Under No Child Left Behind, schools are being set up to fail

Stories by Sherry Posnick-Goodwin
Photos by Scott Buschman

By 2014, nearly all of California's K-12 schools are likely to be labeled as "failing" under the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act.

For those receiving Title I funds for low-income students, chances are they'll be facing serious sanctions — conversion to charter status, takeover by a for-profit company or complete closure.

Instead of being a tool to help "fix" public schools as it was originally touted, it's now obvious that the federal law sets up schools to fail. NCLB, in fact, includes 37 different ways in which a school can miss the mark.

Schools considered good on every other standard of measurement are being branded as failing.

Already, 36 percent of the state's schools have been put on the list of schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) this year. The number is expected to rise exponentially as the percentage of students required to score "proficient" ratchets up to 100 percent.

As of this summer, approximately 1,200 Title I schools in California had been enrolled in Program Improvement (PI) as a precursor to more severe sanctions.

The original legislation included school vouchers as a way for students to escape failing schools, but the Bush administration abandoned the provision to win congressional approval. Clearly, however, vouchers are still at the heart of the program: If public schools are set up for failure and then found to be missing the mark, can vouchers be far behind?

"One hundred percent is perfection and, by 2014, either we will have 99 percent of all schools in PI, or we will continue to modify this law," says Martha Wallace, a member of the NEA Board of Directors and CTA's NCLB workgroup. She's not sure schools can ever reach the goal of being 100 percent proficient without the funding promised under the law. "The only way that could happen is maybe by having a class size of one — but I have a class size of 33 middle school students with raging hormones."

"I'm not aware of any school today that has 100 percent of its students at this high a bar," says State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell. In the next several years, "the majority of schools will not meet the unrealistic status bar. ... And we won't have the resources to target 60 or 70 percent of schools for improvement."

Even though he supports the goals of NCLB, he doesn't have much regard for an accountability system in which more than half the schools are considered to be in need of serious remediation. "We need to focus on the 10, 15 or 20 percent of schools that really need help."

Even schools where test scores have risen dramatically face penalties for failing to meet the rigid NCLB requirements. As of this summer, approximately 403 California schools had more than doubled their growth scores on the state's Academic Performance Index (API) over the previous two years, but were facing sanctions nonetheless. The problem is NCLB does not reward growth or improvement.

Four years ago, Verde Elementary School in North Richmond, where the students mostly come from low-income, minority families, had no one measuring proficient at grade level in reading and math. Now, Verde's test scores are improving at a rate seven times better than the state expected. "But federal officials aren't applauding," says the San Francisco Chronicle. "Under their NCLB rules, Verde could be shut down next year."

Even high-scoring schools in affluent areas have been declared failing under NCLB. In Palo Alto, for example, not enough students took the standardized test. The district put the blame on high school juniors who opted to skip the California Standards Test so they could study for Advanced Placement exams. Even the district's testing director said he couldn't fault the students for choosing to skip a test that would not have much impact on their future in favor of preparing for a test that could help them get into college.

More than 1,700 California schools — including 1,307 high schools — did not make AYP for 2003 because they tested fewer than 95 percent of the students in each subgroup. Even though schools are required to test 95 percent of students in every subgroup, students are not required to take the tests. Parents can sign a waiver to keep their children home.

"In our high school district, schools got hit with low participation," says Kern High Faculty Association President Bruce Saathoff, a math teacher at Centennial High School in Bakersfield. "If it happens again, we could face sanctions."

It's hard to get high school students to show up for tests and care about the results, says Saathoff, who serves on CTA's Testing and Assessment Committee. "We have so many days of testing, spread out over three weeks. The kids try real hard to be there the first week. We have almost perfect attendance. But by the second week, attendance is way down. The kids at the top take the test very seriously, because that is their nature. But kids who are average or lower get tired. By the end, they don't care anymore."

Students at Bonita Vista High School in Chula Vista openly rebelled against the test, saying they were "overwhelmed" by testing. Seventeen of the 40 protesters ended up opting out with waivers from their parents.

O'Connell and other education leaders have criticized NCLB for punishing schools that improve on state tests but fail to meet rigid federal targets. They suggest replacing the current "status model" — where all schools show AYP by reaching a single bar — with a "growth model" like California's API, which measures the improvement of individual students, schools and districts.

"The federal government uses a status bar, which is arbitrary, like having a high jump all students must jump over or the entire school fails," says O'Connell. "The more accurate model is the growth model, because all students don't come to school equally prepared."

Under NCLB, every state can set its own definition of proficiency. Some states set theirs laughably low. Before NCLB was passed, California had approved a set of standards that were the highest in the nation, with the goal that all students would meet University of California requirements. California could have lowered the bar to avoid federal sanctions; however, once high standards were in place, no one wanted to back down from them. As a result, California has more schools in PI than other states.

"California is being punished for setting its standards high," says CTA Board member Pixie Hayward Schickele, chair of CTA's NCLB workgroup. "Nobody wants low standards. But other states that have lower standards aren't having high numbers of their schools facing sanctions the way California is."

"We set high standards for a totally different purpose than this law," says CTA Board member Bob Nichols, who serves on the NCLB workgroup. "They were goals, not absolute benchmarks. But they have been converted into absolute benchmarks that will be increasingly impossible to attain as we approach 2014, when California will require 100 percent of all students to meet standards based on UC and CSU requirements."

Schools serving diverse students are more likely to be subjected to federal sanctions, according to a Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) report, "Penalizing Diverse Schools: Similar Test Scores But Different Students Bring Federal Sanctions."

In demographically diverse schools, notes the report, schools must assess the performance of several subgroups consisting of different ethnic groups, students with limited English skills, those with disabilities and those from low-income families. Sometimes the same students are counted in two or three subgroups, such as Latino children from low-income homes with limited English.

Each subgroup is a potential minefield with "a harrowing set of trip wires that can easily detonate consequential explosions. Hit one trip wire, say, if a school tests just 94 percent of its kids (instead of 95 percent) with learning disabilities and the school or district is stigmatized and labeled failing by the federal government."

A case in point, according to the PACE report, is Manzanita Elementary School in Oakland, which serves African American, Asian and Latino students, many of whom come from low-income families and have limited English skills. The school has met all of the state's API growth targets, which rose 100 points over the past three years. It also hit 17 of the 18 necessary targets for AYP. "But the African American subgroup just missed the proficiency target for mathematics. Hitting this one trip wire, the school failed to meet its federal AYP target. Manzanita was posted on California's burgeoning list of failing schools."

Students at nearby Golden Gate Elementary are performing at statistically equal levels with Manzanita and have similar test scores. But with only two subgroups, Golden Gate has a better chance of making its AYP target because there are fewer "trip wires" to avoid.

"What's most striking is that the percentage of schools hitting their AYP growth target is strongly related to the number of student subgroups," concludes the report. Although the federal reforms emphasize equity, they actually penalize schools with diverse student bodies.

The law is especially hard on minority and integrated schools, and requires much less student progress from schools in affluent areas, where most students are already performing at grade level, observes Harvard University's Civil Rights Project in its report, "Inspiring Vision, Disappointing Results." It contends that NCLB is undermining state education reforms and assessment strategies, and that the mandates of the law have no common meaning across state lines.

Nationwide, urban districts were twice as likely to be identified for Program Improvement.

Even if students have exactly the same skills, proficiency standards among the states differ enough to cause dramatic disparities in the percentage of students categorized as proficient, according to a study from the Northwest Evaluation Association.

Once federal sanctions kick in , schools are likely to begin a downward spiral, because they will have less money to work with. "Corrective actions" include using up to 20 percent of Title I funds to transport students to "non-failing" public schools, if requested by parents, and to pay for tutoring by outside providers, including faith-based organizations.

An estimated 4 percent of eligible California children have used the tutoring services and approximately 30,000 students have taken advantage of the option to change schools. Nationwide, the numbers are relatively small. Nevertheless, money taken from general Title I funds and redirected to such services "concentrates resources meant for many children on only a few," says the Harvard study.

Money could be better spent helping schools improve rather than paying for students to leave them. "We have schools that have doubled their API two years in a row, but they are being forced to walk away from reform efforts that work and put money into transportation," says O'Connell.

Under NCLB, students who attend schools that are classified as "persistently dangerous" are also allowed to transfer to different schools. So far, no schools in the state have been placed on that list, which classifies schools as dangerous if one student has been caught with a firearm in each of the last three years, and one percent of its student population has been expelled for hate crimes, extortion, sexual battery or other violent acts.

The federal government insists that NCLB is about providing "extra help," not punishment. But teachers don't see it that way.

"Once people hear something bad about a school, it takes a lot of extra things to get it on track again," says Pam Kingsley, chair of CTA's Assessment and Testing Committee.

At one Santa Barbara middle school in her district that has been labeled as failing, "parents are opting out of sending their children there because they think there is something wrong with the school," she says. "How does that help an underperforming school? There's a stigma that comes when a school gets labeled. But it's understandable; if you heard bad news about a Ford would you go out and buy a Ford? No, you'd probably wait until it improves."

One school that went up 86 points one year and down two points the following year was labeled underperforming. "Is that fair?" she asks.

"The whole accountability model and high-stakes testing should be about improving student learning and ensuring equity and access — not rewarding and punishing," says CTA President Barbara E. Kerr. "We should be providing guidance and information for local decision-making, not classifying schools as successes or failures."

The process of determining which schools are succeeding and which are failing is having a negative impact on teaching and learning, say teachers.

"Weeks and weeks of valuable instructional time are lost when preparing for and administering standardized achievement tests," wrote CSU-San Bernardino teacher Gary Negin in an article for the San Bernardino County Sun. "Endless and unnecessary comprehension questions and math practices beat the interest out of students."

"Everyone is so worried about covering curriculum in time for the test that we don't have time to think about mastery," says Saathoff in Bakersfield. "There is no time for creative activities or hands-on activities that accommodate different learning styles. These days it's just rush, rush, rush to meet the testing deadline."

"We're definitely losing something," says NEA Director Wallace. "We talk about it in the lunchroom all the time. Because there is so much emphasis on testing, the joy of teaching and learning are diminished. Schools have added extra periods of reading and math, while other subjects are going by the wayside. Pacing guides tell you what page to be on for that day. Instead of responding to the individual needs of students with activities to get them interested and involved, you are constantly trying to meet a schedule to prepare kids for the test."

If anything good has come out of NCLB, Wallace can't think of it. "Well," she reconsiders, "maybe there's one good thing. Maybe it has mobilized teachers to vote for John Kerry."