Westchester Schools Confronting Proficiency Demands
By JOSEPH BERGER, NY TIMES, March 23, 2008

IT looms in the distance, a goal meant to challenge the nation’s schools to reach ever higher.

It is 2014, the year the country’s schoolchildren must all reach proficiency in reading, writing and mathematics under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. (Click here for ED.gov., and here for Accountability data -Ed.)

But many school officials around the region are wondering how many more strides they can make in six years toward what some see as an unattainable goal.

Their options to make improvements, they predict, will narrow as 2014 draws closer, particularly since the target of 100 percent proficiency must also be reached by students who have proven particularly challenging — students from impoverished homes, students with learning disabilities and new immigrants.

Take Howard W. Smith, the superintendent of the schools within the Villages of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, a district on the east bank of the Hudson River, where Latino immigrants or children of immigrants make up half the 2,600 students.

He said he is pleased that five of his district’s six schools have made what No Child Left Behind deems “adequate yearly progress” toward proficiency, the one exception being a middle school that fell one or two students short of meeting the requirement for testing 95 percent of students.

But he knows that his principals and teachers have already doubled the time devoted to reading and mathematics, lengthened the school day by 15 minutes and are concentrating on English and math skills.

He wonders what else he can do to turn 100 percent of his students proficient.

“We can pick up a few extra kids each year, but statistically what’s going to happen is that those opportunities to capture more students will diminish,” he said. “Unless you’re at 100 percent, every school will fall short eventually.”

On Long Island, John R. Williams, the new superintendent in Amityville, said that two of his five schools failed to make adequate progress only because special education students and students categorized as English language learners did not meet their targets. Nearly one in five students in Amityville takes special education classes, almost 30 percent are Latino and 60 percent of students qualify for free or low-price lunches.

“I can’t imagine for the life of me how by 2014 we’re going to have 100 percent of our students making adequate yearly progress,” Dr. Williams said.

While he applauds the law for forcing schools to narrow the so-called achievement gap between whites on the one hand and blacks and Latinos on the other, he faults it for “holding all districts accountable by the same yardstick regardless of the makeup of the population.”

“We’ve known forever that people who come out of homes rich in reading materials and with highly educated parents who expose them to all kinds of opportunities generally do much better in school,” he said.

Dr. Williams also said that the law’s requirement that 95 percent of students be tested at the same time every year ignores the fact that in districts like his, where many families spend a large part of the year visiting home countries in Latin America, students miss the test. That means that a school can fail no matter how well or poorly students who take the test do.

Penalties for persistently failing to make progress get tougher each year, and include curriculum revisions, changes in staffing, reorganizing of schools and loss of federal financing.

Of course, the federal government will not shut down most of the nation’s schools in 2014, so some educators look at the 100 percent proficiency target as less of an absolute and more of a goal to prod schools to do better. Indeed, on Tuesday, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, tacitly acknowledging the problem, announced a program to give up to 10 states permission to focus their remedies mostly on schools that are drastically underperforming as a whole rather than those that are struggling with one group of students, like the learning disabled.

Yet Dr. Smith, Dr. Williams and Betty J. Sternberg, the school superintendent of Greenwich, Conn., worry that No Child Left Behind is also transforming instruction for all students in ways that are not always good.

Far more time is being spent on test preparation. Classic elements of the school day like art, music and shop are shrinking. Dr. Sternberg goes even further, saying that science and history instruction have also been squeezed. Two of 15 schools in Greenwich — which has a sizable poor population despite its reputation as one of America’s richest towns — failed to meet the adequate yearly progress standards for the 2006-7 school year.

“If you believe in a comprehensive education, this has been a detriment to that,” Dr. Sternberg said. “More importantly, if you believe that the kids’ needs in the 21st century involve innovation, creativity, collaboration, problem solving, critical thinking — but the way you judge schools is to judge them solely by a narrow set of skills that are not ‘higher order,’ if you will — I believe this law only hurts.”

In New Jersey, 618 schools — about one in four — did not make adequate progress. In Connecticut, 315 schools, or about a third, failed to do so. On Long Island, 45 schools, or about 7 percent, did not meet the progress standards; in Westchester, 31 schools, or 12 percent, failed.

Sometimes they fell short because the school as a whole did not have enough students reaching proficiency in either reading, math or both, or sometimes it was because subgroups like blacks or so-called English language learners did not meet their improvement targets. The middle school in Scarsdale, one of the state’s highest achieving middle schools, was essentially blacklisted because fewer than 95 percent of the students took the tests.

Lucille E. Davy, New Jersey’s education commissioner since 2006, defended the law’s general thrust and New Jersey’s response. All the state’s 1.4 million schoolchildren, she said, should be proficient in reading and math when they leave high school.

“That’s our obligation as educators,” she said. “I think we’re on a pathway to making all children proficient.”

What is clear from talking to school officials and educational experts is that the law has given the federal government far more power in dictating the nature of the school experience and given states far less leeway.

“The law has involved the federal government in commandeering to a large extent the educational program, which by the Constitution is a state right,” complained Alfred S. Posamentier, dean of the education school at the City College of New York. “When you find out you lose money by not conforming to the federal guidelines, the trickle-down is that teachers end up teaching to the test.”

New Jersey Data
New York Data

March 23, 2008
On Education
Long Island Schools Confronting Proficiency Demands
By JOSEPH BERGER, NY TIMES

IT looms in the distance, a goal meant to challenge the nation’s schools to reach ever higher.

It is 2014, the year the nation’s schoolchildren must all reach proficiency in reading, writing and mathematics under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. But many school officials around the region are wondering how many more strides they can make in six years toward what some see as an unattainable goal.

Their options to make improvements, they predict, will narrow as 2014 draws closer, particularly since the target of 100 percent proficiency must also be reached by students who have proven particularly challenging — students from impoverished homes, students with learning disabilities and new immigrants.

On Long Island, John R. Williams, the new superintendent in Amityville, said that two of his five schools failed to make adequate progress only because special education students and students categorized as English language learners did not meet their targets. Nearly one in five students in Amityville takes special education classes, almost 30 percent are Latino and 60 percent of students qualify for free or low-price lunches.

“I can’t imagine for the life of me how by 2014 we’re going to have 100 percent of our students making adequate yearly progress,” Dr. Williams said.

While he applauds the law for forcing schools to narrow the so-called achievement gap between whites on the one hand and blacks and Latinos on the other, he faults it for “holding all districts accountable by the same yardstick regardless of the makeup of the population.”

“We’ve known forever that people who come out of homes rich in reading materials and with highly educated parents who expose them to all kinds of opportunities generally do much better in school,” he said.

Dr. Williams also said that the law’s requirement that 95 percent of students be tested at the same time every year ignores the fact that in districts like his, where many families spend a large part of the year visiting home countries in Latin America, students miss the test. That means that a school can fail no matter how well or poorly students who take the test do.

Howard W. Smith is superintendent of the schools within the Villages of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, a district on the east bank of the Hudson River in Westchester County where Latino immigrants or children of immigrants make up half the 2,600 students. He is pleased that five of his district’s six schools have made what No Child Left Behind deems “adequate yearly progress” toward proficiency, the one exception being a middle school that fell one or two students short of meeting the requirement for testing 95 percent of students.

But he knows that his principals and teachers have already doubled the time devoted to reading and mathematics, lengthened the school day by 15 minutes and are concentrating on English and math skills. He wonders what else he can do to turn 100 percent of his students proficient.


“We can pick up a few extra kids each year, but statistically what’s going to happen is that those opportunities to capture more students will diminish,” he said.

Penalties for persistently failing to make progress get tougher each year, and include curriculum revisions, changes in staffing, reorganizing of schools and loss of federal financing.

Of course, the federal government will not shut down most of the nation’s schools in 2014, so some educators look at the 100 percent proficiency target as less of an absolute and more of a goal intended to prod schools to do better. Indeed, on Tuesday, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, tacitly acknowledging the problem, announced a program to give up to 10 states permission to focus their remedies mostly on schools that are drastically underperforming as a whole rather than those that are struggling with one group of students, like the learning disabled.

Yet Dr. Smith, Dr. Williams and Betty J. Sternberg, the school superintendent of Greenwich, Conn., worry that No Child Left Behind is also transforming instruction for all students in ways that are not always good.

Far more time is being spent on test preparation. Classic elements of the school day like art, music and shop are shrinking. Dr. Sternberg goes even further, saying that science and history instruction have also been squeezed. Two of 15 schools in Greenwich — which has a sizable poor population despite its reputation as one of America’s richest towns — failed to meet the adequate yearly progress standards for the 2006-7 school year.

“If you believe in a comprehensive education, this has been a detriment to that,” Dr. Sternberg said. “More importantly, if you believe that the kids’ needs in the 21st century involve innovation, creativity, collaboration, problem solving, critical thinking — but the way you judge schools is to judge them solely by a narrow set of skills that are not ‘higher order,’ if you will — I believe this law only hurts.”

In New Jersey, 618 schools — about one in four — did not make adequate progress. In Connecticut, 315 schools, or about a third, failed to do so. On Long Island, 45 schools, or about 7 percent, did not meet the progress standards; in Westchester, 31 schools, or 12 percent, failed.

Sometimes they fell short because the school as a whole did not have enough students reaching proficiency in either reading, math or both, or sometimes it was because subgroups like blacks or so-called English language learners did not meet their improvement targets. The middle school in Scarsdale, one of the state’s highest achieving middle schools, was essentially blacklisted because fewer than 95 percent of the students took the tests.

What is clear from talking to school officials and educational experts is that the law has given the federal government far more power in dictating the nature of the school experience and given states far less leeway.

“The law has involved the federal government in commandeering to a large extent the educational program, which by the Constitution is a state right,” complained Alfred S. Posamentier, dean of the education school at the City College of New York.

SUN EDITORIAL:

Not far enough
Pilot program to reform ‘No Child Left Behind’ law should be extended to all states
Las Vegas Sun, Mar 23, 2008 (2:07 a.m.)

The Bush administration has announced it will ease the requirements of its No Child Left Behind law for a handful of states in a pilot project that officials say should help reverse a weakness in the law that has resulted in 10 percent of the nation’s schools being classified as failing.

Last week Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said her department will give up to 10 states the leeway to concentrate on improving schools that are struggling the most while focusing less on schools that are raising standardized test scores for all but one group of students, The New York Times reports.

Under the No Child Left Behind law that President Bush signed in 2002, all students are to be proficient in math and reading by 2014. Schools have to demonstrate specified incremental improvements in standardized test scores across all segments of their student populations — even among groups of students who have learning disabilities or don’t speak English.

As a result, about 9,000 of the nation’s 90,000 public schools have been deemed as failing, which means they could face sanctions that include cuts in federal funding or even closure, the Times said.

Under the pilot program, schools that have missed target scores for only one demographic group of students will not face sanctions, allowing states to focus on improving the schools in which significant numbers of students are failing.

To qualify for the program, states must have untarnished records of following the No Child Left Behind law. Nevada’s standardized assessment method remains under federal scrutiny until next year, so it does not qualify.

The plan illustrates that even the Bush administration has been forced to acknowledge the stunning failure of this law, which has made standardized test scores more important than educating children to be well-rounded critical thinkers.

While the pilot program can be viewed as a small step in the right direction, we think it is too small. This reform should be extended to all of the nation’s public schools as a first step toward repealing what is a bad law.