The National Journal took the pulse of congressional insiders asking them how likely certain pieces of legislation were to pass. Democrats put the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind at a 5.0 on a 10-point scale (10 being guaranteed to pass this Congress), while Republicans gave it a 3.7. Most interesting were a couple ad-hoc [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'NCLB'
First Take: $350m Assessment Competition Guidelines
Last week, the U.S. Department of Education released its initial overview of the competition process for the $350 million in stimulus funding set aside to improve student assessment (see Education Week’s helpful summary).
What We’ve Learned
It’s All About Accountability: Not surprising, but important to distinguish that ED’s plans are for assessments related to current NCLB mandates–reading [...]
Crossing the Assessment Innovation Chasm
The announcement of a new National Science Foundation grant to the University of Wisconsin to further develop a game-based science and math learning program, along with an associated assessment system, caught my eye. It’s the exact type of promising technology-enabled assessment system that I wrote about in “Beyond the Bubble.” It’s also a good opportunity [...]
Defining NCLB’s Value
Mike Petrilli and Tom Loveless take to the pages of the NY Times to argue, yet again, that No Child Left Behind has been harmful to gifted students. Their real critique is with a recent report that attempts to show, with state test trend lines, that NCLB has benefited both top and bottom students. That’s [...]
Willful Misunderstanding
Over at the National Journal’s group edu-bigwig blog, they’re debating the question “Are the Race To the Top Requirements Fair?” A lot of the discussion centers on the RTT requirement that states eliminate prohibitions against linking student test score data with individual teachers. Most of the bloggers are in favor of this, on the grounds [...]
Tale of Three Turnarounds
Turning around a low performing high school may be the most difficult task in K-12 education. This week Sec. Duncan has suggested that charter schools should play a critical role in the effort to turn around low performing schools. Perhaps this comparison will start to suggest why. There is a lot to learn about two [...]
Arts, Continued
Per Chad below, new results from the NAEP 8th grade Arts & Music test show very little change over time. So little change that’s it’s really kind of fascinating. In 1997, respondents got 42 percent of the art questions right. In 2008, they also got 42 percent of the questions right. Of the 12 listed [...]
New Report: NCLB Did Not Narrow Arts Curriculum
Under the headline, “Frequency of arts instruction remains steady, ” a new report from the National Assessment of Education Progress concluded:
In 2008, fifty-seven percent of eighth-graders attended schools where music instruction was offered at least three or four times a week, and 47 percent attended schools where visual arts instruction was offered at least as [...]
Think Positive
You get more flies with honey than vinegar. In Psychology 101 you learn that people are more responsive to positive reinforcement than negative reinforcement or punishment. While both positive incentives and punishment can be effective at modifying behavior, punishment tends to lead to other negative responses like anger and resentment. Yet, much of our current [...]
Civics 101
Jay Greene continues to fight the fight on vouchers:
the suggestion that DC vouchers were not democratically created because they affected DC and DC does not have a vote in Congress wouldn’t just call into question the legitimacy of DC vouchers. All federal laws affecting DC would be undemocratic by this standard. This would include NCLB [...]
Jay Greene’s Long Strange Voucher Trip
Jay Greene has published a long and weirdly incoherent response to this post on DC vouchers. Most of it I’m happy to let stand, but this (you have to run it through a negative de-sarcasticizer to find the meaning) deserves comment:
…vouchers aren’t really accountable because even though they were democratically created, subject to oversight and [...]
Why DC Vouchers Don’t Matter
President Obama wants to appropriate enough money to keep the DC voucher program going for the children currently enrolled. Good–this is the only ethical position to take. I know some Democrats in Congress wish the program had never been implemented, but that’s the price of losing elections. Dragging low-income and minority students out of their [...]
Reassurance Needed
In addition to fully funding NCLB, the stimulus bill includes a gargantuan $54 billion fiscal stabilization fund for education. In many ways this money is best understood as not education-related at all, but simply a politically palatable way for the federal government to prevent pro-cyclical state and local budget cuts that would accelerate the current [...]
Beyond the Bubble (cont.)
Below, Chad highlighted my new Education Sector report on technology and the future of student assessment. In the report, I show how technology can help to both deepen and broaden assessment practice–by assessing more comprehensively and by assessing new skills and concepts.
Beyond the Bubble, of course, refers to the multiple choice question types that dominate [...]
That’s Settled
The recently-enacted stimulus bill includes $13 billion in extra funding for Title I of the No Child Left Behind Act. Since Title I currently receives a little over $12 billion per year and the maximum amount authorized under the law is $25 billion, by my count NCLB is now “fully funded” and I assume those [...]
Duncan Puts Up a Three-Pointer
There’s a clear message emerging from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s early public pronouncements: He’s going to push for higher standards than most states have adopted under NCLB, and that may include national standards (and tests). In pushing the Obama administration’s stimulus priorities in a speech yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Council [...]
Darling-Hammond Unbound
Score one for the KAPPAN magazine. The edu-magazine has a very timely piece on school accountability in its just-mailed December issue by top Obama policy advisor Linda Darling-Hammond. Anonymous “reformers,” some of whom also have ties to the Obama administration-in-waiting, have been taking shots at the Stanford professor during the transition, in part because she [...]
100% or…What?
The 2014 target for 100% proficiency is one of the most vexing parts of the No Child Left Behind Act. On one hand, it seems absurd to suggest that every single student in America, all 49 million of of them, could pass a legitimate proficiency standard in both reading and math less than six years from [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/19/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on college graduation rates and the NCAA Tournament in the Detroit Free Press.
03/19/10 | Linda Perlstein links to Education Sector's "College- and Career-Ready" event.
03/17/10 | Ben Miller's column on graduation rates and NCAA Tournament eligibility is mentioned on The Wall Street Journal's The Daily Fix.
03/17/10 | Kevin Carey's critique of Diane Ravitch's latest book is quoted in Doublethink's Conventional Folly blog.
03/15/10 | Ben Miller pens an op-ed for US News & World Report on using graduation rates to determine NCAA Tournament eligibility.