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This spring, in HGSE's Learning Technologies Center, faculty member Robert Schwartz moderated a videoconference about the future of No Child Left Behind with five national leaders in education. To that conversation, several HGSE faculty members now add their voices with the commentaries that follow: Paul Reville: Richard Elmore: It is clear that localities are under-investing in professional development for teachers and administrations and in the development of new pedagogical and administrative practices associated with school improvement. Why? Local school systems have to run schools. Their focus is primarily on getting new knowledge into classrooms, not on the development of new knowledge, the benefits of which accrue to everyone, not just themselves. States are generally weak players in accountability and improvement because they are removed from the immediate demands of making schools work. Their comparative advantage is to sustain and develop knowledge about how accountability systems can be made to serve the purposes of school improvement. The political discipline required to keep policymakers focused on sustaining continuous improvement in accountability systems is more than enough for states to focus on. At the national level, as most industrialized countries discovered after World War II, the compelling interest is keeping the country focused on the development of human talent. Since the benefits of large-scale investments in human talent accrue powerfully to society as a whole, and are not necessarily visible to individual parents, students, local or state officials, it is important for the national government to keep policy focused on this level of aggregation. A human investment strategy for education would have an explicit strategic focus: to increase access of all students, particularly low-income, minority students, to high-level academic work, and to invest in the human capital infrastructure for schools that will promote this access. Susan Moore Johnson: In an effort to ensure that their students will succeed and that their schools will meet AYP goals, many teachers spend virtually all their instructional time on literacy and mathematics, with little attention to science and social studies. Teachers in many schools, particularly those in low-income communities, are required to used scripted curricula and to comply with lock-step pacing guides, monitored closely so that all tested topics are covered. Teachers must spend precious instructional time on test preparation, despite their conviction that many of the standardized tests they administer inadequately assess what their students know. Increasingly, new teachers who leave the classroom report that they are disillusioned with the prospects of accountability for their students and for them. The purposes of NCLB are worthy, but as it is currently being implemented, the law is having unintended negative consequences for students, their teachers, and the future of public schooling. Dan Koretz: We should continue to hold educators accountable for results, and we should continue to insist that they work to raise the performance of all students, especially those in historically low-scoring groups. Personally, I think we should also continue to give options to students who would otherwise be trapped in failing schools. The devil is in the details, however, and many of the details of NCLB are unreasonable and even pernicious. Arbitrary, uniform, and inflexible performance targets such as those set in NCLB are impractical and counterproductive. Instead, targets should be based on evidence and should reflect the circumstances of individual students and schools. The AYP mechanism is fundamentally flawed. Given both the inconsistent path of educational improvement and the many sources of instability in school performance, we should be looking for gradual improvements over the moderate term, not incessant gains in scores. Most fundamentally, accountability systems that focus entirely or almost entirely on scores on a single test simply don't work well. They tend to backfire because they create incentives to raise scores by many undesirable means, such as reducing time allocated to untested subjects and devoting time to various types of inappropriate test preparation. We know what the result is: misleading and sometimes outright fraudulent gains that create an illusion of progress but leave kids behind. If we really want not to leave kids behind, we have to institute more complex accountability systems that combine multiple measures and use both scores and expert judgment. And for both practical and ethical reasons, we need to monitor these accountability systems to minimize unintended negative consequences and make midcourse corrections. We know how to do that; we simply need the political will. For More Information About the Responses
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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