Five years after federal No Child Left Behind rules were imposed nationwide, Montana educators are still digging. But optimism is fading.
“I've found it lacking in funding, lacking in its ability to understand rural states, and lacking in its ability to get out of paperwork and testing and actually improve education,” Montana Superintendent of Public Instruction Linda McCulloch said last week. “Our office spends a huge amount of time on paperwork. I'd like to be spending it on teaching.”
Most recently, the state won an argument in basic mathematics by convincing the U.S. Department of Education that allowing only 1 percent of a school district's children to use alternative tests was unworkable. The alternative tests are for children with serious physical or learning disabilities. If just one of Woodman Elementary's 28 students was severely disabled, he would count as 3.5 percent of the student body - swamping the federal threshold.
In an Aug. 7 letter, Education Department officials acknowledged that 84 percent of the state's school districts would fail that requirement, so they granted an exception “based on Montana's extraordinary rural nature.”
Missoula County Public Schools Superintendent Jim Clark often resorts to a rural saying to express his opinion about the program he calls “Nickelbee.” It goes: You don't make a calf any heavier by weighing it.
“We weigh way too much,” Clark said. “We do test our kids too much, in fourth grade especially. They've got the NAEP, ITBS and MontCAS all this year.”
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, Iowa Test of Basic Skills and Montana Comprehensive Assessment System are all tools in the nationwide effort to account for children's learning. Nevertheless, Clark said, the emphasis on educational accountability has been good for Montana's children.
“I don't think it's been busy work,” Clark said of the NCLB requirements. “I think our teachers have been working harder than they did before trying to meet those goals. It's a tough road, and some of our kids don't come as well prepared as we'd like them to.”
At C.S. Porter Middle School, the accountability issue has been a source of motivation. Porter made headlines two years ago when it failed to make adequate yearly progress, or AYP, for the second year in a row. While 64 percent of its students scored proficient or advanced on their tests, a subgroup of 60 low-income students had only 31 clear that bar. Porter needed 33 of them to make AYP.
Porter Principal Gail Chandler said the school responded by turning the tests into a tool.
“We took last year's test, ripped it apart, found the kids who were going to need assistance and placed them in a reading class,” Chandler said. “I know there's a lot of negativity to NCLB. But what is important is we should have some accountability to show we're learning what we should be learning. We take a positive approach: What is it the kids need to know to be successful?”
To do that, Porter teachers have drafted learning goals and posted them on the walls of every classroom, in terms the kids can understand. They've also drilled into the test answers themselves, looking for places where Porter's lesson plans are out of sync with what's expected.
For example, math teachers found they needed to move more algebra concepts to the start of the school year so students would be ready for algebra questions in April. Art, history and science teachers have been finding ways to build math and reading skills into their lessons, for double value.
“I don't think they're feeling the pinch,” Chandler said. “They're asking what they can do to help. If you've gone through the process as much as Porter has, you know the accountability is still there. NCLB may go away, but the accountability is still there.”
Those efforts have hit a speedbump this year at the state level. Last spring, NCLB required states to test every grade from third to eighth, plus sophomores in high school. That was up from the previous tests in grades four, eight and 10. The shift from three testing grades to seven was the main reason many states delayed release of their AYP scores beyond the regular August deadline. Montana's 2005-06 results are expected on Jan. 22.
MCPS Assistant Superintendent Gail Becker said the school district has become much better at administering and preparing for tests. But that has been a dubious distinction.
“We've become focused on getting at big ideas and learning targets, and understanding what the benchmarks are,” Becker said. “Our principals are using data analysis to discover weaknesses in teaching. It might prompt us to change the sequence of math lessons (to cover topics certain to be on the tests).
“But the tradeoff is - if we're putting this much into it and we're not getting that much from it that informs us how to do things better - I don't know. We're getting test scores one time a year. That tells us some things, but doesn't tell us near enough. We need to know if they're progressing or not progressing, so you can intervene right then and there.”
In the meantime, teachers have been pruning their lesson plans of many favorite side topics or projects that don't have a firm connection to the test requirements.
“We've had to become more efficient in our teaching,” Becker said. “If it doesn't tie into a standard, or address a big idea, we have to ask: ‘Why are you teaching it?' ”
NCLB is due for reauthorization this year. Congress may take it up in 2007, or extend it as is for a year or two - to get past the 2008 presidential election. However it happens, Montana educators generally agree on how to improve it.
“It's unrealistic that we're all going to be at 100 percent proficiency by 2014,” Lowell Elementary School Principal Cindy Christensen said. “I think our teachers are tremendously stressed out about this.”
What they want, Christensen and her colleagues said, is an accountability system that understands all children won't hit an arbitrary threshold by an arbitrary deadline. Instead, they would prefer a model that measures how much a child has progressed from day to day and year to year, delivered in ways that allow teachers to adjust their lessons accordingly. Annual tests are part of that, but not all of it.
“Plus you have another area that Congress has not dealt with at all,” OPI's McCulloch said. “In Montana, we have pockets of severe, generational poverty, especially on our American Indian reservations. We have parents and grandparents with very low education levels, where the unemployment rate is
50 percent or 60 percent. That's where our test scores are the lowest. To say within the four walls of the school you're going to fix everything is unrealistic.”
At the moment, there's little option but to keep digging. Next fall, Montana must add science tests to its MontCAS battery, in addition to reading and math. And with additional classes added into the testing pool, the chances of failing to make AYP on some subgroup grow higher.
“I didn't write the law,” McCulloch said. “I'm just following it.”
Reporter Rob Chaney can be reached at 523-5382 or at rchaney@missoulian.com
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