Failure at An Early Age

Fourteen years ago Louisiana had the dubious distinction of being the first state in the Union to require elementary school students to pass a state test, the LEAP, to be promoted to the next grade.  Parents, teachers, and principals in high poverty neighborhoods all over Louisiana knew what was coming, and all the "Lean on Jesus" test prep rallies that could be staged by parents and churches did not alter the plague of failure among 4th and 8th graders who were retained until they could pass the test.  Test results predictably reflected family wealth and income, as all high stakes tests have for the past hundred years at least.

Over the past decade, some children in Louisiana have been held back three times before moving from 4th to 5th grade, and one supervisor told me in 2002 of being able to hear a fourth grader's heart beating from across her desk as she had to tell him he was one of those children who would be in 4th grade for a third time the following year.

Aside from the fear of losing a parent or going blind, the greatest fear children have is failing in school.  Children's hopes and fears, however, have been filtered out of the data used in the cruel calculus of race-and-class-based testing accountability measures.

With fourteen states now signed on to another generation of inhumane schooling practices, millions of elementary-aged children have their second greatest fear realized each year as a result of a single test given on a single day that will affect, from that day forward, self-efficacy, attitudes toward school, odds of dropping out, and the future likelihood of incarceration.

The most prominent part of the failed child's future that is not affected is test score improvement over time.  Even the most avid testing-for-retention proponents' "research" finds that any temporal rise in test scores immediately following retention disappears before previously-retained third graders reach high school.  With such results, can anyone justify this kind of racist, classist, expensive, and degrading policy that represents a moral failing of monumental proportions.

Here is a clip from a journal article that sums up the research on grade retention, via Susan Ohanian:

The practice of retaining students in a grade has been extensively studied over several decades and the preponderance of results show that retained students do worse academically than comparable students who are promoted. Retention has also been shown to have negative effects on personal adjustment, attitudes towards school and school drop out rates. (Dawson and Rafoth, 1998). A sample of the research findings on retention:

• Some groups of students are more likely to be retained than others. Those at highest risk for retention tend to: be Black or Hispanic, have late birthdays (e.g., August, September, October), have developmental delays and/or attention problems, live in poverty, live in a single-parent household, have parents with low educational attainment, or have changed schools frequently (National Association of School Psychologists, 1998).
• Early retentions are not better than later ones. There is no evidence of positive effects on school achievement or personal adjustment by such practices as delayed entry into school, kindergarten retention, or transitional classes.
• Reading is the primary academic problem for which students are retained.
• Initial achievement gains may occur during the first year of retention, but a consistent finding across many research studies is that such achievement gains decline within 2-3 years. Retained children either do no better or perform more poorly that similar groups of promoted children. This is true whether children are compared to same-age or same-grade students who were promoted. One of the reasons that teachers often underestimate the negative effects of retention is that these effects may not show up until the student is in another grade or school.
• Children who are developmentally delayed are most likely to be harmed by retention. Particularly at the first grade level, large percentages of retained children are either subsequently retained again or are placed in special education.
• Retention is associated with significant increases in behavior problems, with problems becoming more pronounced as children reach adolescence.
• Students who are retained drop out of school at a much higher rate than promoted students even controlling for prior achievement, grades and attendance (Roderick, 1995). This finding is true whether the retention occurs early or late in their school career. For students who have been retained twice, the likelihood of dropping out increases by 90% (Task Force on Education of Young Adolescents, 1989).
• A recent national longitudinal study shows that the use of high stakes 8th grade tests is associated with sharply higher drop-out rates, especially for students at schools serving mainly low SES students (Reardon, 1996).
• Asked to rate stressful experiences, a group of students rated only blindness and death of a parent as more stressful than being retained in school (Byrnes and Yamamoto, 1984).

Some have argued that retention research has not looked at what has been called "retention with remediation." They correctly point out that a few studies have provided some support for retention. However, Holmes (1990) points out that these studies are similar in that they occurred in suburban settings, and included few, if any, disadvantaged students. Most retained students had average IQs and near-average reading skills. 

Retained students were not recycled through the standard curriculum but were placed in special classes with low teacher/pupil ratios and given considerable extra help. It should be noted that most of these successful retention studies did not provide remediation for the at-risk promoted children with whom they compared the retained children. In those that did, promoted at-risk children with extra help did better than retained children with extra help.

William Romey has pointed out that it's ironic that, "Retaining a child who hasn't passed a certain level at the end of June isn't really retention at all. It is moving the child clear back to the beginning of the year he or she has failed rather than working with the individual child at his or her actual achievement level." (Romey, 2000, p. 632). Romey suggests that children do not need to repeat an entire grade when they are missing part of the material-they just need to practice some of the material longer.

Despite the consistent research findings that retaining students does not improve long-term achievement and will actually increase the chances of dropping out of school, the SAS emphasizes retention as a way of helping students.

References

American Educational Research Association (1999). Standards for educational and psychological testing. Washington, DC: Author.

American Educational Research Association (2000). AERA position statement concerning high-stakes testing in PreK-12 education. [On-line]. Available: www.aera.net/about/policy/stakes.htm.

American Psychological Association (1997). Learner-Centered psychological principles: A framework for school redesign and reform. Revision prepared by a Work Group of the American Psychological Association's Board of Educational Affairs (BEA), November 1997.

Byrbes, D. and Yamomto, K. (1984). Grade repetition: Views of parents, teachers, and principals. Logan,UT: Utah State School of Education.

Cummins, J. (1984) Bilingualism and special education: issues in assessment and pedagogy. San Diego, CA: College-Hill.

Dawson, M. M. & Rafoth, M. A. (1991). Why student retention doesn't work. Streamlined Seminar, 9, 3.

Heubert, J. P. & Hauser, R. M. (Eds.). (1999). High stakes: Testing for tracking, promotion, and graduation. Washington: National Academy Press. [Also on-line document]. Available: www.nap.edu/books/0309062802/html/ index.html

Holmes, C. T. (1990). Grade level retention effects: A meta-analysis of research studies. In L. A. Shepard & M. L. Smith (Eds.) Flunking grades: Research and policies on retention. New York: Farmer.

Jones, M. G., Jones, B. D., Hardin, B., Chapman, L., Yarbough, T., & Davis, M. (1999) The impact of high stakes testing on teachers and students in North Carolina, Phi Delta Kappan, 81, 3.

Linn, Robert L. (2000, March). Assessments and Accountability. ER Online [On-line serial], 29(2). Available: www.aera.net/pubs/er/arts/29-02/linn01.htm.

Marzano, R. J., Brandt, R. S., Hughes, C. S., Jones, B. F., Presseisen, B. Z., Rankin, S. C., & Suhor, C. (1988.) Dimensions of thinking: A framework for curriculum and instruction. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

National Association for the Education of Young Children (1998 a) Position paper on standardized testing of young children in North Carolina. Raleigh, NC: Author.

National Association for the Education of Young Children (1998 b). Learning to read and write: Developmentally appropriate practices for young children. [On-line]. Available: www.naeyc.org/resources/position_statements/ psread0.htm.

National Association of School Psychologists (1998). Position statement: Student grade retention and social promotion. Bethesda, MD: Author. (available at www.naspweb.org).

North Carolina Association of Educators (2000, September). Does the ABCs program pass or fail? News Bulletin, 31, 2.

North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. (1999). North Carolina standard course of study. Raleigh, NC: Author.

North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. (2000a) North Carolina public schools statistical profile. Raleigh, NC: Author.

North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. (2000b) A report card for the abcs of public education, vol II, 1999-00. Raleigh, NC: Author.

Public Agenda (2000, October 5). Survey finds little sign of backlash against academic standards or standardized tests. [On-line] Available: www.publicagenda.org.

Reardon, S. (1996) Eighth-grade minimum competency testing and early high school dropout patterns. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. New York, NY.

Roderick, M. (1995). Grade retention and school dropping out: Policy debate and research questions. Research Bulletin 15. Center for Evaluation, Development and Research, Phi Delta Kappa.

Romey, W. (2000). A note on social promotion, Phi Delta Kappan, 81, 8.

Rotthacker, J. W. & Mellnik, T. (2000, August 21). Test rules get tough on school promotions. The Charlotte Observer, pp. A1, A6.

Sadowski, M. (2000, November/December). Are high-stakes tests worth the wager? Harvard Education Letter, [On-line serial]. Available: http://edletter.org/past/issues/2000-so/tests.html.

Salvia, J. & Ysseldyke, J. (1991) Assessment in special and remedial education (4th ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin

Sanford, E. E. (1996). North Carolina End-of-Grade Tests (Technical Report #1). Raleigh, NC: Department of Public Instruction.

Sattler, J. (1992). Assessment of Children. La Mesa, CA: Jerome M. Sattler.

Singham, M. (1998). The canary in the mine: The achievement gap between black and white students. Phi Delta Kappan, 79, 9.

Task Force on Education of Young Adolescents (1989). Turning points: Preparing American youth for the 21st century. Washington, DC: Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development.

U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights (2000). The use of tests when making high-stakes decisions for students: A resource guide for educators and policy makers. [On-line]. Available: www.ed.gov/offices/ OCR/testing/Testing Resource.pdf

Third Graders Face Retention in 13 States for Failing a Test

In 2000, Louisiana became the first state in the Nation to require elementary school children (4th graders), to pass a test to move on to 5th grade.  Since then hundreds of thousands of poor children have learned failure at an early age, with many of them now entering the "correctional" system of Louisiana, which is a major employer in the state.

Research shows that failing a grade is as traumatic to 3rd graders as losing a parent, but with the help of Jeb Bush's team and the lawyers from ALEC, we now have this bare-knuckled legislation to mandate 3rd grade retention in 13 states, as reported in this story at WaPo by Lyndsey Layton.

Where are the pediatricians, the child psychologists, the educational researchers who publish their important research and these horror stories in arcane journals that no one reads?  Where is the conscience of academics and the unions, who are bound by ethical code to protect children from miseducation and harm?

Here is a short list of research from Shane Jimerson's page at UC Santa Barbera.  Does anyone care about this travesty?

Synthesis of Retention Research - CSP 2001

Meta Analysis of Retention Research - SPR 2001

Characteristics & Consequences - JSP 1997

Dropout & Retention - PITS 2002

On the Failure of Failure - JSP 1999

Retention and Dropout - CSP 2002

Exploring Successful Failures - PITS 2001

Beyond Grade Retention and Social Promotion - PITS 2006

NEPC Review of Heritage Report

It's not difficult to find an edu-pundit or politician pushing reform proposals based on the so-called Florida model.  Jeb Bush pushed it as a governor and continues to push it through his foundation; Colorado Succeeds, the "business voice for education," wrote a policy paper titled, "Proving the Possible: A case study of Florida's K-12 education reforms and lessons for Colorado"; then-gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman boldly claimed "all roads lead to Florida" when it comes to education reform in bigger states; and the Education Equality Project teamed with Education Reform Now to author a review of all recent gubernatorial candidates that favored many of the same proposals.  The common claim is that Florida is closing the achievement gap with this "cocktail of reforms."

There may be some lessons to be learned from the reforms in Florida, but there's also reason to be cautious about the conclusions some have already drawn from the changes.  The Heritage Foundation, for instance, published a report, Closing the Racial Achievement Gap, praising Florida for making dramatic progress and urged other states to follow.  Here's a snippet from the abstract:

One state, Florida, has demonstrated that meaningful academic improvement—for students of all races and economic backgrounds—is possible. In 1999, Florida enacted far-reaching K–12 education reform that includes public and private school choice, charter schools, virtual education, performance-based pay for teachers, grading of schools and districts, annual tests, curbing social promotion, and alternative teacher certification. As a result of parental choice, higher standards, accountability, and flexibility, Florida’s Hispanic students are now outperforming or tied with the overall average for all students in 31 states. It is vital that national and state policymakers take the lessons of Florida’s success to heart. The future of millions of American children depends on it.

But, as you hopefully know, think tank research generally isn't peer-reviewed.  And that can lead to advocacy based on shaky grounds.  Proceed with caution.  It's always handy to keep Bracey's various literature around.  Another great resource is the National Education Policy Center.  Here's a description of Madhabi Chatterji's review of Closing the Racial Achievement Gap:

The Heritage Foundation report, Closing the Racial Achievement Gap: Learning from Florida’s Reforms, endorses a set of policies from Florida: vouchers funded by tax credits, charter schools, online education, performance-based teacher pay, grading of schools and districts primarily based on test scores of students, test-based grade retention, and alternative teacher certification. The report claims that Florida’s student achievement trends improved and gaps were substantially reduced for Black and Hispanic students because of this package of reforms. Based on these purported successes, it recommends adopting these reforms in other states. However, the central analysis compares average test scores of students in the nation versus Florida without considering key group differences, an oversight that leads to erroneous causal interpretations on effects of reforms using purely descriptive data. The report further ignores group differences resulting from the state’s mandatory grade retention policy for the weakest readers in grade 3. This policy-driven increase in grade retention rates spuriously inflated the average scores of grade 4 students on state and national assessments, making racial achievement gaps narrower. The report also fails to examine test score data on all subjects and grade levels, instead relying only on grade 4 reading, which showed the most positive results. Finally, although a great deal is known about the reform policies the report promotes, it neglects this research literature. These serious flaws call into question the report’s conclusions.

Do read the full report.

Gov. Bill Lee to Sacrifice Third Graders to Help Him in 2024?

Revised January 24, 2020

Prior to this week, the last time a Tennessee governor brought the General Assembly into Special Session to pass education legislation was January 2010, and it was all about getting more federal money to pay for the schools that state politicians are unwilling to support.  

Responding to call by Gov. Phil Bredesen (D), the TN legislature quickly met in January 2010 and passed into state law the necessary policies that would make the state a shoo-in for a half-billion dollar federal grant to be provided by Obama's Race to to the Top (RttT).  A core component of Tennessee's half-baked program was to use the money for a test score based teacher evaluation scheme, which added to Tennessee's reputation as an educational laughingstock.

Just this week, Governor Bill Lee (R), has ridden herd over another special session on education, this one ostensibly to address 1) what educational snake oil salesmen call the Covid-related "learning loss," and 2) the reading proficiency emergency at Tennessee's elementary schools.

Since "learning loss" scam is covered in this recent post, let me focus for a moment on Bill Lee's other manufactured crisis, reading literacy. 

Less than two years ago, Lee's Commissioner of Education, Penny Schwinn was providing this spin on recent NAEP results for Chalkbeat:

Tennessee jumped from 34th to 25th in fourth-grade math and moved up three spots to 31st in fourth-grade reading, according to calculations provided by the state education department. For eighth-graders, Tennessee now ranks 30th in both reading and math, up from 38th and 35th, respectively.

Legislation introduced this week by Lee's team adopts an entirely different spin on reading proficiency by TN students:

(3) In 2019, Tennessee's third grade English language arts proficiency rate was thirty-six and nine-tenths percent (36.9%);

(4) In 2019, Tennessee's eighth grade English language arts proficiency rate was twenty-seven and one-tenth percent (27.1%); and

(5) In 2019, Tennessee ranked thirty-first in the nation in fourth grade reading proficiency and thirtieth in eighth grade reading proficiency.

A couple of things are notable about these claims.  First, there are no third grade proficiency rates provided by NAEP.  Grade 4 rates, check.  Grade 8 rates, check.  No grade 3.  

Second, the mendacious and misleading NAEP proficiency rates cited by Lee's folks are simply wrong: 4th grade proficiency in 2019, according to NAEP, was 35%, and 8th grade proficiency was 32%.  

The reason that Lee's henchmen want to mislead the public with manufactured scores for 3rd graders is explained here by Amy Frogge:

. . . here’s the biggest concern about the “learning loss” bill: It will require districts to hold back third graders who are not deemed “proficient” in standardized testing. (Proficiency rates can be manipulated by the state through cut scores.) If you google the term “Mississippi miracle,” you will find that Mississippi used this very same trick to create the appearance of a sudden increase on NAEP test scores. Holding back low-performing third graders creates the illusion of huge one-time testing gains, and implementation of the bill would take place just in time for the 2023 NAEP tests. This is not about best serving the children of Tennessee; it’s about gaming the system. Furthermore, the costs for holding back large numbers of third graders, as mandated by this bill, would be astronomical.

It's not as if we don't know the harmful effects of grade retention on children.  We do.  Even so, Lee up for, um, a presidential bid? in 2024, and he has consciously decided to sacrifice the welfare of Tennessee's poorest children, who inevitably will comprise the vast majority of 3rd grade failures, for the PR boost that he hopes voters will attribute to his miraculous education interventions, just passed.

The Assault on Public Education in SC Continues: More Innovation!

How much education innovation can a high-poverty state take?

Apparently, according to former-general-without-a-second-of-experience-as-a-teacher Superintendent Mick Zais, just a little more.

As reported by Patrick Hayes at EdFirstSC (and not reported at the Charleston Post and Courier because the P&C is all about endorsing the worst possible policies for SC public schools, such as merit pay and VAM as well as TFA, charter schools, and misguided teacher evaluations), Zais

wants to delete rules that limit class size, teacher workloads, and mandatory staffing levels for teachers, guidance counselors, principals, assistant principals, and media specialists.

What is Zais’s justification for these changes? Watch for the weasel words:

His staff emphasizes that the goal is to give districts “flexibility”, but that state and federal laws also cover these topics. 

When asked how a harmless paper shuffle would add flexibility, I was told, “That’s the way Dr. Zais wants it, so that’s the way it is.”… 

The SBE and Dr. Zais have advocated for increased flexibility for school districts and schools to remove barriers to innovation and to raise student achievement.

Yep, flexibility and that ever-wonderful innovation!

Hayes notes that Zais has pushed terribly flawed teacher evaluation plans and mislabeled reading legislation grounded in retaining third graders. Zais loves Florida, but again Hayes recognizes that Zais’s affection for the Sunshine State is pretty selective:

Florida spent roughly $25 billion over the last decade bringing down class-sizes at the same time test scores were going up. Classes are capped at 18 students in K-3 and 25 students through 12th grade…. 

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush doesn’t talk about this because he didn’t want it to happen. He fought two battles to stop it, and was overruled by voters and the legislature. 

Dr. Zais talks about Bush’s mandatory 3rd grade retention policy as if it were responsible for Florida’s score gains during this period (he talks a good deal less about the hundreds of millions that were spent on reading interventions to head off retention [$130 million this year alone] and the dip in scores that occurred when this funding was cut). 

Ironically, smaller class-sizes have been directly linked to achievement gains, and retention is negatively associated with long-term outcomes.

If Zais’s education policies are implemented in SC, just who will they impact in the classroom—which children will feel the brunt of this flexibility and innovation?

• Third-grade retention will disproportionately impact children in poverty, African American and Latino/a children, and English Language learners.
• Removing class size limits will disproportionately impact children in poverty, African American and Latino/a children, and English Language learners.
• Continuing to de-professionalize teaching and committing to temporary-teachers such as TFA will disproportionately impact children in poverty, African American and Latino/a children, and English Language learners (see Charleston for proof).

See a pattern?

When political will mis-serves those with the greatest needs, that political system is broken.

The assault on public education in SC is further evidence of what really doesn’t matter—and in my home state, what really doesn’t matter includes impoverished children who have no political power.

Retention Still Harms Students, Just As It Always Has

The gross immorality of student retention based on standardized test scores continues to spread, even though the vast compendium of research consistently points to the harm caused by such practices.  Here is the latest in a long line of research that points to what the test and punish crowd has known and ignored for years.  ht to Monty Neill for this link:

Five years after a state law required school districts to make third-graders who fail the reading FCAT repeat the year, questions remain about whether the strict rule that has affected tens of thousands of students is effective.

Soon after the law was enacted, the state trumpeted stories of parents initially upset by the retention who later were pleased. But a recent Miami-Dade study that followed the first group of retained students concluded that retention only improves student achievement initially.

''It appears now that the gains have essentially disappeared,'' the study states.

A similar Broward study that tracked the first group of retained students -- who just finished seventh grade -- also found that as they have grown up, their attendance rate in school has dropped and their suspension rate has risen.

State data show that for students who have repeated third grade -- despite the extra year in elementary school -- nearly half fail the reading test as fourth-graders.

Arizona State University Professor Mary Lee Smith studied Florida's law the year after it was enacted and has continued monitoring its effects. In 2004, her policy brief recommended the law be repealed.

Four years later, Smith's objections are the same.

'The research stretching over a 60-plus-year period has consistently demonstrated the same thing: that retention in grade does not improve performance in subsequent years' achievement and bears a strong relationship to dropping out of school later,'' Smith wrote in an e-mail to The Miami Herald. ``No other body or research is so strongly one-sided, yet policy makers and politicians point to it as a way to improve performance.''

She said many other strategies, including small class sizes, high quality preschools, good teachers, remediation on academic skills before and after school and tutoring are better than retention as long as they are not teaching to the test.

Policies like Florida's dot the country. In New York City, for the last four years, third-graders who score in the lowest of four levels on English and math tests have been required to repeat the grade unless they score higher after summer school or if teachers appeal. . . .

Manhattan Institute Bogus Research on Florida Retention Policy

In September the sludge tank, Manhattan Institute, pumped out a smelly report requested by Jeb Bush to justify his immoral and abusive retention policy in Florida, which has used a single test to label hundreds of thousands of children failures at an early age and to leave them behind permanently. Walmart scholar, Jay Greene, concluded that the retention policy is actually good for children, since retention raises subsequent test scores. Leaving out for a second Greene's self-imposed blindness to the psychological damage that results from school failure, we now find that, surprise, surprise, the research is rigged, faulty, and, otherwise, sludge.

Thanks to Marty Solomon for the tip to the new evaluation of the study from the Think Tank Review Project at Arizona State. Summary findings of the review:

1. Florida’s retention policy has three major elements; it includes more than just repeating the same grade twice. Retained students are also required to attend a summer school intervention and to receive ongoing intensive reading instruction. The effects estimated by Greene and Winters include all of these experiences. This makes it impossible to isolate the effect of repeating the same grade from the effect of attending the summer intervention and of receiving intensive reading instruction.

2. While the study’s methodological approach is in general appropriate for the analysis Greene and Winters have conducted, the authors omit important information necessary to understand and evaluate the particular model they specified. Particularly problematic is the omission of key descriptive statistics about the characteristics of samples analyzed over the study’s two-year time period.

Even under the assumption that their instrumental variable regression analysis has been appropriately specified, the authors appear to misinterpret the retention effect they have estimated. The upshot of this misinterpretation is that the magnitude of both the one- and two-year retention effects are overstated.

Guess What? Pressure Cooker NCLB Testing Doesn't Raise Achievement

With millions of school children labeled failures at an early age, with soaring dropout rates (so bad that states hide them in statistical spider holes), with small hearts pounding so hard the teachers can hear them from across the desk, with puke-covered test forms secured in zip-lock bags, with disabled children hiding under beds out of shame for failing the tests, with the most committed teachers leaving education out of disgust and despair, with students and teachers taught that doing anything to pass is fine just as long as you don't get caught, with the school curriculum shrunk to exclude thinking and with school turned into a job that kids simply put up with, with segregated housing patterns and real estate prices determined by test scores, with parents blaming teachers and teachers blaming parents, and with a Katrina-sized lump of cash hauled away by textbook, tutoring, and testing companies, with American ingenuity and creativity threatened by a lock-step stupidification of school children, and with a 200 year effort to create a public system of quality schools for all children now held up to ridicule and possible replacement by a bunch of craven, ideological and know-nothing hacks, with all of this,

we now find out that high-stakes testing does not raise student academic achievement.

Who, who, will be accountable for this debacle? Who will take the blame, yes the blame, for this cynical crime against humanity?

National Study Finds No Convincing Evidence that High-Stakes Testing Pressure Leads to Increased Student Achievement

CONTACT: Teri Moblo (517) 203-2940 (email) tmoblo@mea.org or
Alex Molnar (480) 965-1886 (email) epsl@asu.edu

TEMPE, Ariz. (Tuesday, September 20, 2005) — The pressure associated with high-stakes testing has no real impact on student achievement, according to “High-StakesTesting and Student Achievement: Problems for the No Child Left Behind Act,” a study released by the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University and the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), high-stakes test scores are the indicators used to measure school and student success on a statewide basis. Low test scores can result in severe consequences for schools under this law. The underlying theory behind this type of accountability program is that the pressure of high-stakes testing will increase student achievement. But according to this study, there is no convincing evidence that this kind of pressure leads to increased student achievement.

The authors, Sharon L. Nichols, University of Texas at San Antonio, and Gene V Glass and David C. Berliner, Arizona State University, studied the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test data from 25 states. The results suggest that increases in testing pressure are related to increased retention in grade and drop-out rates. The authors found that states with the highest proportions of minority students implemented
accountability systems that exerted the greatest pressure. Thus, the negative impacts of high-stakes testing will disproportionately affect America’s minority students.

“This most recent research demonstrates that the pressure to produce high test scores as a result of No Child Left Behind hasn’t helped students to achieve more, and has served to limit the depth and breadth of what students are being taught in schools around the country,” said Teri Moblo, director of the Great Lakes Center.

Four key findings emerged from the study:

• States with greater proportions of minority students tend to implement accountability systems that exert greater pressure. An unintended consequence of this patterning is that problems associated with high-stakes testing risk disproportionately affecting America’s minority students.

• Increased testing pressure is related to increased retention and drop-out rates. High-stakes testing pressure is negatively associated with the likelihood that eighth and 10th graders will move into 12th grade.

• NAEP reading scores at the fourth- and eighth-grade levels were not improved as a result of increased testing pressure. This finding was consistent across African American, Hispanic, and White student subgroups.

• Weak correlations between pressure and NAEP performance for fourth- grade mathematics and the unclear relationship for eighth-grade mathematics are unlikely linked to increased testing pressure. While a weak relationship emerged at the fourth-grade level, a systematic link between pressure and achievement was not established. For eighth-grade performance, the lack of clarity in the relationship may arise from the interplay of other indirect factors. Inconsistent performance gains in these cases are far more likely the result of indirect factors such as teaching to the test, drill and practice, or the exclusion of lower-achieving students than pressure.

What the researchers could not find is also of great importance. Many different analyses were unable to establish any consistent link between the pressure to score high in a particular state and that state’s student performance on the NAEP. That means that claims of a clear-cut link between pressure and performance cannot be considered credible.

“A rapidly growing body of research evidence on the harmful effects of high-stakes testing, along with no reliable evidence of improved performance by students on NAEP tests of achievement, suggests that we need a moratorium in public education on the use of high-stakes testing,” said Nichols, the study’s lead author.

Eugenics is Alive and as Sick as Ever in Rockland County, New York

In defiance of common sense, core research studies, the best thinking from universities, ethical norms, and humanitarian principles, the loons in charge of schools in East Ramapo, New York have run the clock backwards by almost a hundred years to a time in America when it was cutting-edge thinking to propose identification and segregation of defective individuals that stood in the way of American aspirations for purity and perfection.

Today in East Ramapo, instead of using the crude IQ tests that Yerkes, Terman, and Goddard devised to separate the poor and the brown from others with non-defective "germ plasm," we use crude standardized achievement tests on young humans (1st graders) whose normal developmental differences would make such tests a joke, if the results were not being used to fail first graders, to segregate them, to drill them in math and reading, and to remove art, music, social studies, and science from their lives.

Can you guess the snazzy title of this test-and-segregate policy for first graders? The Gift of Time. Let's all nominate Dr. Mitchell Schwartz, retiring superintendent, for the 2008 Orwell Prize.

Can this really be happening in 2008, in America? From the NYTimes:

By WINNIE HU

SPRING VALLEY, N.Y. — With the increasing emphasis on standardized testing over the past decade, large urban school systems have famously declared an end to so-called social promotion among youngsters lacking basic skills. Last year, New York flunked 6 percent of its first graders, and Chicago 7.7 percent.

Now the 8,400-student East Ramapo school district in this verdant stretch west of the Palisades is going further, having revived a controversial retention practice widely denounced in the 1980s to not only hold back nearly 12 percent of its first graders this spring but to segregate them in a separate classroom come fall.

The special classes, which are limited to 15 students and follow a pared-down curriculum of reading, writing and arithmetic, are called the Gift of Time and come with extras like tutoring and field trips to a local farm.

School officials say that adding resources — about $2,000 per child, in a district whose average general-education spending per pupil is about $13,000 — and tailoring the lessons for low-performers works. Nearly 80 percent of the 54 first graders and 47 second graders in Gift of Time classes this past school year now read at grade level (although they are, of course, a year behind their age group); at least 30 percent of the younger group and 11 percent of the older group are above grade level, according to district evaluations performed last month.

Iraida Hada, the principal of Hempstead Elementary here, said that merely holding back students without a special program to address their needs would not have been as effective.

“How are we going to make it work the second time around, if it didn’t work the first time?” asked Mrs. Hada, whose school was one of five in the district that inaugurated the program this year. “What are we going to do for them? What are we going to change? I believe this program has afforded them another opportunity.”

But some parents have greeted the idea with skepticism, and many education experts say it doubly stigmatizes vulnerable children by combining two practices widely discredited by research: retention and tracking low-achievers.

“This is very worrisome,” said Jay Heubert, a professor of law and education at Teachers College at Columbia University, arguing that both holding back students and separating them can lower self-esteem and academic achievement, increasing the likelihood of dropouts.

Michelle Brown, 34, a certified nursing assistant, fought unsuccessfully to keep her son, Nallehc, out of the program this year for fear that he would be picked on — which he was.

“We believe that for you to have to repeat first grade, it means that you are not capable, you are a dunce child,” Ms. Brown said. “It was bad enough to repeat, and then to repeat in a Gift of Time class. I thought it was a polite way of saying he’s a special-needs child.”

The concept, often called transition classes, was tried in kindergarten in thousands of schools — including East Ramapo’s — in the 1970s and ’80s. Lorrie Shepard, dean of the School of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said such programs were generally abandoned after students failed to show significant academic gains and often developed a worse attitude toward school.

“Kids as young as kindergarten were aware that they were being held back and that what they were doing wasn’t normal,” Dr. Shepard said.

But with the federal No Child Left Behind law and a battery of state mandates increasing pressure on schools to raise test scores, efforts to end the longtime practice of promoting children based on age rather than achievement have taken on new urgency. Districts in Milford, Del., and Lakeland, Fla., are among a handful nationwide that have been experimenting with transition classes in recent years, though both dropped them in the face of parental resistance and, in Florida, concerns among teachers.

“I had a hard time putting just the low-achieving kids together,” said Betty Fitzgerald, principal of Lakeland’s Churchwell Elementary, which ran a separate class for repeating third graders for two years in response to tougher state standards. “It’s like saying, ‘You all are low kids, and you all didn’t pass.’ ”

(The Delaware schools scrapped the retention piece: low-performing kindergarteners are promoted, but grouped in a first-grade class that emphasizes basic skills)

Supporters of the separate classes say they give struggling students a chance to learn at their own pace rather than setting them up for future failure by shoe-horning them into a uniform timetable. Since the 1970s, several schools scattered around New Hampshire have placed kindergarteners in what they call readiness classes for up to a year before starting first grade; the classes are usually smaller and promote social development as much as academics.

“I feel it raises the academic bar in the entire school,” said Dillard E. Collins, principal of an elementary school in Hampstead, N.H., who enrolled his own son in a readiness class in nearby Nashua in the 1980s. “If all the children are ready to go, it’s like moving the starting line up.”

Here in Rockland County, the East Ramapo district serves a mostly poor and minority student population: nearly three-quarters qualify for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program; about 56 percent of the overall public school enrollment is black, 25 percent Hispanic and 7 percent Asian.

District officials said they revived Gift of Time classes to address a widening gap in the vocabulary and other skills of the youngest children. Similarly, the district began requiring full-day kindergarten last year for the bottom one-fifth of students.

Dr. Mitchell J. Schwartz, a psychologist who retired this spring as the district’s superintendent, said East Ramapo had similarly tried separate classes in the 1980s to address an achievement gap between boys and girls (boys were behind). He said those classes, also called Gift of Time, were successful but were eliminated after several years for financial reasons. . . .

Yesterday Congressman Miller got through the House a bill that would shut down the human rights hellholes that operate under the name of youth boot camps. Where is the bill that would put an end to the kind of publicly supported abuse and humiliation that is happening in Rockland County's first grade classes for poor children? Inspired, no less, by that policy fiasco we shall never forget as No Child Left Behind?

Some price to pay, huh, for a school privatization plan gone haywire?

Tests Drive Increase in Kindergarten Failures

What was once the child's garden is now the briar patch where children who are deemed phonemically unaware (based on the crap pseudoscience of Reid Lyon and Doug Carnine) are labeled as failures before they can ever know about success.

In Texas, where our current national policy of sanctioned child abuse began, 11,684 kindergarteners were failed in 2004 because they posed potential threats to passing rates when (and if) they reach the third grade TAKS. We have just demonstrated that our sanity and, now, our humanity bave been sacrificed on the alter of a monstrous notion of accountability--accountability where children no longer count. This will, no doubt, join the eugenics era as forming the most sordid chapters in American educational history.

A clip from an in-depth piece from the San Antonio Express-News:

Jeanne Russell and Jenny LaCoste-Caputo
Express-News The use of standardized testing as a key means to improve public school performance has been a fact of life in Texas since 1993. A lesser-known fact: More kindergarten students have been held back each year during that period.

Both the number and percentage of Texas students repeating kindergarten has inched up each year since the 1994-95 school year. Some San Antonio area districts are retaining kindergarten students at particularly high rates, despite the concerns of early childhood experts who criticize the practice as ineffective and confidence-sapping for young children.

It is not clear whether the emphasis on standardized testing performance alone has led to more 5-year-olds repeating kindergarten here. Nationally, the retention rate has remained flat. What is clear in Texas, however, is that those who teach the youngest children are feeling pressure to prepare their students, not for first grade or even for second, but for third grade, when students take the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills for the first time.

In 2003, the state mandated that third graders must pass the TAKS to move on to fourth grade.

"What we realized is that the third grade TAKS is not just a measure of your third grade, it's a measure of your kindergarten through third-grade program," said Alicia Thomas, associate superintendent for instruction in the North East Independent School District. . .

The rest here.

Tutoring Pre-Kindergarteners: Thank NCLB

Even the mainstream media is putting out occasional stories that discuss the dramatic downsides of No Child Left Behind. In the MSNBC article posted below, you'll notice the reference to the law and the testing bonanza inspired by standardized learning and fast-tracking students. The tutoring described in the article below is pushed by helicopter moms afraid their little Jimmy or Jane won't be able to academically compete with their peers - in kindergarten! It's the competition rat race, education's equivalent of "Keeping up with the Joneses." And it's gotta stop.

Want to join the anti-NCLB fight? Start with Susan Ohanian's Stop National Standards and join Joe Lucido in the Freedom in Education meeting later this month.

From MSNBC.com:

Tutoring tots? Some kids prep for kindergarten

Students under growing pressure to perform at ever-younger ages

By Jacqueline Stenson

MSNBC contributor

msnbc.com contributor

updated 7:00 a.m. PT,Tues., Aug 18, 2009

For two hours a week this summer, Krissy Rubesch has been working with a tutor on reading and math. Summer schooling isn’t unusual for kids who need a jumpstart on academics for fall, but Krissy is only going into kindergarten.

Already a pro at reading phonetic words such as “cat,” she has spent seven weeks learning about the silent “e,” letter combinations such as “sh” and other more advanced reading skills. She’s been working on addition with four-digit numbers and has done some creative writing to improve her penmanship and ability to sound out words.

Krissy, who turned 5 this month, will be among the youngest kids in class, and her mother emphasizes she isn’t trying to create a superstar student. She just wants to make sure her daughter is prepared to keep up with the other children who are learning their words and numbers, too. All of them will be expected to master various academic skills in the upcoming school year, or risk retention.

“My concern is there’s so much emphasis, probably because of No Child Left Behind, on reading and math,” says Heather Rubesch, mother of two in Kansas City, Kan., referring to the controversial education law signed in 2002 that focuses on increased academic performance and standardized testing.

While more parents are keeping the youngest kids like Krissy out another year before starting them in kindergarten — often entering them into pre-K in a practice called “red-shirting” — Rubesch decided against that for Krissy, who already attended two years of private preschool.

“She is ready and I saw no reason to hold her back,” says Rubesch. “But I do want her to have the confidence academically, especially against her peers who are almost or over a year older than her.”

Long gone are the days when parents signed their kids up for kindergarten based on whether their birthdays met the school's cut-off, and youngsters simply showed up on the first day, where they played, snacked and napped. Perhaps they had attended preschool, but if they did, they almost certainly didn’t have any summer tutoring to make sure they really were ready for kindergarten.

Today, many children go to two or three years of preschool and some stay on for another year of pre-K. Like Rubesch, some parents have begun signing their kids up for summer classes or one-on-one tutoring to improve their reading, math, writing and overall "kindergarten readiness."

It’s not hard to see why parents feel the pressure to help their kids, but is all this kindergarten preparation really necessary? Is it just one more example of over-the-top helicopter parenting? Or has kindergarten become so rigorous that kids need every possible advantage to succeed?

‘Pressure-cooker classrooms’
Critics of the state of early education say there are problems all around. The pressure, they say, largely starts at the top with efforts such as the NCLB, the federal act that pushes schools to increase performance or face penalties. That puts pressure on superintendents and principals, who put pressure on teachers, who in turn increase their focus on academics for even the youngest children.

Knowing that standards are high, parents who want the best for their kids also can pressure them in ways that aren’t productive or welcome (though Rubesch says Krissy loves her tutoring, which is given by her former preschool teacher). The pressures are trickling down into the more academic preschools, and even to new parents hoping that certain toys and music will nurture a baby genius right from birth.

“It’s like a dog chasing its tail,” says Joan Almon, executive director of the Alliance for Childhood, a nonprofit organization in College Park, Md., who formerly worked as a preschool and kindergarten teacher. “You don’t know quite where to stop this. But the kids need it to stop.”

The group released a report this spring titled “Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School,” which concludes that kindergartens have changed dramatically in the last two decades “from places where love of learning was thoughtfully nurtured into pressure-cooker classrooms where teachers are required to follow scripts, labor under unrealistic one-size-fits-all standards, and test children relentlessly on their performance. Kindergarten has ceased to be a garden of delight and has become a place of stress and distress.”

The report is based on nine studies, including three commissioned by the group that examined the state of kindergarten in New York and Los Angeles. Those three new studies showed that play materials such as blocks, sand and water tables, and props for dramatic play “have largely disappeared” from more than 250 full-day kindergarten classrooms studied. Most children had half an hour or less a day for playtime, and some got no playtime at all.

Instead, standardized testing and preparation for those tests were a daily activity in most of the classrooms, even though such tests are of “questionable validity” for kids under 8, the report says.

Today, says Almon, kindergarteners are expected to perform at the level traditionally expected of first-graders — reading, for instance, by the end of the year, despite any solid support behind the change.

“There is absolutely no research showing that children who read at age 4 or 5 do better at age 10 or 12 than children who start reading in first grade,” she says. “But there is research showing if you push 4- and 5-year-olds too hard, it backfires.”

The report points out that while there’s ongoing concern about American children catching up with their counterparts in countries such as Japan and China, specifically in areas such as science, math and technology, schooling in those countries before second grade is “playful and experiential.” And youngsters in Finland, where teens consistently score high academically, also attend play-based kindergarten and start first grade at age 7 rather than age 6.

Power of play
Play not only is a stress-reliever from all these academic pressures, Almon says, it’s also a critical way that children develop language, express their creativity, expand their social skills, solve problems and generally learn about their world — all important abilities that will help them in kindergarten and well beyond.

“Through play children take on every aspect of life,” she says, without them worrying about being judged by adults. “In their world of play, they rule supreme.”

But as kindergarten has become more academic at the expense of play, retention rates have gone up and so have extreme behavior problems, says Almon. “We think that’s coming about because the children are so stressed about expectations that are unrealistic.” Problems are surfacing in preschool too, where expulsion rates are more than three times higher than the national average for kindergarten through 12th grade, according to a Yale survey involving 40 states.

Carleton Kendrick, a Boston-area family therapist for more than 30 years, says he sees first-hand the consequences of “fast-tracking” children.

Too much pressure to perform academically from teachers and parents can lead to a range of anxiety-related complaints and psychosomatic symptoms in youngsters that normally wouldn’t show up until the teen years or later, he says. School stress can cause young children to be worried, overwhelmed, ashamed, guilty and even clinically depressed. For some, the stress can contribute to headaches, stomach upset, stuttering and insomnia.

“The parents think something is wrong with the child — and not the parents and teachers and education system,” says Kendrick.

“As a therapist who has seen many children become mentally and emotionally overwhelmed by being placed on this out of control, educational gerbil wheel, I hope that parents will wake up and say ‘no’ to hurrying their children through preschool and kindergarten,” he says.

Jodi Allen, a kindergarten teacher in North Miami Beach, Fla., says that with today’s high academic standards, she understands where anxious parents are coming from. “It used to be you had to read in first grade and now you have to read in kindergarten or you don’t go to first grade,” says Allen, who had to hold back two girls who couldn’t read well enough to pass kindergarten.

Still, she wishes parents wouldn’t worry quite so much because, after all, it is a teacher’s job to teach, and most of her students who have attended preschool are prepared enough for kindergarten. “We tell the parents at open house that [the students] don’t have to come in reading, but they feel the pressure,” she says.

As a result, it’s not uncommon for preschool kids in her area to get tutoring or at least intensive study time with their parents to prepare them for kindergarten, she says. Allen herself has been tutoring this summer for extra income.

‘A little too prepared’
Looking back now, Wendi Aarons of Austin, Texas, says she learned a lesson of her own after extensively preparing her first son, Sam, for kindergarten two years ago.

He’d already gone to a preschool that “concentrated on prepping him for kindergarten,” Aarons says, and she worked with him during the summer before he began school to further hone his skills. “By the time he started kinder, he was already reading at a second-grade level,” she says.

On one hand, knowing how to read boosted his self-esteem. “He was known as the best reader,” Aarons says. “In kindergarten, that’s like the equivalent of having a Camaro.”

But there was a downside, too. “I think he was actually a little too prepared, as he began to be very bored and unchallenged throughout the year,” Aarons says. “Kindergarten is seven hours a day in Texas, and he just didn't have enough to do.”

Aarons says she talked with the teacher about moving Sam up a grade, to challenge him more, but the teacher said he was not socially ready for that. Sam was challenged more in first grade, Aarons says, including getting extra projects to keep him busy. And while he still complained of being bored, he no longer said he didn’t want to go to school.

With her younger son, Jack, who will start kindergarten this month, Aarons has been taking “more of a casual approach.”

“He went to a preschool that was a lot more play-based,” she says, “and while I'm working on his reading with him, it's not to the extent that I did with my first son.”

For parents, one of their biggest tests is trying to figure out what’s best for their young school kids in today’s rigorous academic climate. The answers aren’t always so simple, and they certainly go beyond teaching tots the three R’s.

“It's really a fine line between over- and under-preparing,” says Aarons, “and I think a lot of parents don't know what to do, exactly.”