The Marshall Democrat-News (MO) picks up on a recent report by the Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) that suggests problems with NCLB, and reprints arguments from the AP that support the study. Not having read the study myself, I'll just link to Secretary of Education Rod Paige's strongly-worded response to the study, here, which suggests a deeply-flawed methodology and results that aren't quite what PACE claims they are.
(Update: It appears now that not only was the study mistakenly attributed to PACE, but the organization is actively trying to distance themselves from the study. Interesting. )
I'll try to do a more in-depth analysis of this controversy later. Right now, I just want to nitpick by selecting this one passage from the news article:
Another major flaw of NCLB is the emphasis placed on standardized tests to measure performance.
In many school districts across the state (especially those with poor performance records), an entire month is spent on nothing more than preparation for a test taking no more than five days -- and generally only three. This is valuable time that could be spent teaching equations, atoms, or World War I, but is wasted preparing for something for which students attach very little value.
Many states have scaled back ambitious tests, reverting to the commonplace Iowa Basic Skills test to evaluate proficiency in basic ability. Nevertheless, wasting an entire month on instruction to pass a test is ridiculous, but schools are forced to do so in the face of lost funding.
Think about this for a minute. Basic reading and math skills are something to which students "attach very little value." Schools are "forced" to spend weeks on teaching these very basic skills. It's a "time-waster" for students to be able to pass the "commonplace" IBST, much less more ambitious tests. Schools should be free to focus on history, equations, and physics without first ensuring that they are giving all of their students a solid grasp of the basics.
Do these critics hear themselves?
Some of these critics might say that what this really means is that the skills tested are so basic it wastes students' time to prepare for the test. But if students really have the basics down cold, schools should have to spend virtually no time on test prep. While I agree that many tests are not perfect, and it's bad to have a test that is completely out of sync with the curriculum, it's just plain to silly to complain about how much time schools are forced to spend going over basic skills, and then say the problem is with the tests.
Posted by kswygert at October 11, 2004 04:13 PM