apply themselves when they take tests -- and still the NAEP numbers are up. They note that NAEP high-school scores are flat without acknowledging that they opposed reforms that are helping more of today's 9-year-olds read. _____________ Bush increased the Department of Education's funding by 40%, and forced the data to reveal the performance of specific demographics such as wealth and race. Most of the promising data comes from grade schools. High schools are still pathetic.
I don't get this. If the reforms pre-dated Bush, and the scores rising pre-dated Bush, how do we know that Bush's NCLB had any effect? The real key would be seeing a graph of trends, and seeing how the scores have changed the last two years. You can't say everything was improving before Bush, so Bush's "school reforms pay off" without some kind of evidence. You can argue the reformers' changes have paid off (which is what most of the article discusses), but that's not linked to Bush in any way.
President Bush is "fighting the soft bigotry of low expectations" with the hard bigotry of no opportunity. Yet another reason he is the worst President in US history.
What??? Uh...its too early in the morning to figure out what your trying to say...Speak english...Better yet, don't speak like a liberal...
Because he is making sure minorities can't advance or get jobs? man it is too early for ambiguous bush is a bigot statements.
Kaus in Slate had a theory about why test scores improved shortyl before reforms were implemented: "Why did all sorts of indicators (e.g., teen pregnancy, caseloads) start to improve in the years before the enactment of the 1996 federal reform? President Clinton attributed the results to state reform efforts that preceded the federal law. The case for a similar effect in education seems at least as strong, if not stronger. Weren't pre-NCLB state efforts to require more testing and accountability far more pervasive than pre-1996 state efforts to require more welfare recipients to work? ... " Also, it's funny seeing the teacher's unions and some liberal groups downplaying these good results. Shouldn't they be happy?
I do believe accountability will raise performance levels, Bush was definately correct in that regard.
Believe me they are happy when we get results. The California teacher's union even instituted additional standards that hold teachers accountable, not just students. Closing the acheivement gap is a top priority but Bush's CLFB actually makes that harder in some cases. Closing the gap means taking students who are way behind and having them catch up. But the way schools are looked at now are by how many students score a proficient or advanced on standardized tests. Schools have to improve in the percentages that meet those standards each year. The problem with that is that students who are far behind don't become the focus. The focus now goes to students who close to the proficient level because they are easier to have reach the target level. The students who are far below basic are not given as much attention because it would take more than one year to get them to the proficient level when it comes to testing.
Teacher's unions, I agree. Some groups, though, don't think rising test scores equate to smarter students, but instead teaching to the tests. If students are better at math and English, but worse at history and other subjects, are the students better or worse? Or if they are better at whatever math the test focuses on, but can't solve other math problems, then what? Or if you scale back your teaching of advanced students to get more focus on the students behind, has your school really improved? That's one of the arguments against standardized testing - if teachers and schools are judged by them, then they will simply teach that material and less of everything else. Whether that's the case (or whether that's even a bad thing), I don't really know.
That happens very much. Science was ignored for a long time, then they started testing it as well, so now science is being taught again. But it isn't tested as heavily, so the emphasis is still on Language arts and Math. Social Studies is heavily ignored.
We should have different schools/classes for people of different ability. That way, the advanced students do not have to be taking the classes geared toward getting people from non-proficient to proficient, the middle students can receive the standard education, and the bottom students can be given more intensive instruction to try to raise them up to the level of the other students. I was never challanged in grade school or high school and it hampered my ability to motivate myself to work on a task. It was easier for me to skip all of the homework and just pass the tests than to actually put in any time or effort outside of class. In the end I was just training to slack off on the job.
I had the exact same experiences in school. When I saw I was lagging behind or my teachers gave me ultimatums about bad grades I would produce work that would get the pressure off. I spent most of k-12 trying to just get by unless I was interested in something. In CA elementary schools or at least the 100% title 1 school I teach at classes are not by ability but the child's level of English proficiency. There is also a good reason at the elementary level not to have all advanced students in one class, and all far below basic students in a class. The students need good examples. They need examples of higher levels of thinking and Bloom's taxonomy. They need models of outside the box problem solving etc. They also need peer interaction where they learn from other students and teach other students. It is one of the quickest ways to close the acheivement gap. But schools have limited resources, and with the way testing is set up now, they will devote all those limited resources moving students at the top of the basic classification to the proficient classification, so it looks like the school is making huge strides. The sad thing is that the students who are the farthest behind, that need the most help are having the resources diverted from them.
