Brownstein: Don't leave this law behind

Progress is slow under Bush's 2001 education reform,

but No Child Left Behind is worth improving.

THE COMPLAINTS are reaching a crescendo as Congress moves closer to reauthorizing No Child Left Behind, the education reform law that President Bush passed with rare bipartisan support in 2001.

Conservatives are wailing about federal intrusion.

Teachers unions and some leading Democrats moan that the law relies too much on testing as the measure of student progress. And some parents echo each of those indictments.

There's no doubt the law has minted enemies.

But Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a nonpartisan group that advocates for low-income children, has it right when she says the law wasn't designed "to make people happy." It was passed because too many students in too many places were not learning enough. It wouldn't be doing its job if it left in place the practices that produced those unacceptable results. Grumbling, in education as in everything else, is the inevitable price of change.

And the evidence is that change is generating some progress.

The Center for Education Policy, an independent research organization, recently found that the share of students demonstrating proficiency in reading and (especially) math is up in most states since the law's passage. In most places, achievement gaps between white and minority students are narrowing.

The problem, on both fronts, is that improvement is coming too slowly. The overall gains remain relatively modest. And the gaps between white and minority students, though narrowed, remain dauntingly wide in many places...

[The testing] system — the heart of the law — is mostly admirable. It ensures that schools focus on educating all their students.

The problem is that it has produced a reverse Lake Wobegon syndrome, one in which all (or at least too many) schools are below average.

Fully one in five schools that receive federal Title I education dollars are now identified as needing improvement. That trend is alienating parents and educators at basically solid schools tossed onto the "failing" pile because one or two groups underperformed.

It also means states must spread their resources over so many "failing" schools that they can't concentrate on the most troubled. "They are swamped," says Bruce Reed, President Clinton's former chief domestic policy advisor. "They have too many failures to fix."

The Bush administration and leading Democrats should be able to agree on a solution: establish tiers to distinguish between schools that fall just short of their annual improvement targets and those with deep, systemic problems, and then direct most attention to the latter. "We should focus our resources on the chronic underperformers," says Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) says much the same.

This from the L A Times.

Schools call roll at a border crossing

Students routinely walk from

homes in Mexico to

attend public institutions in the U.S.

In Arizona, one district

has chosen not to ignore the violation.

San Luis, Ariz. — ROBERT Villarreal, standing at his post behind the customs officers at the border crossing station, knew he was being watched.

A slim teenage boy wearing a green T-shirt was furtively peering at him from behind a pillar on the Mexican side. "I know who it is before he even comes in," Villarreal said, ducking into an alcove. Minutes later, perhaps thinking Villarreal had left, the boy and another teen breezed through customs.

Villarreal sprang out of hiding and called the teens by name. "If you hide like that," he said, "you're just going to make things worse." Villarreal is not a border agent. He is a school attendance officer whose assignment is to catch students who live in Mexico but attend public school in the U.S.

Children who are U.S. citizens or legal immigrants but live in Mexico cross every morning to get a better education for free in Arizona, breaking the law that requires them to live within the boundaries of the district. To many of their parents, who have ties in both countries, not living in the district is the educational equivalent of jaywalking.

"I pay taxes. I work over here," said a 31-year-old corrections officer who would not give his name as he walked his son from Mexico to elementary school in San Luis. "What's the difference?"

There are no hard statistics on the number of children who break the residency requirement, but some people opposed to U.S. immigration policy have seized on the issue as another example of how they say migrants exploit the U.S. They contend that most school districts do not enforce the law because they risk losing state funding, which is based on the number of enrolled students.

This from the Los Angeles Times.

No slack for slackers

Colleges are revoking admissions for students who may have partied too much their senior year.

Some high school seniors may have scoffed at warnings about partying instead of studying this spring. But nagging counselors and parents turn out to have been right: A senior-year slump can have painful repercussions.

In June and July, elite universities in California and across the country increasingly are revoking admission offers to students whose grades originally were good enough to gain acceptance but whose final exams and transcripts took a dive into Ds or worse. It's a little-known practice, but it can dump as much as 2% of an incoming class.

For example, UCLA has begun to send out letters informing some students that their "academic record no longer meets the standards for admission." So the coveted acceptances to the freshman class, celebrated just months ago, are withdrawn. Gone. Revoked. Frittered away.

This from the Los Angeles Times.

170 Los Angeles students to pay a price for absence

Tougher attendance rules will force more than one-quarter of eligible Carson High graduates to sit out commencement ceremonies.

More than one-fourth of Carson High's graduates will miss commencement ceremonies because they missed too much school.

About 170 of 665 eligible graduates won't don a cap and gown because they failed to show up for more than 60 hours of instruction this year or were late to class more than 15 times.

This from the Los Angeles Times.

Struggling LA charters face uncertain future

Two campuses that fail to meet

key guidelines

due to poor test scores may survive

because of popular support.

By the rules, Discovery Charter Preparatory School in Pacoima ought to be doomed because its test scores have fallen from the penthouse to the cellar.


For its part, Pacifica Community Charter School in West Los Angeles raised eyebrows with its "learn as you feel like it" approach, which also produced low test scores. Pacifica didn't even receive a valid school score in 2004 and 2005.


The state says that to survive, charter schools must improve student achievement, and these schools, by key measures, have not. So with the city's school board scheduled to decide today whether these schools will live or die, the decision should be easy.


Not necessarily.


This from the Los Angeles Times, Photo by Luis Sinco.

South leads in early childhood education

A report says the region provides public preschool to the

highest percentage of youngsters in the nation.

Rarely do experts extol the virtues of public education in the South.

So it was notable when a report released last Thursday said the Southeast led the nation in state-funded early childhood education.

The Southern Education Foundation, a charity based in Atlanta, said the Southeast provided public prekindergarten to the largest percentage of 3- and 4-year-olds in the country: 19%, compared with 12% in the Northeast, 9% in the Midwest and 5.6% in the West.

This from the Los Angeles Times.

More states abstain from federal sex-ed funds

In an emerging revolt against abstinence-only sex education, states are turning down millions of dollars in federal grants, unwilling to accept White House dictates that the money be used for classes focused almost exclusively on teaching chastity.

This from the Los Angeles Times.

Pranksters glue high school doors shut

About 100 locks and exterior gates at a Carlsbad campus are

plugged with a super-strength adhesive.

Forget being glued to their seats: Students at a San Diego County high school couldn't even get through their classroom doors Friday. With only a day to go before spring break, vandals plugged the locks on all the exterior gates and doors on campus with super-strength adhesive.

Realistic standards, rigorously enforced

Today's Los Angeles Times editorial gets it right

Son of No Child Left Behind
The education law -- up for reauthorization this year -- sets standards without looking at what's realistically achievable.

CREDIT THE No Child Left Behind Act for this: It helped to reveal how little learning was going on in many classrooms, especially those with poor and minority students. As a result, educators are working to change that.

This is no small accomplishment. Still, the law has not yet achieved its key goals: improvement in student scores and a narrowing of the achievement gap between white, middle-class children and their poor, minority counterparts.

Flaws in the law have held back real educational progress and unfairly placed blame on public-school teachers for everything but the weather. The law has labeled many good schools as failures, which has led to a bipartisan uprising against legislation that once had true bipartisan support. While its basic tenets should remain intact, and even be strengthened, the law needs an overhaul to deserve reauthorization this year.

It's stated goal is to bring every child to academic "proficiency" by 2014, and it sets yearly guidelines for getting there. At the same time, it allows the states, not the federal government, to define "proficiency." Some states (though not California[or Kentucky]) have set the standard laughably low, making a mockery of the law.

In states where proficiency actually means something, on the other hand, it doesn't necessarily help the students who most need help. Teachers often work most with the children who are just below proficient, getting them above the bar so they'll count as successes. Children at the bottom, who need the help even more, receive too little attention. Gifted students, meanwhile, are left out of the equation, prompting many schools to cut their programs for gifted children.

The law should be rewritten to require yearly improvement for each student — a realistic goal that teachers can meet whatever their students' scores were at the beginning of the year. This would encourage more good teachers to work at the schools that need them most, and would relieve schools from being blamed for the low scores of a new student whose poor performance is no fault of theirs. To close the achievement gap between minority children and white, and between poor and middle class, more growth should be expected from the lowest-scoring groups.

Other areas in which the law needs revision: It places too much emphasis on teachers who are "highly qualified," meaning they've got a lot of credentials. Instead, schools need teachers who are effective — meaning their students do well. The law must help pay for and design better tests that are true measures of what students are supposed to learn and, as President Bush has suggested, define what "proficiency" should look like.

The success of a nation depends largely on the quality of its educational system, and the international standing of the U.S. system is embarrassingly low. The key to improving it is realistic standards, rigorously enforced. No Child Left Behind has the standards and the enforcement, but it could use more realism and rigor.

No Cheap Fix for California Schools

California's immense public school system is plagued by gross inefficiencies and inequalities that will require fundamental reforms and much more money, according to a series of studies released this week.

Suggested reforms included making it easier to fire bad teachers, providing massive infusions of resources to schools that serve the poor, delivering more accurate student data and eliminating excessive paperwork and conflicting rules and directives.

This from the L A Times.

California School Funding Study to be Released This Week

The 1,700-page, $3 million report has a simple central finding:

Money alone cannot fix California's public elementary and high schools. It will require major reforms, some controversial. And those reforms, indeed, will cost billions more annually.

See the Los Angeles Times article.

False Profits: continuing speculation on the future of newspapers

This Slate piece by Jack Shafer cites continued expectations for twenty percent profit margins in the newspaper industry as having destructive effects on the quality of journalism and future web-based development – which is where the growth is. These historically high expectations are the result of conditions that no longer exist; as technology eliminates monopoly.

Last fall, former Lexington Herald-Leader and Los Angeles Times Editor John Carroll decried these conditions on NewsHour. He discussed corporate pressure for profits, and conflicts between those who see themselves as serving the shareholders and those who see themselves serving the reader. “I think every good editor has a point which he has to define for himself, at which he must quit or resist, rather than damage the paper further.” Carroll left the LA Times last year and is now the Knight visiting lecturer at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.

In this era of publicly owned newspaper chains, money has overshadowed all else. And obligations to journalism, obligations to the community have fallen by the wayside to a considerable extent, and that is really the tension that's causing this problem. If owners reduced expectations to 10 percent profit margins, Carroll said, circulation would probably start growing. "And we would be able to invest very heavily in the Web, which is crucial to the paper's future," Carroll said. "At a 20 percent margin, I feel strongly that we are cashing in the paper's future in favor of current earnings."

“My topic is an urgent one: nothing less than the fate of journalism,” said Carroll. “The economic underpinnings of our craft are eroding. At the same time, the Web is offering rich opportunities for journalism in new forms. And, in the current scramble for market share, the work of the principled journalist is being lost in a din of marketing and propaganda...As a matter of public policy, a self-governing nation simply cannot do without real journalism...”