By John Hechinger, Molly Peterson and Oliver Staley
March 15 (Bloomberg) -- The first U.S.-wide set of academic standards for schoolchildren may be adopted by half of all states this year, while President Barack Obama presses to overhaul the main law designed to hold accountable 100,000 public schools for their students’ achievement.
Obama is scheduled today to present to Congress a blueprint for transforming the No Child Left Behind law, which uses testing to gauge student achievement, into a measure that would offer schools more flexibility in demonstrating academic progress. Governors and chief schools officers on March 10 proposed specific grade-level requirements for reading, writing and math.
The twin initiatives may transform U.S. education with a common goal of prodding schools to produce more graduates ready for college-level work, Dane Linn, director of education for the National Governors Association said in an interview yesterday.
The common standards and Obama’s proposals together represent “a fundamental shift in the way we think about school reform,” Linn said.
No Child Left Behind, the signature education legislation of George W. Bush, mandates that all children be proficient in reading and math by 2014 while leaving the definition of proficiency up to individual states.
The law, enacted in 2002, requires states to measure student gains through standardized tests. While states may set their own standards to determine what constitutes an adequate education, they lose some federal funds if they don’t show yearly progress toward those goals.
Lowering Standards
Most states made their academic benchmarks easier so kids would pass state tests, said Chester E. Finn Jr., who served as an assistant secretary in the Education Department under President Ronald Reagan.
No Child Left Behind created “perverse incentives” for states to lower academic standards to meet federal progress benchmarks, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a telephone briefing on March 12. The new plan is designed to reward schools for improving student achievement and use multiple measures to show progress, he said. It would drop the 2014 proficiency deadline and focus on Obama’s goal of preparing more students for college-level work by 2020.
“We’ve got to get accountability right this time,” Duncan said. “We’re much more interested in absolute gains than in test scores.”
Competitive Grants
The proposal would fund the overhauled law at $28 billion in fiscal 2011, which is $3 billion more than states, districts and schools received this year under No Child Left Behind, according to an Education Department summary. It includes $7.8 billion in competitive grants for states that embrace Obama’s priorities.
The Obama plan would let schools be judged on subjects other than reading and math, responding to criticism that the law narrowed what is taught in schools. It would also eliminate labeling schools under a rigid pass-fail system that deemed one in three schools as failing. Instead, the law would require action to turn around the lowest-performing schools, the bottom 5 percent, and offer financial rewards to the best performers.
The Obama administration risks a backlash by linking the award of federal grant money to the meeting of common standards at a time when Republicans have already accused the Obama administration of attempting a federal takeover of the health- care system, Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington-based nonprofit research group, said in an interview. Standards still have significant Republican support, especially among state officials, Jennings said.
Avoid Dictating
“The federal government has to be supportive of the movement without appearing to dictate the movement,” Jennings said.
U.S. Representative John Kline of Minnesota, the senior Republican on the House education and labor committee, said he objects to the federal government’s using the lure of money to convince states to adopt common standards.
“If the federal government is going to insist that the states adopt these standards, then the federal government is using coercion, and will move inevitably to a national curriculum,” Kline said in an interview.
In a meeting earlier this month, Kline told Duncan that he would object to including any requirements of national standards into the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Schools Act, which includes the No Child Left Behind provisions. The Education Department declined to comment.
Voluntary Standards
Linn said the standards were voluntary, did not require a specific curriculum and the states were free to come up with their own ways to teach.
Obama’s proposal to change No Child Left Behind built on Bush administration accomplishments, including programs that gave teachers credit for progress in the classroom, Margaret Spellings, Duncan’s predecessor as education secretary, said in an e-mail. She said she disagrees with Obama’s scrapping of provisions that provided free tutoring and the chance for families to switch their children out of low-performing schools.
The proposal also wouldn’t hold schools accountable for the progress of poor, minority and disabled students over the next several years, Spellings said. Under the current law, schools can be deemed failing if any of these groups at a school isn’t considered proficient.
“No Child Left Behind’s greatest accomplishment was its focus on these students and the corresponding increases in student achievement in reading and math,” Spellings said. “We cannot backtrack on this progress.”
Unions’ Disappointment
Both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, which together represent about 4.6 million educators, expressed disappointment with Obama’s No Child Left Behind overhaul.
Obama’s proposal places “100 percent of the responsibility on teachers and gives them zero percent authority,” Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT, said in a statement.
“For a law affecting millions of schoolchildren and their teachers, it doesn’t make sense to have teachers -- and teachers alone -- bear the responsibility for school and student success,” Weingarten said.
The union said it can’t support Obama’s plan “at this time,” in part because the proposal still relies on standardized tests and requires states to compete for limited resources. The NEA sees “too much scapegoating of teachers and not enough collaboration,” in Obama’s revised plan, said Dennis Van Roekel, president of the association in a statement.
Specific Requirements
Putting more pressure on teachers, the standards developed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, both based in Washington, have specific grade-level requirements for reading, writing and math that replace the hodgepodge of curriculum approaches in different states.
States that agree to adopt a set of common standards also improve their chances of winning federal education grants in this year’s $4.35 billion Race to the Top competition. The fund rewards states for finding ways to recruit better teachers, collect data on student performance and fix failing schools.
Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Maine and Kentucky are likely to be among the first wave of states to sign onto the common benchmarks for math and English developed by the nation’s governors and state school superintendents, Linn said.
State governing bodies for education, usually school boards, can decide whether to adopt the standards. While Florida has committed to approving the proposed benchmarks this year, providing the necessary course materials, textbooks and training will take four years, Mary Jane Tappen, Florida’s deputy chancellor for curriculum, said in an interview.
‘Little Women’
The proposed common standards call for kindergartners to read at least 25 basic words. By middle school, they should understand Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” and Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” By high school, they should comprehend works by William Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson.
In math, first- and second-grade students should master addition and subtraction and third- and fourth-graders should learn multiplication, division and fractions. Eighth graders are expected to solve algebra problems.
Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia participated in drafting the proposed common core standards. The final set is scheduled to be available in May after a period of public comment.
New York plans to adopt the standards by August, after approval by its Board of Regents, said Anne Schiano, assistant director of curriculum instruction for the state education department, based in Albany. Implementing the guidelines will require training 250,000 teachers who work with 2.75 million students, Schiano said.
“This is all about preparing students for 21st-century skills,” Schiano said. “That’s the business we’re in. We can’t afford not to change our standards. This is our future.”
Massachusetts, which has been cited in many studies as having among the toughest state standards, will be examining the quality of the benchmarks to make sure they are as rigorous as the state’s own guidelines, Paul Reville, the state’s secretary of education, said in an interview.
To contact the reporter on this story: John Hechinger in Boston at jhechinger@bloomberg.net; Molly Peterson in Washington at mpeterson9@bloomberg.net; Oliver Staley in New York at ostaley@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: March 15, 2010 00:00 EDT
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aF9wi8wsYgT0
