The AFT this month launched a series of seminars to engage educators, policymakers and community groups in a candid discussion of some of education's most pressing issues. It's a timely and important project that has direct bearing on such key concerns as the No Child Left Behind Act—a policy arena where it's often hard to get stakeholders to take off blinders and move beyond sloganeering. The new seminars and their informal tone, the union believes, will promote well-informed, well-reasoned discussion and consensus building so sorely needed in today's polarized education climate.

Paul Barton

NCLB's accountability measure for schools, known as adequate yearly progress (AYP), was a featured topic in the inaugural session, held Oct. 10 at AFT headquarters. Congressional staffers joined representatives of education and civic groups for a panel discussion of "'Failing' or 'succeeding' schools: How can we tell?" a new paper published by the AFT and authored by Paul E. Barton, a leading researcher in the field of testing and accountability.

The current AYP system is a weak, patchwork approach, Barton argued. It cobbles together old and new state exam systems and different notions of student proficiency. And when it comes to gauging adequate yearly progress in schools, the current AYP system blurs the distinction between measuring students and measuring schools. "There was never a time when this accountability shirt was cut out of the whole cloth. It was pieced together from old shirts," said Barton, an education writer and consultant who is former director of the Educational Testing Service Policy Information Center.

Barton said policymakers need to ask hard questions about the appropriate use of tests. The law requires that tests be aligned content standards and instruction--and "test results are not valid until the alignment occurs," he stressed.

He also said that school accountability can't be achieved under the current system, which compares one group of students' end-of-year knowledge with a different group's end-of-year knowledge. "There is no measure of change in knowledge" under this approach, Barton said. A better way, he proposed, would be testing in the fall and spring, with tests aligned to the curricula. This approach also provides teachers with useful information at the beginning of the year, rather than a simple "grade" at year's end. And. to protect against over-testing, Barton argued that assessments may not need to be used every year for all students. Sampling of individual schools, subjects and grades might be in order, he said.

This new approach still poses a fundamental question that policymakers will have to grapple with: How much gain is enough? The answer must be based on "informed judgment of what is acceptable" student gains in an academic year.

Also participating in the discussion was Raul Gonzalez, legislative director at the National Council of La Raza (NCLR). Gonzalez acknowledged the value of student achievement growth in any new or modified AYP formula. But from a "civil rights perspective," Gonzalez emphasized that NCLB must not abandon the concept of helping all students reach academic achievement levels that signal proficiency. Former AFT educational issues director Joan Baratz Snowden also joined the panel. She echoed Barton's concerns about an accountability system that doesn't distinguish student and school performance. And, given the depth and scope of social problems in many communities, "resources are needed in any serious accountability system," she maintained. "Schools won't do better with the same or less" support.

Many of the concepts introduced in Barton's work are sure to be influential and bear watching, said panelist Andrew Rotherham, co-founder and co-director of Education Sector, a national education policy think tank. But it's also important that NCLB changes accommodate the political landscape as well as the best thinking among educational researchers, stressed Rotherham, who is author of the Eduwonk blog. There is strong appeal among parents for a system that reports how their particular children are doing in school, he said. And there is also a practical sentiment among some in Congress and in the Bush administration that will resist major changes in the law. The feeling is "you go to war with the law you've got," explained Rotherham.

The session was moderated by AFT executive vice president Antonia Cortese, who stressed that any version of AYP won't succeed "if the system isn't grounded in a rich curriculum that challenges all children."

Additional seminars are scheduled for early in 2007.

October 18, 2006