Swift & Change Able

In yesterday’s New York Times, Diana Jean Schemo wrote about the difficulties Los Angeles schools are having in meeting the No Child Left Behind law’s minimal standards for student proficiency in reading and math (while meanwhile, others are opining that these standards are too low and uneven across states, but that’s another story).

As Alexander Russo points out, at first glance Schemo’s piece seems skimpy, perhaps even unfair and unbalanced. But, as Russo also points out, Schemo’s piece is actually quite rich.

The set-up: one almost starts to feel sorry for the State of California in general and Los Angeles schools in particular when one reads statements like the following:

“For chronically failing schools….the No Child Left Behind law, now up for renewal in Congress, prescribes drastic measures: firing teachers and principals, shutting schools and turning them over to a private firm, a charter operator or the state itself, or a major overhaul in governance.”

I say “almost” because soon enough Schemo delivers the punchline:

“At Woodrow Wilson High one recent morning, teachers broke into small groups over coffee studying test scores for areas of weakness. But there were limits to what they would learn.

“The teachers analyzed results for the entire school, not for their own students. Roberto Martinez, the principal, said he had not given teachers the scores of their own students because their union objects, saying the scores were being used to evaluate teachers.

“And who suffers?” asked Veronica Garcia, an English teacher at Wilson. “The kids suffer, because the teacher never gets feedback.””

So let me get this straight. States, as pointed out yesterday by Ken DeRosa, have been using tests for decades. They have been required to do so under federal law since 1994. They have been required to do so annually in grades 3-8 under federal law since 2002. They are on Capitol Hill simultaneously complaining that there is too much testing and asking for more testing ("local” assessments they say they want to use for “formative” purposes although there is the feeling among many that they just want to monkey-wrench state accountability systems).

And yet, teachers still don’t use those tests to inform instruction? States and school districts (who are the ones that select which tests are administered in the first place) don’t require that they use tests for such purposes, even though teachers such as Veronica Garcia are hungry for the information and point out that in the power struggles among adults, it’s the kids who suffer?

Maybe a change in governance for such school systems isn’t such a crazy idea after all.