All the teachers at a low performing High School in Rhode Island will be looking for new jobs next year. A school that performed poorly on Rhode Island state tests will have all new teachers and administrators, because the school board couldn't get the teachers they had to agree to longer hours and less pay.
Now, it isn't that the school board KNEW that longer hours and less pay for teachers would solve the problem of their students' low test scores, there's no research backing up that particular position, but they felt they had to do something, and decided that hitting the reset button was an appropriate choice.
I'm not here to discuss the merits of reconstituting High Schools.
But I would like to explain why this will happen to your child's school, sooner, rather than later.
In the Rhode Island High School case, just 7 % of 11th-graders passed the state math test. That's one statistic I read. I presume the Language Arts scores were similarly poor and that graduation rates were pretty dismal, as well. That particular school had had low test scores for years. There are a lot of reasons for that, but the fact remains, they had been identified as a failing school under the current testing regimen, and had been in that predicament for years. Nothing they had tried in earlier years had worked to pull them out of the test score gutter.
Many people framed the issue as teachers' job rights vs. students' right to learn. But no one that I could tell actually asked any Rhode Island students what they thought. We defined students' needs for them: they need to pass the state tests.
So what did the teachers do wrong that kept the students' scores so low? Did they refuse to turn that High School into a year long test prep class? Or had they turned it into a year long test prep for years and are reaping the rewards of alienated and low performing students who are tired of 11 years of jumping through somebody else's hoops.
People say:
The kids and their futures are what is important
meaning: the kids won't have a future unless they pass the test
We can't have a lost generation of children
meaning: the generation will be lost unless they pass the test
They need teachers who are serious about helping our kids succeed.
meaning: the only way our kids can succeed is if they pass the test.
All we really know is that, in this school, the kids aren't passing the federally mandated state test. People are upset because the kids aren't passing the state test.
I didn't want to talk about the merits of reconstitution, but I will anyway, a bit.
Kids come to High School and can't multiply, they read at second or third grade level, and can't write two coherent paragraphs on a single subject when when they show up in 9th grade. Their teachers are sure to notice they come to school with such abysmal skills.
So, let's suppose Arne Duncan reconstitutes the school, fires all the teachers and hires teacher-of-the-year replacements and has them flown in at his own personal expense (or uses the Department of Education Slush Fund) to make this school a showcase for his union busting reform.
And let's suppose that these exemplary teachers have outstanding success. They take students who, in their first eight years of schooling, have made about three months of progress per year, and they triple the rate at which those students learn, to nine months worth of learning in a ten month school year. Now, taught by the best and the brightest, these disaffected, shell shocked and alienated students average almost a whole year's worth of progress for each year of High School.
They walk into that testing room in the 11th grade reading, writing and doing arithmetic at the fifth or sixth grade level! Hallelujah! They have doubled or tripled their earlier educational accomplishments, because now they've been taught by the best teachers in the country. They are still woefully unprepared. They are still going to fail that 11th grade test.
What you may not know, though, is that the NCLB mandated tests are designed so that all schools will fail to meet its standards by 2014. Four more years, people. This school is just the canary in the coal mine. Your kids' school is next.
In order to understand why this battle is coming soon to a school near you, you need to understand the NCLB test mandates.
This is from the Illinois State Board of Education website, similar information could be found for any state, since NCLB is federal law.
Here is the goal statement:
A state definition and timeline for determining whether a school, district and the state are making "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) toward the goal of 100 percent of students meeting state standards by the 2013-2014 school year. (emphasis mine)
All students must pass the test by 2014.
Each school has individual goals, which increase, year by year, heading toward that magical 100% of students meeting state standards in 2014 (the test for the 2013-2014 school year is given in the spring of 2014.) Each year the bar is raised a bit higher, and schools who don't make "adequate yearly progress" are labeled as failing. Since the goal increases each year, it is possible for a school to improve each year, and still be a failing school, for not improving enough.
Of course, it would be politically difficult to reconstitute a school that had been steadily improving, however little, each year, so the New Jersey school undoubtedly had a mixed record, up a little one year, down a little the next, and always low.
Now, about the test itself [this is for Illinois' test, the ISAT (warning: 33 page PDF] by an independent reviewer from Northwestern University. (ISBE is Illinois State Board of Education, they hired the outside expert to validate their test.)
Are the statistical and psychometric data provided by ISBE accurate?
Is the quality of the ISAT similar to well-known, norm-referenced, and commercially-available published test?
The answer to both questions is affirmative. (emphasis mine)
Note that the reviewer compares the ISAT to a commercially available NORM REFERENCED test (the Stanford 9.) A norm referenced test is a test designed so the average student scores 50%. If the test is well written and well calibrated, half the students taking the test will score above 50%, and half will score below 50%.
Part of the test design criteria is to avoid "floor effects" and "ceiling effects" which means either the test is so easy everyone scores too high or so hard everyone scores too low.
Now, the state sets a cut off score for "proficient" (Illinois uses the terms Academic Warning, Below Standards, Meets Standards, Exceeds Standards, and sets a cut off score for each) -- some score which, if students meet or best, they are deemed to have scored high enough that they meet state standards, something all students must do by 2014, to avoid their school being considered a failure.
Now, the only way all students taking a norm referenced test can be above the cut off score, is if the cut off score is set at 0%, or the students who might not pass are not allowed to take the test. In other words, everyone who takes the test passes the test. Automatically.
It has to do with test design and construction. The tests are built to ensure that test takers fall into a normal distribution curve, or as close to one as they are able to get. Sure, it would also work that way if test score were random, but the same effect is deliberately created by asking more or less difficult questions.
Norm referenced tests are designed to rank students from best to worst. That's their purpose. Using norm referenced tests to determine whether students have met state standards sets schools up to fail when they must have 100% of their students pass the test. The only way 100% can pass a norm referenced test is if the test is faulty, the passing grade is 0%, or some students are not offered the opportunity to take the test.
In the real world of norm referenced testing, if the general educational level of the tested population goes up, the test questions get harder, if the general educational level goes down, the questions get easier. There's no way to tell which way it goes without examining the actual test documents from year to year.
If the cut off score is even, say, 10%, in a well designed norm referenced test, a few percent of the test takers will fall below that cut off score, and the school will fail to have 100% of it's students meeting state standards.
Norm referenced tests are designed to rank test takers. What ever the cut off score, there will be students below it. And how likely is a state to set a low cut off scores at even, say, 30%, and publish that information to the public school parents in that state? Most states use cut off scores between 40% to 60%. If a kid got those scores in class, he'd get a D. I expect a backlash to form when people realize state educational proficiency means "getting above an F."
Now, I did say earlier that ALL schools would fail by 2014. That was hyperbole. Schools that can cherry pick their enrollment; schools that can expel students who do poorly on practice tests (and don't think for-profit charter schools won't do that to make their numbers look good); or schools that have feeder area socio-economic demographics which any educator will tell you predicts test scores much better than any other factor, will do well on a district or state wide test. Few PUBLIC schools will be in that enviable position. Most, if not all but a small handful of public schools in your state will be deemed failures by 2014 or earlier.
This, I think, is the unstated goal of NCLB: to make public schools look like failures, so the money taxpayers pay to support public schools can be re-routed through for-profit private or charter schools. There is no guarantee that private schools will do any better educating the mass of American public school students than public schools are doing now. There is every reason to believe that putting profit taking shareholders in the money stream will result in the same kind of catastrophe that now afflicts our health care system, and for much the same reasons.
[Edit: oops: Rhode Island, not New Jersey]