NCLB innumeracy
The controversy spawned by the AP article about supposed NCLB loophole appears to have legs. How unfortunate. Over on the Eduwonk blog, guest blogger Dianne Piche reports on a House Education & Workforce Committee hearing about the controversy in her article, Size Does Matter.
I'm dumbfounded. No one gets it. And it is not that hard to grasp. Is simple numeracy too much to ask?
If you try and track progress of statistically insignificant ethnic subgroups, you will harm kids and schools based on meaningless observations. Worse, the whole arrangement penalizes diversity and rewards segregation.
I'm sure there are cases where states are setting the threshold too high, and that some statistically significant subgroups are not being tracked that could be. Fine. It's a simple regulatory problem that can be fixed—preferably by actuaries or other social scientists with a background in statistics. Clearly that is not what will come from Congressional hearings and clueless reporting in the press.
Those who would portray this as a civil rights issue should pause and consider the whole picture. Holding schools responsible for the progress of all children is, of course, a good idea. But regulations that reward segregation are outlandish. Regulations that punish schools arbitrarily on the basis of statistically insignificant aberrations is utterly unjust and cannot be justified.
I'm dumbfounded. No one gets it. And it is not that hard to grasp. Is simple numeracy too much to ask?
If you try and track progress of statistically insignificant ethnic subgroups, you will harm kids and schools based on meaningless observations. Worse, the whole arrangement penalizes diversity and rewards segregation.
I'm sure there are cases where states are setting the threshold too high, and that some statistically significant subgroups are not being tracked that could be. Fine. It's a simple regulatory problem that can be fixed—preferably by actuaries or other social scientists with a background in statistics. Clearly that is not what will come from Congressional hearings and clueless reporting in the press.
Those who would portray this as a civil rights issue should pause and consider the whole picture. Holding schools responsible for the progress of all children is, of course, a good idea. But regulations that reward segregation are outlandish. Regulations that punish schools arbitrarily on the basis of statistically insignificant aberrations is utterly unjust and cannot be justified.
4 Comments:
KC, the piece I think you're missing here is how high or low school districts are setting the bar for whose achievement gets counted and whose does not. Children with disabilities are the prime example of this: they are a small percentage of most school populations and even if a child with a disability participates in testing, his or her scores will probably not count. In many cases, this might be appropriate; and yet there are numerous situations where a child falls victim to a cycle of low expectations and no one ever really looks at whether that child could have achieved at a higher level with different teaching methods or curricula. Until NCLB, the burden of making districts accountable for the achievement of children with disabilities largely fell to individual parents. What I hope will happen now is that districts will take a look at WHY achievement levels might be lower among students with disabilities - is it the inherent capacity of those students or is it low expectations & ineffective teaching? But that will only happen if those scores are made to count.
OK, so we want NCLB to force districts to pay attention to the progress of every child. Penalizing individual schools for statistically meaningless variability is not the way to do that. Creating a regulatory framework that substantially rewards segregation is completely unacceptable.
One idea that comes to mind would be to track sub-group progress at the district level as well as the school site level. Schools may have only a handful of students in a sub-group -- such as disabled students -- but the district as a whole would have enough students to track. That way very few students would "fall through the cracks", and there would still be responsible educators close enough to the students to take responsibility for their well being.
Tracking sub-group progress at the district level is what they used to do and it didn't help matters and didn't make any difference. Don't you get it? Nothing will change unless it does have a negative impact on the schools if it is not remedied. Something radical must be done; something must at last FORCE districts to PAY ATTENTION to what is happening. SFUSD is failing to educate African American students -- 80% of them (yup - 4 out of 5) fail to score at proficient or above on Math and English tests ... that statistic may be "meaningless" to you, but it is sure alarming to many others who actually care.
I agree with Rachel, the bar has been set so low for some kids -- we have to raise that bar -- instead of just muttering: "those kids can't learn and I don't want their scores making my kids school look bad", which is what your are saying, in subtext.
I am not saying that "those kids can't learn", not at all. I'm saying that you can not measure progress reliably for small cohorts of kids. Basing high stakes determinations of "adequate progress" on unsound data will lead to unsound and unjust results.
You say "Tracking sub-group progress at the district level is what they used to do" but were they held accountable for their progress? Were the stakes really as high as they are under NCLB? I doubt it.
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