The Challenge Continues: High Standards for All Students

by Beverly Breton Carroll and Hanna Bordas

Thirteen years ago, Massachusetts launched the Education Reform Act (ERA), a historic initiative to improve the state's public education. Based on a strategy known as standards-based reform, it set high standards for schools and students and defi ned a testing system-the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS)-to track progress toward those standards and give educators data methods to monitor performance. ERA represented one of the more dramatic state school reforms attempted in decades.

At the same time, states such as New York, North Carolina, and Texas were also taking a hard look at their students' achievement level and the possibilities standards-based reform offered. This movement was spurred by increasing concern from parents, colleges, and employers that the U.S. public school system was not turning out graduates suitably prepared for competition in an international high-tech economy.

The reform movement that began to gather speed was based on a standards and accountability theory for improving education based on three basic premises: First, define what students should learn; second, test what students have learned; and third, make the results count. In other words, set standards, measure achievement, and hold educators and students accountable.

"One of the real positive aspects [of standards-based testing] is that it provides schools with data," says Robert Chisholm, Ed.M.'04, a U.S. history teacher at Monument High School in Boston. "[It provides] the opportunity to study the performance of certain subgroups of students-regular education students, English-language learners, special education students, and [students grouped by] gender, race, and ethnicity. This ensures that schools are aware of the specifi c issues associated with these subgroups." As William Jaeger, Ed.M.'03, a U.S. and world history teacher in Hartford, explains, this data can be used "to demand resources be allocated to schools most in need of help."

Standards-based reform could only succeed if all students were afforded sufficient opportunity to learn, which was defined as quality teaching, a course of study that supported the standards, and the time needed to attain these standards. Such an undertaking would require a major effort on the part of districts, schools, and educators to build their capacity to meet these challenges-and would fall flat without necessary funding. Reform legislation needed to include-as the Massachusetts ERA did-not only provisions for standards, assessments, and accountability, but also structural reform. This would include revising tenure laws, requiring teacher recertification, changing the balance of responsibility between superintendents and school committees, and allowing for publicly funded charter schools. Financial reform that added new state support to local funding would also be necessary.

NCLB Shines Necessary Spotlight

So when the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, supported by a bipartisan effort led by President Bush and Senator Kennedy, was signed into law in 2002, it was not earth-shattering in the type of educational reform-high standards, regular assessment, and real accountability-it legislated. States were already required to set up assessment systems, but they had retained jurisdiction over low-performing schools.

For any school not meeting Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) goals, the federal government now had the power to impose sanctions, which started with a school being put on a "watch" list the first year. After several consecutive years of not achieving AYP, a school could face extensive personnel replacements, major reorganization, and takeover by a private management company or the state. States were still free to determine their own proficiency levels, but would be required to devise plans to get all their students there by 2014.

While hailed by many administrators and business leaders as a tool to finally stimulate change, NCLB also quickly came under fire. Teachers, parents, and child-development experts worried about the psychological impact of such pressure, and the consequences of a system that could influence the narrowing of a curriculum to the detriment of high achievers while raising the bar so high that lower achievers would give up.

Many teachers in the trenches were wary of losing control over what they'd teach and when, and feared a disconnect between noble-sounding political rhetoric and the resources necessary to meet these mandated goals.

"We put our teachers in front of students virtually the entire school day," points out HGSE lecturer Paul Reville, "and if teachers are going to be effective at changing teaching and learning in ways that are going to make the student performance that we're expecting possible, then they're going to have to have time to retool their practice." This would include putting aside time during the school day and school year for professional development, including meetings several times a week for teachers to examine student data together, pool their ideas on strategy, and invite outside experts to their school to help them evolve their practice.

The Conversation Continues

"Measured student achievement is extremely important, but so are motivation, creativity, and many other outcomes of learning. NCLB is well-motivated but fundamentally flawed."Four years after the passage of NCLB, the controversy continues unabated. Do data from tests like the MCAS in Massachusetts and the CMT (Connecticut Mastery Test) in Connecticut give educators any kind of valid read on what the students are learning? Ronen Habib, Ed.M.'05, a math teacher at Lexington High School, in Lexington, Massachusetts, says no, that ability should be measured by many different assessments and only the combination of all of them does justice to the student. For instance, Habib believes it is important that his students not only have the ability to do the math, but to explain it and apply the concepts to life applications-skills that are not tested on standards-based tests.

"Many people in the policy world misunderstand testing," says HGSE professor Daniel Koretz, "and think that once they have a test score, they've captured most of the important results of schooling.. Measured student achievement is extremely important, but so are motivation, creativity, and many other outcomes of learning. NCLB is well-motivated but fundamentally flawed. There's no evidence that this basic model-that you can get what you want merely by holding people responsible for test scores-works adequately."

Chisholm believes that standardized tests can signify cognitive improvement and better test-taking skills, but thinks that "these two are difficult to tease out." He, too, advocates assessments that allow students to demonstrate knowledge in different ways, saying that "mastery seems to be a more important goal."

A positive side to NCLB is that a federal requirement creates a sense of urgency, says Robert Costrell, chief economist of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and education advisor to the governor. "It pushed us [in Massachusetts] to define math and reading by grade and to have an accountability model for every year, rather than every other year," he says.

Habib agrees that gathering data to ensure accountability is a "noble and important idea," but he also sees a darker side-an issue much greater than the mechanics of the test. "[Standards-based testing] puts the burden on the students, when it should be assessing the teaching that is going on in schools-as well as the support that teachers are getting."

Jaeger supports setting curricular goals, general frameworks, and some skill-based standardized assessments, but believes the classroom professionals and school administrators need to be trusted to use their skills and training to achieve the greatest outcomes for their students. "Consistently, we see that the teacher's knowledge of his or her subject matter and dedication to students is one of the best predictors of student growth. The moment we stifle teacher creativity, autonomy, and ability to design, deliver, and assess content, we are going to see a significant dip in teacher quality, motivation, and thus, student achievement."

Candace Dunlap, dean of curriculum at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, believes the open-response questions on the MCAS are the best indicator of whether students are really achieving a higher level of proficiency, yet she would also like to see systems developed to give educators more information and preparation. "I think that where universities.must continue to help out, and must get better at helping out, is [in immersing] new teachers who are going through degree programs to become teachers in the standards-based philosophy. Th ey should not be coming into schools without already having ample opportunity to grapple with these issues."

Resources Still Lacking

Sufficient resources are critical to accomplish such change, and getting more behind-the-scenes frameworks in place may be as large an undertaking as accomplishing the work in the classroom. Massachusetts is one state that, to date, has largely met the challenge of providing financial resources. "In Massachusetts, there has been a substantial increase in resources over a decade, heavily targeted toward the highest-needs districts in return for increased accountability for performance," says HGSE professor Robert Schwartz. "The law worked basically as it was intended."

"If you ask the larger question, have we paid enough attention to high-quality technical assistance and building the capacity of schools and districts to do this work, the answer has to be no."However, the federal government, by some counts, is $9 billion short of the amount promised when NCLB was enacted. Educational professionals are also turning their concern to resource areas not as clearly identifi ed and easily assessed as funding. "If you ask the larger question," says Schwartz, "have we paid enough attention to high-quality technical assistance and building the capacity of schools and districts to do this work, the answer has to be no."

One area where schools need assistance is learning how to interpret and analyze the assessment data that standardized tests provide. Increasingly, schools find themselves awash in a sea of numbers without the skills or tools to turn those numbers into plans for improving student learning. "People think that using data is all about crunching numbers, but crunching numbers is actually the easy part," says Liz City, an HGSE doctoral student and coediter of Datawise: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Learning with Thompson Professor and Academic Dean Richard Murnane and adjunct lecturer Kathryn Parker Boudett. "The challenge is figuring out how to have collaborative, honest conversations about the data and how to generate effective solutions once you've identified the learning problem. The volume of data can be overwhelming, especially when you're not sure what to do with it."

In the Classroom

The effect of reform movements like NCLB and the Massachusetts ERA on what is taught day-to-day in the classroom remains a hot topic for debate. How uniform should classroom instruction be? Historically, education administration in the United States has fallen under the jurisdiction of state and local districts. Currently, states have their own proficiency standards-some higher than others-influencing what's being taught. States such as Massachusetts give local schools the power to decide how many years of each subject must be completed to graduate.

Costrell, for one, would like to see this evolve. He supports developing a recommended high school curriculum in Massachusetts and gives no credence to the idea that the broad eff ect of the standards-based reform will result in a narrowing of the curriculum. "Schools without challenges in these core areas have just kept doing what they're doing."

Koretz, however, thinks a uniform curriculum would create mixed results. "Curriculum should not close doors for students, and at present, many students have doors closed for them because they have inadequate access to a college-prep curriculum. However, even if our educational system were equitable-which it certainly is not-the needs and performance of students would vary. Curricula should allow for that variation while encouraging all students to manifest their potential."

And would the goal of any recommended curriculum be to graduate college-ready students? A large faction in this educational debate sees this as a critical component of future success, but Schwartz, for one, disagrees with the ideas that the principal purpose of high school is to prepare people for college.

"What's tricky.is that I absolutely do buy into the notion that all kids should leave high school with a strong enough foundation of knowledge and skills to have the ability to keep learning and have the ability to choose to go on to higher education," says Schwartz. "[But] I'm for making more space in the high school curriculum for learning that takes place on the work site or in the community, in internships and other types of more experiential education, as a motivator to get kids to understand why they should sit still for academic learning. I worry that the expansion of testing programs and the narrowing curriculum is going to exacerbate the drop-out problem. I think we need to develop multiple pathways to help kids get from secondary school to adulthood."

Looking Ahead: More Research and Development

"Expecting third- and fourth-graders who come from disadvantaged, low-income backgrounds to read, write, and do math at the same level as their contemporaries who come from wealthy homes where preschool and early education are priorities is unrealistic."Uniform skepticism abounds about the likelihood of achieving NCLB's goal of proficiency for all students by 2014. "Expecting third- and fourth-graders who come from disadvantaged, low-income backgrounds to read, write, and do math at the same level as their contemporaries who come from wealthy homes where preschool and early education are priorities is unrealistic," says Jaeger.

But Reville cautions against saddling children with low expectations. "Standards based reform is an equity strategy that relies on the assumption that all children can learn at high levels if adults can create the appropriate learning opportunities," he says. "High expectations should apply to all students and schools. Anything less amounts to discrimination."

"A school should be judged by how well we do with all the kids," posits Robert Weintraub, headmaster of Brookline High School in Brookline, Massachusetts. "Kids who don't think they can meet those standards drop out of school."

Another fear, voiced by some policymakers when the testing regimen was implemented and increasingly being reported in the nation's newspapers today, is that NCLB's combination of high-stakes testing and AYP guidelines provides an incentive for schools to either cheat on the test or ensure that low-performing students are not part of the testing pool. In the four years since NCLB has passed, Massachusetts education officials have launched nearly a dozen investigations into cheating allegations.

These allegations are not altogether surprising, according to Koretz. "There are limits to how quickly teaching can be improved, and demanding too rapid a change generates perverse incentives for teachers. We have learned.about inappropriate test preparation-things teachers can do to raise scores artificially. Yet we lack research that can help us set reasonable targets that teachers can meet by legitimate means. It is distressing that in over 30 years of test-based accountability in the United States, we have accumulated so little hard information with which to design better systems. We need to face up to the crude nature of this accountability tool and design better ones because if we don't, the kids will suffer."

HGSE professor Tom Kane, whose Congressional testimony helped refine the NCLB testing requirements, suggests that even with all of the tests' flaws, the benefits can be immense. "Given the rising importance of academic achievement in the labor market, even if some small fraction of the measured improvement in achievement is real, it may be of such extraordinary economic value to kids that we would be willing to live with some narrowing of the curriculum or isolated instances of teacher cheating."

To continue to improve the current assessment model, education professionals would like to see more attention to research. "Research gives us little reason to be confident in the current system," says Koretz, "and ample reason to be concerned.. The notion that one can set arbitrarily severe targets for performance improvements and expect people to progress toward them continually is unreasonable." Furthermore, says Koretz, an increase in scores does not always indicate that students really are learning more.