We have all been living with NCLB (No Child Left Behind) for so long, that it's beginning to get hard to remember that there was ever a time before the current obsession with standardized testing. My first day at Arlington High School, I was given a set of keys, a teacher textbook and was thereafter pretty much left on my own. I set my own pacing, made my own lesson plans and tests. Ha! Those were the days!
A bunch of teachers all working in relative isolation, however, is not necessarily the best environment for students at the high school level. Although I very much resent a lot of the requirements and implications of NCLB, I think some of it really has been good for me and for the general profession of teaching. However, a great deal of it is misguided at best, and downright damaging at worst. First, let's turn to the good stuff.
Riverside Unified School District (RUSD) many years ago bought into the whole Professional Learning Communities (PLC) idea of education. Originated by some guy in the midwest (where schools have a lot more money, smaller class sizes and more homogenous student population, but never mind that!) whose bright idea was that ideas for change needed to be generated by teacher-led groups, with teachers determining what needed to be done and how. My PLC has four US history teachers, with everyone represented, from AP students to English Learners and Special Ed. I really, really enjoy working with colleagues, sharing ideas, devising common assessments and coming up with ideas to help our students. It's such a big change from what I encountered when I first began teaching. Getting out of our classrooms and together with other teachers has been, on the whole, a great change. PLC would not have happened with NCLB, so in this respect, NCLB rocks.
NCLB and it's close cousin the CST/API (state tests and state test ranking), reward schools more for bringing the lowest performing groups (English Learners, Special Ed, low socio-economic status) up and reward less for bringing up the scores of the highest kids, like GATE or AP. Given that AP parents tend to be the most involved in the school (squeaky wheel gets the grease!), historically their kids would often receive a disproportionate share of school resources. Those whose parents were too busy working, or unaware of what their kids could receive in school, often got ignored. You hardly heard a word about English Learners when I first began at Arlington in 1998. Now you know who they are, their level of English proficiency and are constantly showered with ideas on how to raise their test scores. Although I know I wouldn't be happy about this new allocation of time and resources if I had an AP kid at the high school level (or GATE kid at the elementary school level), I think it is a positive thing to help those kids who need our help the most. I do not believe our focus would've shifted to these sub-groups were it not for the pressure to raise test scores fostered by the rise of NCLB.
Ok, so how bad is NCLB? Where to begin? the list is so long, and the complaints so numerous, they could easily be (and have been) the subject of book-length treatises. I will focus my enmity on perhaps the most significant aspect of it; i.e. the never-ending obsession with test scores.
CST (California Standards test), at least at the high school level, are administered over the course of two weeks, just after spring break. In practical terms, this means that while we once had an entire YEAR to teach our curriculum, we now have to cram it all into three quarters. Once testing is over, we pretty much have the rest of the school year (6-8 weeks) to do whatever we want. CSTs are over, so no one really cares.
Besides the obvious time crunch this pacing chart (racing chart?) imposes, it directly impacts classroom instruction in that it discourages more in-depth, project-based assessments (i.e. what we used to call "authentic assessments") in favor of more direct instruction and multiple-choice common assessments. In the past, I would often have students complete projects (e.g. skits, metaphor posters), as a way to show me what they knew. Kids who might never score well on a multiple choice exam (creative kids, special ed. kids, english learners) would then get a chance to show me what they DID know, versus an exam which only pointed out what they didn't know. Unfortunately, these projects are not a comfortable fit with the new educational paradigm because they are (a) very time intensive and (b) not as easily quantifiable as a multiple choice exam. I used to do projects at the end of every unit, but unfortunately this year I've had a chance to only do one. This is the bad of NCLB. So what is the ugly?
Now that standardized common assessments are the primary vehicle for measuring student achievement, the pressure has come down on teachers to raise the percentage of our final grade that comes from testing. Only a few years ago, if a kid tried on their classwork, homework and projects, they could do poorly on tests, but still be able to pass my class. Unfortunately this is no longer the case. We have all been pressured to raise test scores to at least 40% (in my case) or up to 80% of the final grade. As one administrator pointed out, how can a kid pass your class, even while doing poorly on his tests? He obviously isn't mastering the material. If he isn't passing our assessments, then he certainly won't do well on the CSTs. Heck, last year they even had us plot our grade distribution on a chart with our CST scores to see if they aligned. So really, instruction and grading are all driven by CSTs.
This is especially unfortunate for the special ed student, the creative student, the student who just doesn't do well on tests. I have had special ed kids that could tell me (or draw for me) everything I wanted to know about the age of imperialism, but who will never, ever be able to ace a test. It's not a question of intelligence or "high incidence academic vocabulary." This makes me so, so very sad for my special ed kids who work their rear ends off trying to get at least a "C" for me, and every test they take is dismal. They do know their stuff, but the system is working against them. It's so frustrating for them and for me. Given the pressure coming from all levels to tighten down on teaching, teachers and test-taking, I don't see this changing any time soon. I predict that within the next ten years, at least part of my raise and/or evaluations will be tied to CST scores. And a lot of the joy of teaching is being slowly leached away.
It's pretty much mostly in the 4th quarter, when the pressure is off, that I get to experiment with different types of lessons, different types of "authentic assessment" projects that I don't have the time to do during the rest of the year. Other than the pro forma district common assessment that I have to administer at the end of the year, I can pretty much structure the pacing, depth and scope of my instruction for those blessed six weeks. it's utterly exhilarating and simultaneously really tragic, because it's the kind of teaching I'd like to do all year long! They say that educational philosophy goes in cycles, but I don't see this cycle of test-obsession and NCLB driven mania changing or fading away any time soon. That makes me really sad. I wish I was wrong about it, but I think I'm right.
