From No Child Left Behind to Common Core: Going from Bad to Worse

During the last federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) reform, we heard complaints that NCLB was an attack on Schools.  Why?  Because of the punitive measures placed upon schools when students did not perform well on standardized assessments.  Now we are starting to hear how the Common Core Initiative is an attack on teachers.

Under NCLB schools were judged and funding was tied to, Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).  States set academic standards and administered standardized assessments to gage how well students were performing.  

Threaten a school by withholding funds and you have what many considered, an attack on schools.  In this case the “attack” would be the punitive withholding of funds.

When the Common Core “Initiative” was rolled out, the reformers praised themselves for ending the era of punishing schools for low proficiency scores.  No longer would schools have to worry about the loss of funding.  Instead the U.S. Department of education under President Obama decided to target not only students and schools, but also teachers.

States updated laws that specifically mandated that teacher evaluations must be based on a student performance. How does one measure  performance or student progress?  This will now be done by analyzing student assessment scores.  This is called: Value Added Modeling (VAM)

Proponents say, “Value added modeling is a way of analyzing student test scores to attribute a student’s progress to specific teachers.  This is a new discipline, still very much in development.  If it were a drug, it would be in the testing phase, pre-FDA certification.  But it is in use in a number of districts around the country….. VAM is part of the NH DOE model support and evaluation plan…”

Teacher evaluations based on this experiment are called VAM, which is now included in the NH Department of Education’s “model” policy for all public schools.  

Tying Teacher evaluations to student assessments is one of many mandates attached to federal funds and NCLB waivers. The NH Department of Education was required to promise that all public schools will develop these new teacher evaluations, even though the NH Constitution guarantees that districts may develop their own teacher evaluation policies.

With the U.S. DOE dangling a NCLB waiver and Race to the Top Grant money, state DOE’s did their best to qualify even if teachers became the new target.

There are many factors that play into how well a student performs on a standardized assessment.  To tie a teacher’s evaluation to assessment scores creates genuine concern.

At a recent Manchester School Board meeting, the Superintendent revealed “The Manchester Innovation Plan” to improve the academic performance of students based on the low proficiency scores.  The Manchester Innovation Plan is supposed to improve math proficiency but does nothing to address the math program that's being used in the district, Everyday Math.

This Innovation Plan costs $650k and mandates that 20% of teacher and principal evaluations will be based on student performance.  Taxpayers will now spend $650k on a "plan" that does not replace Everyday Math with a solid math program.

The NH Department of Education developed the New Hampshire Task Force On Effective Teaching.  This report, “exemplifies what the Task Force considers “best practices” in teacher evaluation. “

In the report they state:
1) As a condition of receiving federal School Improvement Grants (SIG) funds, the New Hampshire Department of Education and SIG school leaders agreed that SIG schools will align their educator evaluator systems with the State Model.

2) The recently granted waiver by the United States Department of Education (USED) to the New Hampshire Department of Education to certain provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) requires that all NH Title I schools implement an educator evaluation system aligned with the State Model System.  (page 5)

In other words, local schools receiving SIG or Title I funds must align their teacher evaluations to the State Model.   Note the lack of local control in that statement.

Further in the report it says,

3) The Task Force strongly recommends that all districts include the use of student learning results, including statewide standardized achievement results (NECAP and eventually Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium) in applicable subjects and grades (i.e., tested grades and subjects).  

4)The Task Force further recommends weighting each of the five categories of educator performance (four domains of practice plus student learning results) relatively equally in the overall evaluation and the NCLB waiver requires all Title I schools to weight 20 percent of educator evaluation determinations on evidence from student learning. For example, districts may want to focus their evaluations more on instructional practice than professional responsibility or content knowledge. While the Task Force recommends weighting each domain relatively equally it recognizes that the actual rating of any category, other than evidence from student learning for Title I schools, is a local decision.”
(page 7)

This is how the VAM will be used to evaluate teachers in schools that receive SIG or Title 1 Funds. 

This also explains why teachers and principals in Manchester will now have 20% of their evaluation based on student performance.  The Manchester Innovative Plan wasn’t developed locally.  It’s based on the State Model that was developed to meet the U.S. DOE’s agenda. 

Everyday Math has been one of the biggest contributors to math illiteracy in this country and instead of the local parents and district honestly evaluating the poor math performance based on fuzzy math in the district, the U.S. Department of Education is coercing the NH Department of Ed to mandate an “Innovation” plan that ignores the biggest contributor to the low performance in the district.  

When bureaucrats in Washington D.C. offer a solution to local problems in education, it’s easy to see how money can be wasted and who ultimately becomes the scapegoat: OUR TEACHERS.

Teachers often times do not have the autonomy to choose a real math program for their students and are also told what teaching methods (pedagogy) they must use.

Through grants from the Feds and from organizations like Nellie Mae, school administrators are also pushing pedagogy on teachers that have proven to lower academic achievement in mathematics.  (See the referenced materials at the end of this article)

Constructivism or inquiry learning is another fad that’s left many parents opting for private math tutors.  The method of expecting children to “inquire” or “discover” math content by telling teachers to facilitate in a student’s learning instead of instructing them, leaves many children frustrated and angry.  As one who has actually tutored children in math, I’ve heard from students who consider themselves “dumb or stupid” because they can’t figure out a complex math concept.  

It’s a great way to kill the love of learning and force parents to pay for private tutors.  

What about those who cannot afford private tutors?  This is where we see the dire consequences in the “achievement gap”.  Poor districts vs rich districts.   Parents who have the means to hire tutors will fill in the gaps.

Teachers who are forced to use these methods and failed programs are put in the position of trying to educate children when the cards are stacked against them.

What does the D.C. bureaucrats do to fix the problem they helped to create?  They decide to evaluate a teacher based on a student’s performance.

For teachers in wealthy districts where many parents can afford private tutors, teachers may escape some of the harsh and punitive consequences.  However teachers in the lower performing districts will most likely become the real casualties in this new reform effort.

The new national assessment, Smarter Balanced, has also been criticized for using questions that CPA’s had difficulty figuring out.   This might be why many  are calling the new standardized assessments, “a set up for failure”. 

Nashua’s State Representative and School Board Member, David Murotake submitted testimony to the Joint Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules.  In this testimony he explains the reactions from teachers in the Nashua School District after they administered the Smarter Balanced Assessment:

“Examples of Nashua teacher comments I heard include:
1. Shockingly negative experience. 
2. Totally grade level inappropriate; difficult even for some teachers with advanced degrees.
3. Seems the test was designed more as a psychological or sociological experiment, not as  a measure of academic learning. Who created this test, anyway? It couldn't have been by professional educators.
4. This would be a crushing emotional experience for my students.
5. It is nothing less than child abuse for my special ed students in my classroom.

 6. I refuse to administer thus test to my students.”

We have teachers working in a classroom with inferior math programs they often times do not choose.  Teachers are told to use Pedagogy that’s been proven to lower academic achievement and now they will be evaluated, in part, on an assessment that teachers have little or no confidence in administering to students.

Does anyone still wonder why the Common Core Initiative has been dubbed: An attack on Teachers?

To those who are frustrated with bad teachers I share your frustration.  However those who were so quick to get rid of No Child Left Behind, may not have understood the long lasting impact from this new reform effort.

When education reform is taken away from local communities and instead federally mandated via funding and bribery, there is not only a fear that nothing will really improve but that we’ll now lose some of our great teachers in the process.  Great teachers across the country are being labeled as “ineffective” and many are leaving the profession.   

With all of the lessons learned from the failures of No Child Left Behind, one would think legislators and bureaucrats would be slow to sign on to another “reform”.  Unfortunately that was not the case in most states.

Recently AFT President, Randi Weingarten tweeted that the VAM was a SHAM and referenced “Reliability and Inferences about Teachers Based On Student Test Scores". 

As the President of the Teachers Union there has been an effort to call attention to the numerous problems with this effort to teach to the standardized test and now we are starting to hear about the many problems with the VAM.

In a rush to abandon the failed NCLB reform effort, the New Hampshire Department of Education and Board of Education quickly adopted unproven and experimental reform initiatives.

Whether it be adopting Common Core Standards that are unproven and experimental or teachers being evaluated based on a new national assessment, it would be better for local communities to make sure that any new policies based on these reform efforts are evaluated and debated to insure that our students and teachers are set up for success.

Common Core is being sold as a way to improve upon the failures from No Child Left Behind, but as we begin to see the fall out from the Common Core Initiative, we continue to notice the top-down/Centralized reform effort may bring us even bigger problems as we continue to experiment not only on children but teachers too.

Ann Marie Banfield volunteers as the Education Liaison for Cornerstone Action (www.nhcornerstone.org)  She has been researching education for over a decade and has also volunteered as a math tutor for children struggling in mathematics.

http://www.cogtech.usc.edu/publications/kirschner_Sweller_Clark.pdf 

http://educationnext.org/eighth-grade-students-learn-more-through-direct-instruction/ 

http://www.jefflindsay.com/EducData.shtml