Implications of Michigan’s NCLB Waiver for Macomb County
August 21, 2012
The need for the USDOE to grant NCLB waivers arises from the fact that NCLB was deeply flawed from the beginning, as so many of us pointed out a decade ago. Michigan’s approved NCLB waiver plan essentially "kicks the can down the road" by continuing the same flawed assumptions built into NCLB. Both NCLB and the NCLB waiver are built on the assumption that if you measure student performance on various standardized assessments, and hold particular teachers and administrators accountable for that performance, then administrators and teachers will rise to the challenge and bring up student performance. It assumes that teachers and administrators could do much better than they are already doing, but they need to be incentivized to do so through high-stakes sanctions-- closing or restructuring schools, firing principals and teachers, etc. NCLB operationalized and exercised these sanctions, yet NCLB did not produce the intended outcomes-- improvement in student performance. That's because it was built on the assumption that current teachers and administrators were the core of the problem. In some instances they might have been and might be a small part of the problem, but the changes imposed by both NCLB and the NCLB waiver do not produce changes in teachers and administrators that would improve school performance—quite the contrary—and they certainly do not address societal problems that impact school improvement over which teachers and administrators have little if any control.
NCLB did not provide the gains it was supposed to provide, which is why we now need waivers. While NCLB did not bring the predicted improvements, it did decimate the curriculum of many schools, particularly low-income urban schools and suburban inner ring schools that welcomed families fleeing the low-income urban schools. In too many cases it pushed out or diminished all areas of the curriculum except reading and math, it led schools to teach to the test-- to focus resources on test-taking skills, not on critical thinking or creativity,even in the highly tested areas. And it discouraged quality teachers from teaching in high need areas, because of the risk of being designated as "failing." The Michigan waiver continues the exact same logic—although incorporating some other areas, it continues to focus quite narrowly on achievement on tests, and it punishes schools that do not produce gains without giving them the means to produce gains, and it labels teachers who teach in high need areas and in inner ring suburban schools,"failing".
The new system embedded in Michigan’s approved NCLB waiver, as you know, uses a new term for the lowest performing five percent of schools—these are now called priority schools—and establishes a new designation of FOCUS school.
The Focus school designation is applied to districts that contain schools that score in the bottom 10 percent on so-called achievement gap measures. Now, the achievement gap has typically been talked about in terms of national achievement gaps in performance by various groups—racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, ability, gender, etc. It is not a term that can meaningfully be applied to individual schools, even though this is precisely what the focus designation does. Why? Well, as you know, the formula for assessing which schools are the worst performing in terms of achievement gaps is based in measuring a school’s top 30 percent versus its bottom 30 percent. But some schools are fairly homogeneously European American and middle class. Their schools are less likely to show serious achievement gaps between the highest and lowest 30 percent. And other schools are homogeneously African American, or Latino, and low-income. These schools, too, are statistically unlikely to see the largest gaps between the top and bottom 30 percent. The schools that are most likely to fall into the FOCUS trap are those schools that, intentionally or by accident, have become diverse.
When we—and by we here, I mean educators and advocates for less-privileged students-- talk about achievement gaps, and we are serious about eliminating them, we are not saying that the problem is a school’s diversity. We would not say that the whitest schools have done a good job of eliminating achievement gaps. Yet they will score well on the FOCUS measure. They have succeeded, intentionally or not, in keeping out diversity. And they will get a good score on the focus measure. We would not say, either, that urban schools populated by low income students of color have successfully addressed achievement gaps. But the focus system would lead us to believe they have. The focus system will therefore not achieve what it says it is intended to achievement—address achievement gap issues. If it incentivizes anything, it incentivizes segregation.
We used to call the diversification of school populations within a single school building something else—integration, and we saw it as a positive outcome—something to encourage. But the focus designation does the opposite. It in effect provides a diversity penalty, which NCLB also did by the way, in that it has the perverse effect of punishing districts that are highly diverse, linguistically, socioeconomically, racially, ethnically, etc. We know that what test scores best predict is the socioeconomic status of the family of the child. And, in the U.S., race, ethnicity, linguistic diversity, often function as proxies for socioeconomic status. Therefore the worst thing for a school to do, as incentivized by the Focus system, is to bring diversity to its school.
If a school is to protect its Title I funds for its own use, it is most likely to do so by taking measures to homogenize its population—it should aim for a target population—low-income students of color, middle-income mostly European American families, etc. Any deviation from this is an invitation to be designated as a Focus school, which takes your Title I funds in your district and your school buildings away from the professionals you have entrusted—your teachers, curriculum specialists, and so on—and puts them in the hands of much less-qualified individuals and entities at the state level to engage in unproven practices, or even practices that we know from rigorous research have no effect or are even known to exacerbate achievement gaps.
Believing in the Focus School and Focus District designation system means believing that the state, and not the district or school, knows how to address achievement gap issues. That there are known interventions that they have access to and are ready to use, but that you do not already have access to and are not ready to use. These strategies, you are asked to believe, are vested in experts who will come to your schools and districts and will show you how to use them and will monitor your compliance. The idea here is that the state is “getting tough with you” and letting you know that “it takes the achievement gaps seriously” unlike you, and is ready to force you to implement the strategies that work that it has that you for some reason won’t implement.
The problem is that the state does not have and is not using strategies that work. Its claims to possess strategies that work rely on ideologically driven and flawed studies of alleged school success in places like Florida and North Carolina and New York and Chicago and New Orleans. I say alleged-- the claims of success by Jeb Bush in Florida, Arne Duncan in Chicago, Paul Vallas and others in New Orleans, Joel Klein in New York—despite their continued celebration by those celebrity reformers and those who amplify their claims in the media—have been thoroughly debunked in the research literature. They were fabrications, but thanks to a parade of such celebrities through our state legislature a little over a year ago, including Jeb Bush, Michelle Rhee and others, these fabrications now form the basis of the interventions that will be brought to your schools and districts.
And the irony is that when the state’s experts come to your districts and compel you to implement their disproved interventions, and those don’t succeed in bringing substantial improvement, it is not the intervention experts who will be held accountable—it is you. You will be required to set aside even larger portions of your Title I funds for them, so they can monitor your imposed inability to make progress.
Another aspect of the NCLB waiver is the requirement to engage in high stakes evaluations of teachers and administrators that tie their evaluation to their students' performance on standardized tests. The waiver mandates this and there is a group working away at this right now in the Governor's office—the Michigan Council on Educator effectiveness. The problem is that no system currently exists that reliably and validly connects student performance and performance growth with teacher effectiveness. Even the creators of the most sophisticated models of measuring teacher effectiveness—for example, at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research—say that their measurement systems should not be used in high stakes decisions concerning teacher effectiveness. They should not be used for decisions about promotion, retention, and compensation for teachers. Why? Because the margin of error in the systems means that we can count on ineffective teachers being called effective and effective teachers being called ineffective. The measures will show the same teacher oscillating from effective to ineffective and back to effective wildly, even if the teacher continues teaching in the same way. Such measures of teacher effectiveness will also give parents and communities false confidence about the abilities of their teachers. They will falsely come to believe that teachers who have been labeled effective are so, and that teachers who have been labeled ineffective are so. The worst thing that might happen is that teachers might try to improve their effectiveness ratings—think about how crazy it would be to attempt to improve on a measure that is wildly unpredictable and has very little to do with your own performance. The safest thing for most teachers and administrators to do, of course, will be to focus relentlessly on teaching to the tests—narrowing the curriculum further, focusing on the most tested areas, and on the most dumbed-down versions of those most-tested areas—five paragraph essays, test-taking skills, and drill sheets as opposed to critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity.
And let’s not forget the new pathways to teaching. In Detroit, in the so called new statewide system for persistently low achieving—now priority-- schools, the EAA or Educational Achievement Authority, is hiring 600 new teachers, after firing all the old ones, with approximately 200 slated to be from Teach for America, as a result of contractual obligation between TFA and the EAA.
Teach for America teachers have been the subject of much research over the past decade, so we now know a good deal about their preparation, their effectiveness, and their longevity in the field. Teach for America teachers are actually not trained as teachers before entering their own classrooms. A Teach for America teacher is typically a recent graduate from an Ivy League or Big Ten school who agrees to spend two years as the primary teacher in a classroom before moving on to other more enduring career pursuits. Having Teach for America as an item on a resume is deemed to be a very smart career move, and the demand for TFA spots by graduating seniors at elite universities is quite high.
Teach for America teachers, including the roughly 200 who are expected to begin teaching in the EAA this Fall, have a bachelor’s degree in an academic field but have no coursework or experience in being a teacher. Teach for America teachers go through a five-week summer crash course experience before being put in their own classroom. This is quite different than the preparation of traditional teachers, and the results are fairly predictable. While a TFA teacher stands alone before a classroom of kids in some of the most challenging school environments in the United States after only five weeks of summer training, a traditionally-trained teacher enters her or his own classroom only after a carefully planned and executed program of study that includes coursework on effective pedagogy and a number of field (practice) experiences alongside veteran teachers. A culminating experience for most traditional teacher candidates is a year of student teaching under the daily supervision of a master teacher. Throughout this experience the student teacher observes the cooperating teacher working with the same group of students with whom she or he will soon be working. The teacher candidate then slowly takes on teaching responsibilities, first just an hour here and an hour there, and eventually a few hours each day. A TFA teacher has none of this coursework and none of this structured classroom teaching experience.
The research literature tells us that TFA teachers do not perform as well as traditionally trained teachers in urban high poverty classrooms. And they don’t stay as long either. For example, TFA teachers in New Orleans, the city whose reforms inspired the creation of the EAA in Detroit, often don’t make it through their first year, leaving their students with a string of substitute teachers to round out the year.
One of the most trusted and respected educational scholars, Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford, had this to say in a rigorous, peer-reviewed study about TFA’s lack of placement with an experienced teacher:
“For students to benefit from their teachers each year, alternative programs and other nontraditional pathways into teaching should ensure that new recruits-in-training can practice under the close supervision of expert veterans, so that their students—from their very first days in the classroom—have the benefit of a classroom informed by a prepared teacher’s advice and counsel, rather than being put at a disadvantage. Even if such teachers improve their effectiveness with training over several years, the students have only one opportunity to experience second grade, for example, and cannot afford to lose ground in acquiring basic skills even for a single year.”
You may say that that’s Detroit, and TFA has little to do with inner ring suburban schools. But don’t forget that priority schools can come under the control of the state reform and redesign office, and that so far all schools that have been moved into state-wide district status for low performance have ended up in the EAA. The EAA claims that schools beyond Detroit will be incorporated soon, possibly next year.
Why are they doing this? What should be done?
Think about your ultimate responsibility as a public entity—to your students, and particularly to your most vulnerable students. The endgame is to privatize your school and your district. Whether your school or district formally retains the designation “public” or not, you will see an increased transfer of accountability and governance of schools away from elected local school boards and professional decision makers in your district, and more to external authorities who are not accountable to local voters or to the education profession and educational professionals.
In the end, they will make decisions about your curriculum and your finances, but you will be held responsible for the outcomes.
Become active in voicing your concerns to the state legislature, to the media, everywhere. It is long past the time that we can afford to keep thinking that this will all blow over soon, and that best way to survive is to go along to get along.
Slides: Implications of Michigan’s NCLB Waiver for Macomb County