02 Jan 2006 - 05:44

NCLB and gifted programming

My friend Jen sent me a link to an op-ed at the Washington Post on NCLB. The author is concerned that NCLB will cause schools to have to struggle so hard to pull up their low achievers to proficiency that the educational needs of gifted kids for accelerated classes and special programming will be neglected. From the article:

Perhaps these schools, along with the drafters of NCLB, labor under the misconception that gifted students will fare well academically regardless of whether their special learning needs are met. Ironically, included in the huge body of evidence disproving this notion are my state's standardized test scores -- the very test scores at the heart of the No Child Left Behind Act. Reflecting the schools' inattention to high performers, they show that students achieving "advanced" math scores early in elementary school all too frequently regress to merely "proficient" scores by the end. In recent years the percentage of California students scoring in the "advanced" math range has declined by as much as half between second and fifth grade.

I don't know how to interpret that last statistic, actually -- "In recent years" and "as much as half" aren't specific enough. Here's what I want to know: In the last 4 years, after holding steady at 10% for many years before NCLB, has the percentage of advanced scorers fallen from 10% to 5%? Tell me something like that, and I'll start to worry about the gifted issue in particular. As it is, though, I'm going to subsume this worry into the pile of other worries I already had about NCLB.

NCLB is in many ways, I think, good legislation (for an unfunded federal mandate). I approve of the notion of assessing kids as they move through school, and holding schools accountable; and I like the way NCLB is set up to keep jurisdiction local.

My concern with NCLB is that 100% proficiency goal. I don't think 100% proficiency is attainable, so in the next 8 years until 2014, I fear that we'll see schools falling off the cliff at an accelerating rate. By that I mean that at some point, all schools will be failing to make adequate yearly progress ('AYP' in the edubuzz). How will we deal with this -- by dumbing down the tests until everyone can pass them, or by backing off of that impossible 100% goal? (My guess is that a percentage somewhere in the 90s is actually attainable with earnest work, and would represent a significant improvement in the public schools).

Anything less than 100% may not be politically feasible (think of the slogan: "Only a few kids left behind"). So getting an actual usable policy out of this may be an impossible dream. I fear that a lot of teachers and administrators are going to get burnt out in the next few years, fighting a battle they know from the beginning is unwinnable. And I am afraid the failure is going to set us back in the fight to improve standards in public schools -- an unintended consequence of demanding an unrealistic goal.

As long as I'm airing my darkest fears about NCLB, here's another one: that not only gifted programming, but other 'non-core competency' classes (such as art, music, etc.) are going to get short shrift as more and more money goes into struggling vainly to reach the 100% goal. These classes may not be as 'core' as reading and math -- but it's activities like this that keep many kids in school, and it would be very sad to leave them behind.

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"[NCLB is] an unfunded federal mandate"

Unfunded how? Any state can opt out of NCLB by giving up the Federal funds (Title 1?). Until now, there were few if any conditions attached to those funds. Bush has increased Federal funding and tied that funding to NCLB compliance.

"He who pays the piper, calls the tune". Not so?

-- VerghisKoshi - 02 Jan 2006

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Sorry, forgot to point out that it's 94%, not 100%. I'm sure that Ken DeRosa^? will be happy to explain this as necessary.

-- VerghisKoshi - 02 Jan 2006

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Another part of the problem as I see it is the inability of communities and schools to place proper blame. I think Ken and Doug did a great job over at Edwonks keeping the posters (many of them teachers) on task about who actually is responsible for the curriculums and the makeup of their classrooms. These very important choices have a major impact on student performance. Not to mention the problem of teacher ability itself.

I have found a lot of teachers and parents have a serious blindspot about this. All of the blame goes to the tests and the people making them "teach to it." Of course, they resent the state ones too, but special hostility seems to reserved for NCLB. This special hostitlity often seems to be a bit political in nature on top of it, so it just obscures the real problems for that much longer.

As far as NCLB goes, I imagine the gifted/bright students will "take care of themselves." But selfishly speaking, schools would do well to appropriately deal with these students if only to "up" their state scores. It would be a wasted opportunitity not to take advantage of such brain power, and very telling indeed, that is, if parents were paying an ounce of attention.

-- SusanS - 02 Jan 2006

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Verghis -- please explain the 94% thing, this sounds interesting. My understanding was that by 2014 every child in every school has to be passing the state assessments. Not so?

Susan, I completely agree with your statement about people harboring special resentment for NCLB. It amazes me that there are people out there who have made a special interest out of fighting NCLB (but of course, just the mention of Everyday Math makes me foam at the mouth, and that isn't exactly normal either). ED Hirsch has a whole section in his book The Schools We Need, entitled 'Killing the Messenger', examining people's resentment toward assessment tests. It was around long before NCLB. People just hate hearing the bad news.

-- CarolynJohnston - 02 Jan 2006

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IIRC, 5% of the students can be excused from having to take the test because of "learning disabilities". An additional 1% can take a substitute test devised by the state, and we can reasonably assume that this test won't be too hard. Right?

So we now have 94% of the original student population which has to take the state test, and 100% of them have to pass.

Here's a link to a longish thread that deals with this issue. There's some blood on the floor, though.

-- VerghisKoshi - 02 Jan 2006

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"ED Hirsch has a whole section in his book The Schools We Need, entitled 'Killing the Messenger', examining people's resentment toward assessment tests. It was around long before NCLB. People just hate hearing the bad news."

It's more than not wanting to hear the bad news. Much hostility to testing is fueled by educationist hostility to anything that resembles a solid, coherent curriculum.

-- CharlesH - 02 Jan 2006

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There was a detailed explanation of the 94% in a thread called "More Upset Than I Like to Admit" dated 26 Oct 2005 by Jenny D., but it seems to have vanished (link points to /dev/null).

Ah well!

-- VerghisKoshi - 02 Jan 2006

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EduWonk^? has a good proposal for ensuring that gifted and bright children are not ignored in the NCLB process:

http://www.eduwonk.com/archives/2005_12_25_archive.html#113588173741488822

-- SusanJ - 02 Jan 2006

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Under the current law, 5% of students can be excused from taking the test due to absence. Also, up to 1% of students can take an alternate assessment exam devised by the state. Also, accomodations can be provided to to other disabled kids taking the tests.

Regarding the unfundated mandate, NCLB maintained the existing title I funding and then added sufficient additional funds for the new testing and compliance requirements. It is fully funded.

What NCLB doesn't do is throw large piles of money at schools, like they want, to bring them into compliance with NCLB. The argument is that schools have sufficient funds to do that already and should have been doing it all along under the existing law which was being ignored.

-- KDeRosa - 02 Jan 2006

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There are a few anecdotal cases I know of of gifted students who were determidly failing and tearing up the school out of sheer boredom, until they got some tougher education and turned into model students.

So I don't think that all gifted children will "take care of themselves".

On the other hand, teaching everyone to read and do basic maths seems so much more important as they are so useful for the rest of life - and open up vast new possibilites for future learning.

-- TracyW - 02 Jan 2006

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Gifted kids often don't automatically do well in the classroom. They get bored very easily, (which can lead, especially in boys, to a false diagnosis of ADD/ADHD) and any that have any other problems that they might have just compound this process. For example, my sister has an IQ of 163, but severe emotional problems and very poor motor skills. She got expelled from one school and suspended indefinately from another. She did well in the first school until one teacher insisted on the students who finished early sitting still and being quiet (never a good idea with young kids - they were grade 3s) and seemed surprised when Julie acted up, in the way that only someone like Julie can.

Speaking from my family, gifted kids are some of the most difficult kids to work with and get along with, because they get bored so easily, and they often feel smarter than the adults around them. Unless they're challenged intellectually, a lot of gifted kids will act up to varying degrees in class. A lot of them will just switch off. They certainly don't 'take care of themselves'.

-- SamanthaRawson - 02 Jan 2006

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What I meant by "taking care of themselves" was in reference to a standardized test measuring a minimum aptitude, not their overall schooling. They're not likely to fail a NCLB measure unless there already are some serious emotional problems from being held back.

I absolutely don't believe gifted kids can "take care of themselves" in the schools, but I recognize that this is a touchy subject amongst teachers and other parents. You have to tread carefully when advocating for the gifted. I got into it with a teacher over at another site one time about this and she was totally against gifted kids getting anything "extra." It was a little scary since she was a teacher. I just prayed my son wouldn't ever get her.

-- SusanS - 02 Jan 2006

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"[NCLB is] an unfunded federal mandate"

Yep. I hear this too. I usually tell them to look at the test and tell me what it is about meeting that trivial standard that falls into the unfunded mandate category, unless doing one's job is an unfunded mandate. The last I checked in our area, the teachers are getting paid.

If there are specific aspects of NCLB that are unreasonable, then those should be addressed separately.

-- SteveH - 03 Jan 2006

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"As long as I'm airing my darkest fears about NCLB, here's another one: that not only gifted programming, but other 'non-core competency' classes (such as art, music, etc.) are going to get short shrift as more and more money goes into struggling vainly to reach the 100% goal."

Of course this is happening right now at our schools. They will never admit it, but it doesn't pay to work with the better students. Good 'ol Differentiated Learning saves the day. They can pretend that they are doing something for the better students because it has a name. I have mentioned before that they used to call it Differentiated Instruction, but that implied that the teachers are supposed to do something.

We don't have pull-out or TAG programs because that would send the wrong signal to the lowest achievers. Everyone of all abilities are in the same classroom. What does this mean for the better students? Differentiated Homework Enrichment. They used to call it an Academic Ceiling, but they changed it to Performance Ceiling. Once again, the onus is shifted from the school and teachers to the student. Anyone can get a great education if they do it themselves.

Last week, our town's newspaper had an article that talked about how our K-8 schools assessed the performance of their kids as they started high school. The schools proclaimed that the kids "made the grade". Quite blatant, but being a small town, I don't expect anyone (including myself) will have the temerity to challenge the propriety and merit of doing a self-assessment.

They did mention that some of "our" kids had trouble in a couple of sections of math and suggested only that they were not placed properly. In other words, if those kids were put in an easier course, their grades would be better. Why not put all of our kids in the easiest courses and then they can report that our kids are doing fantastic work in high school.

This is all so pathetically incredible that I don't even know where to begin to change it. $12,000+ per year per student and 25 percent of the kids go to other schools.

-- SteveH - 03 Jan 2006