Playing Devil’s Advocate with NCLB
There are a lot of NCLB critics. This is understandable as the penalties threatened are very real and teaching is not always a 2+2=4 profession. Each student presents a different learning style and ability; blanket standards are not always fair and blind. I still do not know how I feel about this issue. I’m sure when I am actually teaching and the test affects my curriculum I will care very deeply. If high stakes testing is the most evil thing to hit education since ‘do all the odd numbered problems’ worksheets I will just have to try my best to present the material in an interesting and student engaged way. From all the rhetoric about the evils of NCLB I thought there were no positives. This article from the Detroit News shocked me.
For despite its bureaucratic faults — many of which have been protested on this page — No Child is showing real achievement gains, even in low-income schools where longstanding school quality problems have confounded decades of federal administrations. Now, the act should help provide schools with the best methods on how to improve, not simply expand funding.
Even in Detroit, where barriers to learning such as poverty are enormous, the achievement gap is closing, new research shows. Michigan State University experts are still assessing the new MEAP results, but already they see that pupil achievement is improving.
Detroit’s surprising good news mirrors national improvements in elementary student achievement. No Child cannot take credit for all the gains, but even critics give partial credit to the law.
I would prefer more statistics backing up the claims of improvement, but the claims still have been made. Could NCLB actually help improve inner-city elementary schools? And if it does, could the improvement follow the students up through middle and secondary schools? I will look furthur into this.
One item from this article which does worry me is the “surprising good news”. Academic improvements should not be a surprise. What is expected of our schools or teachers if improvement is a surprise? I would hope that failing schools would be more of a surprise.
**I can’t completely cite this article; it is no longer available online
m7pm said,
February 1, 2007 at 12:35 am
I hope you have looked further into the claims that student achievement has gone up, because I have a sneaking suspicion that the way they are measuring achievement may not really reflect actual reading ability. I can drill rules and processes into a group of students and help them pass any test the NCLB act would use to ascertain its positive results, but they would (probably) pass it with, at most, a limited understanding of what they were doing. Successful reading requires so much understanding, metacognitive and otherwise, that a standard test format could not possibly measure a student’s true reading abilities.
I would like to get a better look at the layout of the tests the NCLB uses to measure performance, but as of right now I don’t believe that the improvements reported are necessarily true improvements in reading.