President Obama NCLB Reform
I was very interested to watch the President’s speech when I got home. My daughter was sleepy and settled in on my chest. We got about 10 minutes in and then I was asleep. Ok-attempt 2.
At first I thought it was the baby pheromones that caused my drowsiness. Turns out it was the lack of substance in the speech. You can watch the 27 minutes if you like, but I’ll get to what I thought the meat of it was right here.
Most interesting part for me: Race to the Top costs less than 1 percent of the Federal Education budget and but has led 40 states to change their approach to education. [Seems to me to be a sign of the desperation for funds that public schools were facing during the recession]. Ok, the most interesting part. The Obama administration is going to open up the money and let local school districts apply. This is very interesting. We know that much of RTT is about teacher evaluation (including using test scores as part of evaluations). It will be fascinating to see what individual districts do.
The speech itself didn’t have a lot of meat to it. For that, you need to turn to the White House Fact Sheet released this morning. Some selected parts:
By focusing on teacher effectiveness and driving reforms based in part on evidence of student learning and achievement, this plan will place a greater focus on helping a greater share of teachers excel while rewarding those that are most successful in the classroom. The President’s plan provides resources to back the development of teacher evaluation systems that use student learning and other measures to support and identify good teaching…
NCLB Status Quo: Teachers and principals don’t get credit for improving student scores.
The Obama Plan:Replace the current pass-fail school grading system with a system that rewards teachers, principals and schools for showing they’ve helped students improve and doesn’t just judge them for how students did on one test on one day.
Basically, this is saying that teacher evaluation and possibly some form of compensation “while rewarding those that are most successful in the classroom” will be tied to student test scores. How else would you evaluate student learning? You’re not going to ask the teacher, especially if their pay is connected to it. Not saying that I or any teachers I know would be dishonest, but I studied game theory and that’s a situation where you’re just begging the actor to cheat.
So we’re back to the test. During the speech the President said:
Now, I want to speak to teachers in particular here. I’m not talking about more tests. I’m not talking about teaching to the test. We don’t need to know whether a student can fill out a bubble. We do need to know whether they’re making progress. We do need to know whether they’re not only mastering reading, math, and science, but also developing the kinds of skills, like critical thinking and creativity and collaboration that I just saw on display with the students that I met here.
Ok, so the bubble isn’t the way the president wants to evaluate students, and he wants to go beyond reading and math (yay!). So what to replace the simple bubble test with. By the way, in Oregon we don’t fill in a bubble, we click on it 
NCLB Status Quo: Rely on unsophisticated bubble tests to grade students and schools.
The Obama Plan:Support better tests. The Obama Administration has invested $350 million to support states in their efforts to create more sophisticated assessment systems that measure problem solving and other 21st century skills and that will provide teachers will timely information to help them improve instruction.
Can someone find a link to a developed and field tested example of this? I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, I am genuinely curious how a standardized test can be created, administered, and quickly scored for a states’ worth of children. I see that New Mexico wants a new test, but no details yet.
How can we adequately determine a student’s problem solving without talking to the student, or reading every step they took to solve a problem (or something like that)? Further, these problems can’t just be math, because we are going beyond math and reading to real world problems? Remember that the tests must be administered for several years, across an entire state, and scored quickly. And, and…it has to be cost effective. In Oregon, to score writing samples, it takes teams of teachers all of spring break. How are we going to afford or logistically implement real authentic assessment on a large scale?
In the end, I wasn’t expecting a lot out of the speech, but I had hoped to see some real details. Something I could really think about. I walked away with “We need to improve education by helping teachers do better, not just focusing on the test, and making sure all students succeed.” This has been said for years. Fine, but where are the new ideas?
