Teachers call for fair NCLB targets

The Audubon school closed out the 2003-04 school year on a strong note. As this Cleveland, Ohio, public school worked to make a successful conversion from a traditional middle school to a K-8 building, things were pointing in the right direction. Discipline and achievement had improved significantly in the new K-8 environment; many of the older students were stepping up to the challenge of serving as stronger role models for students in the earlier grades. Students seemed to be benefiting from new block scheduling and tutoring programs. At both the fourth- and sixth-grade levels, the school posted across-the-board student achievement gains in mathematics, reading, writing, science and citizenship from the prior year.

Despite a budget crunch that sparked layoffs at Audubon, “it’s the type of school where teachers believe there is nothing we can’t accomplish no matter what comes from downtown,” observes school guidance counselor Jackie Thornhill.

“In the 10 years I’ve been here, there’s been tremendous improvement; teachers know we’re improving,” adds fifth-grade teacher Mike Nader, and the numbers seem to bear him out. In math, the percentage of proficient students grew to 42.3 percent of students in 2003-04—up by more than 14 percentage points from the prior year. English language arts increased by more than 6 percentage points, up to 35.7 percent of students.

Against this backdrop, it’s understandable that Audubon staff voice more than a little frustration about August 2004, when Ohio joined other states in publishing its list of schools that fell short of meeting the “adequate yearly progress” targets tied to the No Child Left Behind Act. Despite its successes, Audubon had landed on the “failed to meet AYP” list. As American Teacher went to press, Audubon was waiting to find out if it had made the list again in 2004-05 and would be mandated to implement a new school improvement plan—the next step in a process of escalating sanctions under NCLB. Spend enough years on that list, just missing targets that ratchet up annually, and schools like Audubon could find themselves subjected to additional “reforms.”

These include for-profit management, conversion to charter schools, wholesale reconstitution of school instructional staff and other steps driven more by ideology and political interest than by any evidence of proven effectiveness in the classroom.

If that occurs, at least a few educators like Audubon special education teacher Alan Settles will want to know whatever happened to the improvement measures now in place—the ones that were making a difference despite the emergence of staff layoffs and rising class size that “trimmed the sails on us rather than putting the wind at our backs.”

“It’s like starting a race against someone who is standing 20 yards down the field,” explains Settles. “We need to look at each school and say ‘this is where they started and this is where they ended.’ ”

Audubon has no monopoly on this problem. Schools across the nation, many of them making commendable progress, are being targeted for NCLB’s escalating sanctions because some or most of their students started further behind and did not reach the law’s arbitrary benchmark. AYP implementation does not allow schools to get credit for valid and reliable evidence of student progress. And the mandated interventions for schools, such as contracts with private management companies and charter school conversions, are not based on scientific research and are sometimes punitive rather than constructive steps to improve schools.

The problem extends even deeper into AYP benchmarks for school subgroups such as students with disabilities and limited English proficient students. While the AFT strongly supports this “disaggregation” of data as a necessary step to prevent vulnerable student populations from being neglected in school improvement efforts, the mechanisms for achieving this are still wanting. Despite recent adjustments in U.S. Department of Education regulations, not enough has been done to ensure that progress among these groups is fairly and accurately reflected when it comes to AYP and student subgroups. The law is still driven by arbitrary percentages of eligible students, rather than the expertise of IEP teams (which are responsible for developing individualized education plans), when it comes to appropriate assessments for students with disabilities. For English language learners, the law requires states to offer academic assessments in their native language “to the extent practicable”—but many states have failed to do so.

“I just don’t think it’s been thought out,” says Tamara Glenn, an eighth-grade math teacher at Cleveland Middle School in Detroit. In 2003-04, the school failed to make adequate yearly progress although its percentage of proficient students grew by more than 7 percentage points in English, to 23 percent, and by more than 20 percentage points in math, to more than 30 percent.  The eighth-grade math teacher also believes that adequate yearly progress is an accountability system where “they don’t look at the whole picture” when it comes to schools like hers, which serve large numbers of poor families in Detroit and which have many English language learners, a large special education population, and many students from foster homes and group homes.

“I see some areas where there have been many gains, particularly in math and reading,” adds Yarisha Johnson, an eighth-grade math teacher. Cleveland Middle School could be reorganized this year, and Johnson worries that changes may not reflect either the strategies in place that boosted scores or the expertise of teachers. When it comes to reorganizing plans, “they send sheets around, we turn them in, and I don’t know who sees them or reads them.” And if sanctions ratchet up to the point where Cleveland is faced with conversion to a charter school, “we could easily end up with something worse than we have now,” says Johnson, who taught in a local charter school before joining the Cleveland  staff three years ago.

“We have improved tremendously and we continue to improve, but its hard to show when you look at the criteria” behind AYP, says Linda Elum, a language arts teacher at the middle school. “You need a system that really gets down into the school and sees what’s happening.”

Progress also is being made at Pittsburgh’s Arsenal Middle School, which landed on the state’s failed-to-make AYP list in 2003-04. The percentage of students proficient in English language arts jumped more than 11 percent to 35.9 that year, while the percentage of math-proficient students climbed to 32 percent, just under the state’s cutoff score of 35.

“We’re going in the right direction,” says math teacher Judy Karavlan. She believes the current AYP formula is punitive, takes no account of each school’s particular circumstance, threatens to crowd out critical teaching and learning with too much testing and “has really wreaked havoc on schools and put undue stress on both teachers and students.”

AYP “is a score that does not paint an accurate picture,” says Mike Tannous, an eighth-grade communications teacher at Arsenal. “The score should show progress, and not just a pass/fail mark. It’s giving a bad reputation to schools that deserve better, and it’s hard to overcome that.”

Cruel irony
Those who insist that AYP be thoughtfully constructed, aligned with reforms already in place—and, at a minimum, include a scientifically valid measure of “progress” in the “adequate yearly progress” formula— often run the risk of being labeled as apologists for the status quo. That public teachers who speak out against current AYP formulas could be dismissed in this manner is one of the cruelest ironies in the debate over accountability.

“Some of the most compelling and cogent concerns about the effects of NCLB have come from teachers who by any measure are holding themselves and their students to high standards,” AFT president Edward J. McElroy wrote in a recent column. In fact, accountability in public education was embraced by rank-and-file AFT members long before NCLB. And recent surveys show that support remains impressively strong for academic standards, regular measures of student performance, and consequences for students and faculty in schools. A large majority of educators believe this is the right approach for improving education in their schools— but they also believe that there must be improvements in the way this approach is carried out. A majority also want to keep NCLB but insist that changes are necessary. And this attitude runs even stronger in high-needs schools (the schools most likely to get short shrift under the current flawed AYP formula) than in schools generally.

“The AFT will never back away from high standards and accountability, but it is important to get the regulations we place on teachers and schools right,” McElroy adds.

And if teachers’ frustration with AYP is palpable in this “season of school lists,” perhaps it’s because these educators’ demands seem so reasonable: Give us the resources to do the job, accurately measure how well we do, give credit where credit is due, and, when intervention is necessary, do it in ways supported by solid research, and protect the good work already under way.