<p>For those not familiar with the process, it's called ongoing assessment. The purpose is feedback student <----> instructor. Instruction can then be differentiated for individual students. The best materials comprise a text set of linguistic and nonlinguistic sources, the more original the sources the better. Experiential learning is key, the more transactional the better, with students constructing knowledge for themselves in a way that is meaningful, with new learning building on foundational knowledge. Think of it as the coaching model v. the lecture model of instruction or the difference between learning biology from a textbook and learning biology in an experimental lab according to a research model. The fact is that we know quite a lot about effective teaching strategies and can quantify what works and what doesn't. We have many forms of assessment, too. We don't ask varsity athletes to write an essay. We ask them to win games and judge coaches on that record.</p>
<p>Mathews knows this. He says as much in the last sentence of the penultimate paragraph.</p>
<p>I suspect Mathews meant this article to be intentionally provocative. It's disingenuous to suggest that so-called "teaching to the test" relates to anything other than high-stakes NCLB-mandated standardized testing. Discussion of AP, IB, or Cambridge courses is beside the point, as he well knows if he has in fact been observing and reporting on schools for 23 years. Kids taking those classes are not the ones being left behind. It's the failing kids in failing schools who are, and that problem was the one NCLB was ostensibly supposed to remedy.</p>
<p>What changes have the accountability standards of NCLB wrought to help failing kids succeed in school? Can we taxpayers now be assured that our dollars ear-marked for education are being wisely and well used? Let's hold NCLB accountable for meeting its goals.</p>
<p>Jlauer95, you've described a limited measure of accountability well. We already know the best predictor of a student's school success; research has proven again and again that it is the socioeconomic status (SES) of the community in which the student resides. NCLB has been instrumental in spurring research on scientifically or evidence-based effective teaching methodology. What it hasn't done is address how best to implement and fund those changes for the students who need them most, the students with the obvious well-known risk factors for academic failure (poverty, family transiency, literacy-poor home environment, medical or cognitive disability, English as a second language in the home, etc.). What it hasn't done is keep the best, most experienced teachers in the schools that need them the most (in fact, it has accomplished just the opposite). </p>
<p>Let's look no further than the original intent of the legislation. Little education funding is federal; Title 1 is one example. So what club can be held over the head of districts (administrators and teachers) who fail to meet accountability standards, as measured by a standardized test? You can't withhold funds that weren't there to begin with. Instead, parents were to be given the choice to opt out of failing schools. (There's a certain bitter irony in that as private schools are exempt from accountability standards.) Yet that failsafe was not included in the legislation and has since been struck down as unconstitutional in Florida. So what recourse do parents have? Well, they can pick up and move to a better school district IF they have the means to do that. But if they did, their kids probably wouldn't be in a failing school to begin with.</p>
<p>States do already have educational standards in place. Consequences to teachers and administrators for failing to teach to standards vary. The most leverage occurs with teachers who haven't achieved tenure, that their contracts will not be renewed. Whether or not lesson plans are even checked at all, much less for state standards, varies widely. Many schools are so desperate for warm bodies in the classroom -- especially in schools identified as failing -- that vast numbers of teachers are either not certified in subject or certified in an area not concordant with degree. One failing elementary school in my area this year has 17 new teachers out of 22 staff positions and a new principal. NCLB doesn't track staff turnover, a huge risk factor for school failure. </p>
<p>When you set as a measure of "success" a once-a-year, one-size-fits-all standardized test for every child in every district in a state, you have to question what goal you're attempting to meet (just as idad pointed out). I wonder how much outcry there would be if we instituted a national standards literacy test for adults, say for driving or voting privileges, based on the rationale that one should not drive or vote if one is illiterate. Let's further, for argument's sake, make two passing scores: a 500 verbal and a 500 math on an SAT clone. Let's hold individual states accountable for ensuring that they not foist illiterate drivers or voters on the rest of us. Such a proposal would surely be met with derision; but keeping to the hypothetical, obviously there would soon be a booming cottage industry in prep classes for the state test--and a secondary booming cottage industry in gaming the requirement. Obviously there would be pressure on "failing" individuals to figure out how to pass or bypass the standard. States, held to accountability measures for percent of illiterate drivers and voters under the threat of withheld federal funds for highway improvements and knowing there is a certain number of citizens who will never score higher than 500/500, might even learn to "massage" the stats. In the end, do we have safer roads? more informed voters?</p>
<p>That is what is meant by "teaching to the test." And it is exactly what we are doing to our children, to their detriment. Maybe we could come up with a better assessment model, like the one idad suggests. Maybe we could start by first screening students to see who needs remediation and not waste the instructional time of students who don't. Maybe we should give our best teachers monetary incentives to teach failing students in failing schools. Maybe we should lower pay scales for teachers in the easier, high-SES districts (how many of those posting here would put up with that, knowing the kinds of property taxes they pay and what kind of teachers they would get?). Maybe we should facilitate access for all students to all kinds of alternative education opportunites. Maybe we could just simply acknowledge that NCLB, in its present form, has not been the panacea many political opportunists claimed it would be.</p>