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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Friday, August 19, 2005

No Child numbers are simply a tool
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Today's paper contains news that undoubtedly will upset families who have children in some two-thirds of the public schools in the state.

Their schools have failed to hit the mark, determined by state standards and federal law, of "adequate yearly progress" toward certain educational goals.

Like it or not, this translates into a conclusion that these schools are "failing" to do what is expected of them. By any measurement, that is an unhealthy and off-center view of what is actually happening.

What the results actually tell us is that these schools have failed to meet, often in small or ironically irrelevant ways, high-standards goals.

So, the numbers place a laser spotlight on those areas and those schools where improvement and extra help is needed.

The issue is not setting high standards and then measuring where and how we have met those standards. Rather, the issue is what happens next.

Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, the federal statute that drives this high-stakes testing and measuring, a series of fairly fixed sanctions and actions follow when a school misses its goals.

The ultimate sanction is takeover by the state or by another entity. As we have already seen, this "takeover" process can involve bringing in private companies as consultants.

Nothing wrong with that on the surface. But it can, and some fear will, lead to privatization of public schools and/or a voucher system that will allow parents to escape public schools altogether.

Imagine the social consequences of that: Our public schools will be left to educate the least successful and often least-motivated among our young while the rest will have fled.

That is not No Child Left Behind. That is abandonment.

The fixes are rather simple:

  • When a school misses the mark, give it the resources and help it needs to achieve its goals. But allow on-the-ground educators a full opportunity to tailor changes to meet the needs and expectations of that individual school as they see it.

  • Create more flexibility in measuring "success." That is, is it necessary to restructure an entire school because one sub-group fails to meet a particular goal?

  • Recognize that goals are just that: goals. And tests are simply a tool to measure progress toward a goal.

    The task of education is difficult. It is right we have high expectations (and the state should resist any effort to lower them in an effort to achieve greater success). It is useful to have measuring sticks.

    But the goal is not to dismantle public education or make it into something it is not. The goal is to succeed, and the measurement process guided by No Child should be nothing more than a tool used to achieve that goal.