Why Civil Rights Groups oppose the Obama Education Agenda

Two weeks ago in a dispute over California legislation, Sacramento Bee writers claimed that the defeat of SB 1285     was a defeat for "civil rights" groups.  I questioned, who were these so called "civil rights" groups.  Here is what major civil rights groups are saying about education.

Dear Deborah,

In late July, the nation's leading civil rights organizations issued a withering critique of the Obama administration's education policies. Did you see it? It would be understandable if most people never even heard about it because of the circumstances under which it was released. The statement was issued by the NAACP, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the National Urban League, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the National Coalition for Educating Black Children, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the Schott Foundation for Public Education. The press briefing was canceled at the last minute, when the leaders were invited to meet with Secretary Arne Duncan at the very hour they had scheduled their press briefing.

The statement—titled "Framework for Providing All Students an Opportunity to Learn"—got little media coverage, but its detractors got plenty. Columnist Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post castigated the civil rights groups for daring to challenge President Obama, as did an editorial in The Wall Street Journal titled "Civil rights groups choose the teachers unions over black kids."  A hedge-fund manager associated with the pro-charter group "Democrats for Education Reform" called the civil rights leaders "gutless weasels" and accused them of putting the interests of the teachers' unions over the future of minority children.

The only thoughtful reprise of the 17-page document was in Valerie Strauss's blog in The Washington Post, The Answer Sheet, where she explained its main points ("Civil Rights Groups Skewer Obama Education Policy"). Strauss, who is now our nation's most indispensable education journalist, summarized the report in these words: "Dear President Obama, you say you believe in an equal education for all students, but you are embarking on education policies that will never achieve that goal and that can do harm to America's school children, especially its neediest. Stop before it is too late."

I hope that our readers will forget the invective directed against the authors of this report. Read it. It contains wisdom and good sense, both as a warning about the errors of current and proposed policies and as a roadmap for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

The report criticizes the Obama administration's embrace of competition for federal funding, as in Race to the Top, as well as its intention to make future funding for Title I competitive. The civil rights groups point out that competition cannot provide equal opportunity and that millions of minority children will see no benefit from federal funding if they happen to be in states or districts that lose the competition. The principle of our education system, toward which we fitfully strive, is equality of educational opportunity, not winner take all and the devil take the hindmost.

Instead of fostering competition for federal funding, which was never the intent of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the report recommends federal "common resource opportunity standards" that would enhance and support common outcome standards. Specifically, the groups want the federal government to require states to make progress towards resource equity and "to ensure, at a minimum, that all students have access to early-childhood education, highly effective teachers, college-ready preparatory curricula, and equitable instructional resources."

Secretary Arne Duncan often says that "education is a civil right," but if that is the case, then states and districts should not have to compete for federal funding to guarantee the civil rights of their students. Logic suggests that the neediest students should have the greatest claim on federal funding. But, as we saw in Race to the Top, the children in 39 states saw no benefit at all from billions in federal education spending. Poor and minority children in states such as Mississippi, Alabama, California, Texas, Louisiana, and Illinois were left out. If the money were truly intended to strengthen education as a civil right, then it should have gone to those who needed it most, not to those who wrote the best proposal or had the best consultants. "The civil right to a high-quality education," say the civil rights groups, "is connected to individuals, not the states, and federal policy should be framed accordingly." By delivering extra funding to states that compete and win, they warn, "the majority of low-income and minority students will be left behind."

Nor were the civil rights groups complimentary about other components of the Obama education agenda. They complained that: "For far too long, communities of color have been testing grounds for unproven methods of educational change while all levels of government have resisted the tough decisions required to expand access to effective educational methods." Instead of providing high-quality, early-childhood education and supporting policies that would provide "a stable supply of experienced, highly effective teachers," current reforms are "stop-gap" measures that rely on "quick fixes" and "offer no real long-term strategy for effective systemic change." The absence of these strategies in affluent communities indicates "the marginal nature of this approach."

These "quick-fix" strategies include closing schools, which is a central feature of the Obama-Duncan education agenda. Although, as the report says, this strategy has little or no evidence to support it, it will be inflicted primarily on low-income and minority communities. School closings have "increased disruption but ha[ve] not improved achievement for the students in these communities. And in some communities, the new schools created do not admit or retain the most educationally needy students." Schools in poor communities should be closed only as a last resort, and only after intensive efforts to help the school improve, and only after close collaboration with parents, the community, and teachers, and only after development of a clear plan to relocate the students to better schools.

The report also takes issue with the Obama administration's reliance on charter schools: "...we are concerned about the overrepresentation of charter schools in low-income and predominantly minority communities. There is no evidence that charter operators are systematically more effective in creating higher student outcomes nationwide...while some charter schools can and do work for some students, they are not a universal solution for systemic change for all students, especially those with the highest needs."

Nor do the civil rights groups support the idea of using test scores as a "sole or primary measure of teacher effectiveness." They believe that schools in low-income and minority communities need a stable and effective staff that is committed to schools over the long haul, and they propose that "any measure of teacher effectiveness must account for the degree of difficulty of the teaching environment so that high-quality teachers will not be deterred from working in high-need schools."

It is a strong statement, and it deserves a close reading. If you believe that education is a civil right, or that education is of paramount importance to the future of our nation, or that every child should have access to a high-quality education, it is hard to conclude that the Obama administration's education policies are wise, practical, or likely to succeed.

A few weeks after I read the civil rights document, I came across a table showing inequities in funding within states and among states. Take a look. Wealthy communities typically spend two to three times as much to educate their children as districts with poor and minority students. The civil rights groups want to change the status quo. The Wall Street titans who are now promoting privatization, competition, tough accountability, and merit pay don't think this is a topic that bears discussing. They like to talk about how education (if run like a business by a leader who has a chain saw, a bat, or a broom, and who ignores the views of parents and teachers) will close the achievement gap, but they never talk about closing the resource gap.

If the Obama administration won't listen to the groups who are most assertive in defending America's neediest children, if they listen instead to hedge-fund managers and venture philanthropists, what hope is there for a more thoughtful approach to federal policy?

Diane Ravitch 

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/

Civil Rights Groups and NCLB

letter from selected civil rights groups on multiple measures
A Letter from Selected Civil Rights Groups on Multiple Measures


The Honorable George Miller
Chair, Committee on Education and Labor
United States House of Representatives
2205 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515

The Honorable Edward Kennedy
Chair, Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions
United States Senate
317 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510

The Honorable Howard P. McKeon
Ranking Member, Committee on Education
2351 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515

The Honorable Michael Enzi
Ranking Member, HELP Committee
379A Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510



Dear Sirs:

We are writing to express our strong support for a comprehensive model of
accountability in the re-authorization of ESEA that will include multiple measures which can
focus schools both on developing high quality teaching and learning and on educating all
students to graduation. We applaud the Congress’s commitment to address the inadequate
education received by poor and minority children, which led to the enactment of No Child Left
Behind. We share the goal of real progress on educational outcomes, and we see accountability as a valuable tool. We also believe Congress can improve the law to better foster genuine educational progress and to hold schools and school systems accountable for a broader array of important educational outcomes. The benefits can be increased and the harms dramatically reduced with a relatively simple and feasible system of multiple indicators.

Therefore, we are very pleased that you and the Committees on Education are
considering including the use of multiple measures of student progress for accountability
decisions in the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. We believe that the accountability provisions must include a system of multiple assessments of learning, which can help schools focus on assessing the full range of standards and skills appropriately, and multiple indicators of school performance, which emphasize the importance of keeping students in school and educating them to graduation.

Ideally, schools should be held accountable for student growth along all parts of the
achievement continuum. They should demonstrate continuous progress on an index of indicators comprised of multiple academic assessments, plus measures of student progress through school, such as graduation and grade promotion rates. Together, these components can support a comprehensive and educationally beneficial accountability system.

If education is to improve in the United States, schools must be assessed in ways that
produce high-quality learning and that create incentives to keep students in school. A number of
studies have found that an exclusive emphasis on (primarily multiple-choice) standardized test
scores has narrowed the curriculum. The most recent reports of the Center for Education Policy (CEP) and the National Center for Education Statistics (May 2007 Stats in Brief) confirm
sizeable drops in time dedicated to areas other than reading and math, including science, history, art, and physical education. The CEP also found that districts are more tightly aligning their instruction to this limited format as well as content of state tests. While these tests are one useful indicator of achievement, studies document that they often overemphasize low-level learning. As reporter Thomas Toch recently stated, "The problem is that these dumbed-down tests encourage teachers to make the same low-level skills the priority in their classrooms, at the expense of the higher standards that the federal law has sought to promote." To succeed in college, employment and life in general, students need critical thinking and problem solving skills that the tests fail to measure, and they need a complete curriculum.

The law's every-grade every-year testing requirement has discouraged the use of assessments of higher order thinking that motivate ambitious intellectual work and leverage stronger teaching and learning, but take more time and resources to score. These kinds of assessments – which include written essays, oral examinations, research papers, open-ended problems, and other performance assessments – are routinely used in high-achieving European and Asian systems that emphasize higher-order knowledge and skills. Some of our nation’s highest performing districts and states have given up the high-quality assessments they created in the 1990s, because the law currently acts as a disincentive to encourage their continued use.

Perhaps the most troubling unintended consequence of NCLB has been that the law
creates incentives for schools to boost scores by pushing low-scoring students out of school. The very important goal of graduating more of our students has simply not been implemented, and the accountability provisions actually reward schools with high dropout rates. Push-out
incentives and the narrowed curriculum are especially severe for students with disabilities,
English language learners, students of color and economically disadvantaged students. Recent
reports of the Public Education Network confirm that parents, students and other community
members are concerned about the over-reliance on test scores for evaluating students and schools. A number of recent studies have confirmed that this over-reliance has been associated with grade retention and other school actions that exacerbate dropout rates and student exclusion from school, especially for low-income students of color. This creates the perverse outcome that efforts to raise standards are resulting in fewer students receiving an education.

A central part of a solution to these problems is to employ multiple forms of assessment and multiple indicators, while retaining the powerful tools of publicly available assessment information and the critically important focus on equity. A multiple measures approach can help schools and districts improve student outcomes more effectively because:


1. The use of multiple measures ensures that attention will be given to a comprehensive academic program and a more complete array of important learning outcomes;

2. A multiple measures approach can incorporate assessments that evaluate the full range
of standards, including those addressing higher-order thinking and performance skills;

3. Multiple measures provide accountability checks and balances so that emphasizing one
measure does not come at the expense of others (e.g. boosting test scores by excluding
students from school), but they can give greater emphasis to priority areas; and

4. A multiple measures index can provide schools and districts with incentives to attend
to the progress of students at every point on the achievement spectrum, including those
who initially score far below or above the test score cut point labeled “proficient.” It can
encourage schools to focus on the needs of low-scoring students, students with
disabilities, and ELL students, using assessments that measure gains from wherever
students begin and helping them achieve growth.


One of the central concepts of NCLB’s approach is that schools and systems will
organize their efforts around the measures for which they are held accountable. Because focusing exclusively on a single indicator is both partial and problematic, the concept of multiple
measures is routinely used by policymakers to make critical decisions about such matters as
employment and economic forecasting (e.g., the Dow Jones Index or the GNP), as well as
admissions to college. Successful businesses use a “dashboard” set of indicators to evaluate their health and progress, aware that no single measure is sufficient to understand or guide their
operations. Business leaders understand that efforts to maximize short-term profits alone could lead to behaviors that undermine the long-term health of the enterprise.

Similarly, use of a single measure to guide education can create unintended negative
consequences or fail to focus schools on doing those things that can improve their long-term
health and the education of their students. Indeed, the measurement community's Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing mandates the use of multiple sources of evidence for
major decisions. NCLB calls for multiple measures of student performance, and some states have developed systems that incorporate such measures, but implementation of the law has not promoted their use for evaluating school progress.

Multiple indicators can counter the problems caused by over-reliance on single measures.
Multiple forms of assessment include traditional statewide tests as well as other assessments,
developed and used locally or statewide, that include a broader range of formats, such as writing samples, research projects, and science investigations, as well as collections of student work over time. These can be scored reliably according to common standards and can inform instruction in order to improve teaching and learning. Such assessments would only be used for accountability purposes when they meet the appropriate technical criteria, reflect state-approved standards, and apply equitably to all students, as is already the case in Connecticut, Nebraska, Oregon, Vermont, and other states successfully using multiple forms of assessment.

To counter the narrowing of the curriculum and exclusion of important subjects that has
been extensively documented as a consequence of NCLB, the new law should also allow states to include other subjects, using multiple forms of assessment, in an index of school indicators.
To ensure strong attention is given to reading and math, these subjects can be weighted more
heavily. Graduation rates and grade promotion rates should be given substantial weight in any
accountability system. Other relevant indicators of school progress, such as attendance and
college admission rates, could be included.

Because evidence is clear that multiple assessments are beneficial to student learning and
accountability decisions, we hope that the committee will take the step of providing significant
funds to assist states and districts to implement systems that include multiple forms of evidence about student learning, including state and local performance assessments. Congress should also require an evaluation of state multiple measures programs to enable sharing of knowledge and improvement of state assessment and accountability systems.

A multiple measures approach that incorporates a well-balanced set of indicators would support a shift toward holding states and localities accountable for making the systemic changes that improve student achievement. This is a necessary foundation for genuine accountability.


Respectfully,

ACORN

Advancement Project

Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund

Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance

ASPIRA

Center for Community Change

Civil Rights Project

Council for Exceptional Children

Japanese American Citizens League

Justice Matters

League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC)

Learning Disabilities Association of America

National Alliance of Black School Educators (NABSE)

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc.

National Association for Asian and Pacific American Education (NAAPAE)

National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE)

National Association for the Education and Advancement of Cambodian, Laotian, and
Vietnamese Americans (NAFEA)

National Coalition of ESEA Title I Parents

National Council on Educating Black Children

National Federation of Filipino American Associations

National Indian Education Association

National Indian School Board Association

National Pacific Islander Educator Network (NPIEN)

National Urban Alliance for Effective Education (NUA)



Renewing America's Commitment to Strong Public Schools
copyright © 2007 The Forum for Education and Democracy

NCLB: in trouble

Note: in the important story below, Mr. Bush meets with "Civil Rights leaders" as an important support for NCLB. What Mr. Bush has done all along is to select a few "Civil Rights leaders" who support his viewpoints. Notably, the Education Trust claims to be a Civil Rights organization.
Mr.Bush and his team made the same effort in trying to pass immigration reform, inviting a very select group of "civil rights leaders" to work with him. The facts are there are a number of groups funded by corporations and beholding to conservative think tanks who claim to be "civil rights" leaders. This claim should always be questioned. Are they really civil rights leaders?
Duane Campbell

October 10, 2007
Bush Prodding Congress to Reauthorize His Education Law

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
WASHINGTON, Oct. 9 — With his domestic agenda in tatters, President Bush tried Tuesday to prod Congress into reauthorizing his biggest domestic achievement, the 2001 No Child Left Behind education law. But lawmakers have yet to come to terms on the legislation, and prospects for a deal this year appear dim.

Mr. Bush invited civil rights leaders, who are among the bill’s staunchest backers, to a meeting in the White House Roosevelt Room on Tuesday afternoon to discuss the prospects for renewal. Then, in a bit of theater designed to pressure lawmakers — especially Democrats, for whom civil rights advocates are a core constituency — the president took his guests into the Rose Garden, where he issued a public call for Congress to act.

“We don’t necessarily agree on every issue, but we do agree that education is a basic civil right,” Mr. Bush said, adding that the nation “has reached a defining moment in our struggle to secure a good education for every child.”

It was the second time in as many weeks that Mr. Bush has used his presidential platform to draw attention to the education bill, an intensifying effort that suggests he is concerned that his signature domestic achievement could come undone before his term is out.

The bill would remain in effect even if it is not renewed, but the administration is seeking changes to it, and some opponents would like to see it thoroughly revamped. If Congress reauthorizes the bill with its basic components intact, it would be a welcome, and rare, legislative victory for Mr. Bush on Capitol Hill, one that could help cement his legacy in education policy, an issue he has cared about since he was governor of Texas.

The president wants a bill by the end of the year, but administration officials do not sound entirely confident. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said after the Rose Garden ceremony that she was “cautiously optimistic.”

At least one of the civil rights leaders in attendance, Wade Henderson, said he feared that the reauthorization effort could collapse amid challenges from Republicans, in much the same way that the president’s immigration proposal was brought down by his own party. Mr. Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, said Mr. Bush seemed determined to see the bill through.

“He committed to using his personal capital to see to it that the bill is reauthorized this year,” Mr. Henderson said. “This is his signature achievement, and I think he wants to extend that.”

But as with the immigration bill, there are questions on how far the president’s capital can take him. Mr. Bush is in the thick of a series of veto fights with Congressional Democrats, many of whom accuse the administration of failing to finance the original education measure fully. At the same time, the bill faces challenges from some Republicans, who say it tramples on local control of schools.

“Every day that goes by, the likelihood becomes less that they’ll be able to get a bill passed this year,” said Jack Jennings, a former general counsel for the House education committee and president of the Center on Education Policy, a nonprofit group that advises many states on the federal education law.

First passed in 2001, No Child Left Behind created new, specific standards for student achievement, demanding that all schools test students in Grades 3 to 8 in reading and math every year, with the goal of having all students demonstrate proficiency in those subjects by 2014. Mr. Bush said Tuesday that he would not “compromise on the basic principle” that every child must read and do math at or above grade level.

Ms. Spellings said: “It’s a strong law, a hawkish law and a good law. We can make it better, but we don’t need to risk making it worse.”

House Democrats have been working much of the year to draw up legislation to renew the law, but have yet to produce a bill. A “discussion draft” has come under attack from backers and opponents of the original measure.

In the Senate, the lead Democratic sponsor of the original bill, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, plans to introduce legislation to renew it by the end of the month. On Tuesday, Mr. Kennedy chided the White House for making the reauthorization effort “far more difficult by its failure to fully fund and implement it.”

Civil rights advocates said they used Tuesday’s meeting to press Mr. Bush to support substantial increases in federal spending on No Child Left Behind, saying the money was needed to help schools meet the law’s demands and to develop better, more sophisticated ways to measure student progress.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
Privacy Policy

Civil Rights Organizations and NCLB

A Letter from Selected Civil Rights Groups on Multiple Measures

August 7, 2007

The Honorable George Miller The Honorable Edward Kennedy, Chair
Chair, Committee on Education and Labor Senate Committee on Health, Education,
United States House of Representatives Labor and Pensions
2205 Rayburn House Office Building 317 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20515 Washington, DC 20510

The Honorable Howard P. McKeon The Honorable Michael Enzi
Ranking Member, Committee on Education Ranking Member, Senate HELP Committee
2351 Rayburn House Office Building 379A Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20515 Washington, DC 20510

Dear Sirs:

We are writing to express our strong support for a comprehensive model of
accountability in the re-authorization of ESEA that will include multiple measures which can
focus schools both on developing high quality teaching and learning and on educating all
students to graduation. We applaud the Congress’s commitment to address the inadequate
education received by poor and minority children, which led to the enactment of No Child Left
Behind. We share the goal of real progress on educational outcomes, and we see accountability
as a valuable tool. We also believe Congress can improve the law to better foster genuine
educational progress and to hold schools and school systems accountable for a broader array of
important educational outcomes. The benefits can be increased and the harms dramatically
reduced with a relatively simple and feasible system of multiple indicators.

Therefore, we are very pleased that you and the Committees on Education are
considering including the use of multiple measures of student progress for accountability
decisions in the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. We believe that
the accountability provisions must include a system of multiple assessments of learning, which
can help schools focus on assessing the full range of standards and skills appropriately, and
multiple indicators of school performance, which emphasize the importance of keeping students
in school and educating them to graduation.

Ideally, schools should be held accountable for student growth along all parts of the
achievement continuum. They should demonstrate continuous progress on an index of indicators
comprised of multiple academic assessments, plus measures of student progress through school,
such as graduation and grade promotion rates. Together, these components can support a
comprehensive and educationally beneficial accountability system.

If education is to improve in the United States, schools must be assessed in ways that
produce high-quality learning and that create incentives to keep students in school. A number of
studies have found that an exclusive emphasis on (primarily multiple-choice) standardized test
scores has narrowed the curriculum. The most recent reports of the Center for Education Policy
(CEP) and the National Center for Education Statistics (May 2007 Stats in Brief) confirm
sizeable drops in time dedicated to areas other than reading and math, including science, history,
art, and physical education. The CEP also found that districts are more tightly aligning their
instruction to this limited format as well as content of state tests. While these tests are one useful
indicator of achievement, studies document that they often overemphasize low-level learning. As
reporter Thomas Toch recently stated, "The problem is that these dumbed-down tests encourage
teachers to make the same low-level skills the priority in their classrooms, at the expense of the
higher standards that the federal law has sought to promote." To succeed in college, employment
and life in general, students need critical thinking and problem solving skills that the tests fail to
measure, and they need a complete curriculum.

The law's every-grade every-year testing requirement has discouraged the use of
assessments of higher order thinking that motivate ambitious intellectual work and leverage
stronger teaching and learning, but take more time and resources to score. These kinds of
assessments – which include written essays, oral examinations, research papers, open-ended
problems, and other performance assessments – are routinely used in high-achieving European
and Asian systems that emphasize higher-order knowledge and skills. Some of our nation’s
highest performing districts and states have given up the high-quality assessments they created in
the 1990s, because the law currently acts as a disincentive to encourage their continued use.

Perhaps the most troubling unintended consequence of NCLB has been that the law
creates incentives for schools to boost scores by pushing low-scoring students out of school. The
very important goal of graduating more of our students has simply not been implemented, and
the accountability provisions actually reward schools with high dropout rates. Push-out
incentives and the narrowed curriculum are especially severe for students with disabilities,
English language learners, students of color and economically disadvantaged students. Recent
reports of the Public Education Network confirm that parents, students and other community
members are concerned about the over-reliance on test scores for evaluating students and schools.
A number of recent studies have confirmed that this over-reliance has been associated with grade
retention and other school actions that exacerbate dropout rates and student exclusion from
school, especially for low-income students of color. This creates the perverse outcome that
efforts to raise standards are resulting in fewer students receiving an education.

A central part of a solution to these problems is to employ multiple forms of assessment
and multiple indicators, while retaining the powerful tools of publicly available assessment
information and the critically important focus on equity. A multiple measures approach can help
schools and districts improve student outcomes more effectively because:

1. The use of multiple measures ensures that attention will be given to a comprehensive
academic program and a more complete array of important learning outcomes;

2. A multiple measures approach can incorporate assessments that evaluate the full range
of standards, including those addressing higher-order thinking and performance skills;

3. Multiple measures provide accountability checks and balances so that emphasizing one
measure does not come at the expense of others (e.g. boosting test scores by excluding
students from school), but they can give greater emphasis to priority areas; and

4. A multiple measures index can provide schools and districts with incentives to attend
to the progress of students at every point on the achievement spectrum, including those
who initially score far below or above the test score cut point labeled “proficient.” It can
encourage schools to focus on the needs of low-scoring students, students with
disabilities, and ELL students, using assessments that measure gains from wherever
students begin and helping them achieve growth.

One of the central concepts of NCLB’s approach is that schools and systems will
organize their efforts around the measures for which they are held accountable. Because focusing
exclusively on a single indicator is both partial and problematic, the concept of multiple
measures is routinely used by policymakers to make critical decisions about such matters as
employment and economic forecasting (e.g., the Dow Jones Index or the GNP), as well as
admissions to college. Successful businesses use a “dashboard” set of indicators to evaluate their
health and progress, aware that no single measure is sufficient to understand or guide their
operations. Business leaders understand that efforts to maximize short-term profits alone could
lead to behaviors that undermine the long-term health of the enterprise.

Similarly, use of a single measure to guide education can create unintended negative
consequences or fail to focus schools on doing those things that can improve their long-term
health and the education of their students. Indeed, the measurement community's Standards for
Educational and Psychological Testing mandates the use of multiple sources of evidence for
major decisions. NCLB calls for multiple measures of student performance, and some states have
developed systems that incorporate such measures, but implementation of the law has not
promoted their use for evaluating school progress.

Multiple indicators can counter the problems caused by over-reliance on single measures.
Multiple forms of assessment include traditional statewide tests as well as other assessments,
developed and used locally or statewide, that include a broader range of formats, such as writing
samples, research projects, and science investigations, as well as collections of student work over
time. These can be scored reliably according to common standards and can inform instruction in
order to improve teaching and learning. Such assessments would only be used for accountability
purposes when they meet the appropriate technical criteria, reflect state-approved standards, and
apply equitably to all students, as is already the case in Connecticut, Nebraska, Oregon, Vermont,
and other states successfully using multiple forms of assessment.

To counter the narrowing of the curriculum and exclusion of important subjects that has
been extensively documented as a consequence of NCLB, the new law should also allow states
to include other subjects, using multiple forms of assessment, in an index of school indicators.
To ensure strong attention is given to reading and math, these subjects can be weighted more
heavily. Graduation rates and grade promotion rates should be given substantial weight in any
accountability system. Other relevant indicators of school progress, such as attendance and
college admission rates, could be included.

Because evidence is clear that multiple assessments are beneficial to student learning and
accountability decisions, we hope that the committee will take the step of providing significant
funds to assist states and districts to implement systems that include multiple forms of evidence
about student learning, including state and local performance assessments. Congress should also
require an evaluation of state multiple measures programs to enable sharing of knowledge and
improvement of state assessment and accountability systems.

A multiple measures approach that incorporates a well-balanced set of indicators would
support a shift toward holding states and localities accountable for making the systemic changes
that improve student achievement. This is a necessary foundation for genuine accountability.

Respectfully,

ACORN
Advancement Project
Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund
Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance
ASPIRA
Civil Rights Project
Council for Exceptional Children
Japanese American Citizens League
Justice Matters
League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC)
Learning Disabilities Association of America
National Alliance of Black School Educators (NABSE)
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc.
National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE)
National Association for the Education and Advancement of Cambodian, Laotian, and
Vietnamese Americans (NAFEA)
National Coalition of ESEA Title I Parents
National Council on Educating Black Children
National Federation of Filipino American Associations
National Indian Education Association
National Indian School Board Association
National Pacific Islander Educator Network (NPIEN)
National Urban Alliance for Effective Education (NUA)

NCLB and Civil Rights

COMMENTARY
A Diminished Vision of Civil Rights:
No Child Left Behind and the Growing Divide in How Educational Equity Is Understood

By James Crawford
At the core of today’s debates over school accountability lies a contentious question: Does the federal No Child Left Behind Act represent a historic advance for civil rights, or a giant step backward for the children it purports to help?

This argument has divided the civil rights community itself, along with its traditional allies in Congress. One side supports stern measures designed to force educators to pay attention to long-neglected students and enable all children to reach “proficiency” in key subjects. The other side argues that the law’s tools of choice—high-stakes testing, unrealistic achievement targets, and punitive sanctions—have not only proved ineffective in holding schools accountable, they also are pushing “left behind” groups even further behind.

Disagreement is especially acute among advocates for English-language learners, known in the shorthand of K-12 education as “ELLs.” These students pose a fundamental challenge for the No Child Left Behind accountability scheme, owing to the near-total absence of valid and reliable assessments of their academic achievement. Usually tested in English, a language they have yet to master, ELLs tend to perform poorly in both reading and math. Indeed, the law defines them as students who have difficulty meeting state standards because of the language barrier. Nevertheless, under every state NCLB plan, English-language learners’ scores on invalid tests must be included in “adequate yearly progress” calculations, and, where they fall short of AYP targets, schools must undergo “corrective action.”

In other words, high-stakes decisions about the education of these students are being made on the basis of data generally acknowledged to be inaccurate. Schools with an ELL “subgroup” are being labeled and punished for failure—not because of the quality of instruction they provide, but because existing tests are unable to measure what ELLs have learned.

While acknowledging this reality, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the National Council of La Raza have emerged as uncompromising defenders of the No Child Left Behind law. They oppose exempting English-language learners from standardized tests, regardless of the tests’ validity, for more than the one year that is currently allowed by federal regulations. In the words of a MALDEF lobbyist, leaving English-language learners out of No Child Left Behind’s accountability system would mean “removing the incentive to teach them.” The two organizations favor increased funding to develop appropriate assessments, hardly a controversial idea. In the meantime, however, they insist on the continued use of flawed assessments to judge schools and, by implication, to make flawed decisions about educational programs.

Critics of NCLB-style accountability—who now include a substantial majority of educators working with English-language learners—cannot see how such a blunt instrument could produce academic benefits. More importantly, they point to the law’s harmful impact on minority students generally and on ELLs in particular. The perverse effects are well-documented: excessive class time devoted to test preparation, a curriculum narrowed to the two tested subjects, neglect of critical thinking in favor of basic skills, pressure to reduce or eliminate native-language instruction, demoralization of teachers whose students fall short of unrealistic cut scores, demoralization of children who are forced to take tests they can’t understand, and, perhaps worst of all, practices that encourage low-scoring students to drop out before test day.

No one questions that, because of the No Child Left Behind law, English-language learners are receiving more “attention” than ever before. But, as many educational researchers and practitioners can testify, results in the classroom have been far more negative than positive. Supporters of the law have generally declined to respond to what educators are reporting, and instead have accused the law’s critics of opposing accountability or believing that minority children “can’t learn.”

How could civil rights advocates disagree over such fundamental issues? The only plausible answer is that there is a growing divide in how educational equity is understood. Some clues can be found in the changing terminology used to discuss school reform.

Once upon a time, civil rights advocates were united in pursuing the goal of equal educational opportunity. They fought against racial segregation in public schools and demanded equitable resources for all students. Their focus was on “inputs,” pushing state and local officials to provide adequate school facilities, well-designed instructional programs, effective teachers, and attention to the effects of poverty—such as parental illiteracy, poor health, and malnutrition—that pose obstacles to learning. In those days, the enemy was clear: a two-tier system that provided an inferior education to many children on the basis of skin color, language background, class status, and place of residence.

But in the No Child Left Behind era, the words equal educational opportunity have largely faded from the public discourse. In their place, there is talk of eliminating the “achievement gaps” between various groups of students.

The latter term was seldom heard in the 1980s or 1990s, as is shown by a quick archive search of major newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and Education Week. Then, around 1999, “achievement gap”suddenly burst into the popular lexicon. The credit is largely due to then-Gov. George W. Bush of Texas and his political guru, Karl Rove, who were planning a presidential campaign in which school reform would figure prominently.

Their strategy—which ultimately proved successful—was to seize an issue traditionally “owned” by Democrats and give it a “compassionate conservative” spin. By stressing the achievement gap, candidate Bush redefined civil rights in the field of school reform: “Some say it is unfair to hold disadvantaged children to rigorous standards. I say it is discrimination to require anything less—the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Retiring the Republican theme of dismantling the U.S. Department of Education, he called instead for an enhanced federal role based on the Texas model of high-stakes testing.

In 2001, key Democrats in Congress, including Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and Rep. George Miller, encouraged by certain liberal advocacy groups, joined forces with the Bush administration and with Republican leaders in Congress. The result was bipartisan passage of the No Child Left Behind Act late that year.

Eliminating achievement gaps is paramount among the law’s goals; equal educational opportunity is not. In fact, the latter term—which had been prominent in previous versions of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act—appears nowhere in NCLB. (No doubt an anonymous congressional staffer performed a search-and-delete operation on the bill, just as one did with the word “bilingual,” which was also expunged.)

What’s the significance of this shift in terminology? Achievement gap is all about measurable “outputs”—standardized-test scores—and not about equalizing resources, addressing poverty, combating segregation, or guaranteeing children an opportunity to learn. The No Child Left Behind Act is silent on such matters. Dropping equal educational opportunity, which highlights the role of inputs, has a subtle but powerful effect on how we think about accountability. It shifts the entire burden of reform from legislators and policymakers to teachers and kids and schools.

By implication, educators are the obstacle to change. Every mandate of No Child Left Behind—and there are hundreds—is designed to force the people who run our schools to shape up, work harder, raise expectations, and stop “making excuses” for low test scores, or face the consequences. Despite the law’s oft-stated reverence for “scientifically based research,” this narrow approach is contradicted by numerous studies documenting the importance of social and economic factors in children’s academic progress. Yet it has the advantage of enabling politicians to ignore the difficult issues and avoid costly remedies. If educators are the obstacle, there’s no need to address what Jonathan Kozol calls the “savage inequalities” of our educational system and our society.

In other words, despite its stated goals, the No Child Left Behind law represents a diminished vision of civil rights. Educational equity is reduced to equalizing test scores. The effect has been to impoverish the educational experience of minority students—that is, to reinforce the two-tier system of public schools that civil rights advocates once challenged.

English-language learners, for example, are being fed a steady diet of test-prep, worksheets, and other “skill building” exercises from a menu mostly reduced to reading and math. Their language-learning needs are increasingly neglected by the marginalization of bilingual and even English-as-a-second-language instruction to make time for English language arts items likely to be on the test. Meanwhile, more-advantaged students are studying music, art, foreign languages, physical education, science, history, and civics, getting to read literature rather than endure phonics drills, and participating in field trips, plays, chess clubs, and debate tournaments—all “frills” that are routinely denied to children whose test scores have become life-or-death matters for educators’ careers.

Ironically, in numerous ways, No Child Left Behind is increasing the achievement gap, if academic achievement is understood as getting an all-round education and, with it, an equal chance to succeed in life. True civil rights advocates cannot and must not ignore the reality behind the rhetoric.

James Crawford is the president of the Institute for Language and Education Policy (www.elladvocates.org), a nonprofit advocacy group in Takoma Park, Md. He can be reached at bilingualed@starpower.net.

Bob Moses and the Algebra Project

Educator equates algebra, success

Professor and civil rights advocate Bob Moses visits city to push math model.

By Laurel Rosenhall - Bee Staff Writer
Published 12:00 am PST Saturday, December 16, 2006

Bob Moses sees algebra as a civil rights issue -- if poor children don't learn high-level math, he argues, they'll never get the jobs they need as adults to pull themselves out of poverty.

The math professor who fought in the 1960s to earn black Southerners the right to vote was in Sacramento on Thursday and Friday to talk with local educators about bringing his model for math instruction to area schools. It's a prospect still in the early stages of development -- no one has decided yet which schools or districts would participate, or when the effort would begin.

But teachers, administrators and community members at Friday's meeting were intrigued by the possibility of becoming part of the national Algebra Project, a network of schools and teachers trying to improve math education for needy students through methods developed by Moses.

"We recognize that success in math and science lays the foundation for success in school and beyond," said David Oshige, of the California Teachers Association and the Sacramento Valley Organizing Community, a group that set up Moses' trip to Sacramento.

During the meeting at the Celebration Christian Center, Moses demonstrated how participants in the Algebra Project teach mathematical concepts. The approach starts with students doing something, then asks them to talk about it in laymen's terms, then talk about it in scientific terms, then draw it, and finally, convert it to conventional algebraic symbols.

In the example he presented Friday, Moses asked two meeting participants to stand next to each other at the front of the room and say their names: Dr. Richardson and Ms. Vierra, they said.

He asked the rest of the group to write two sentences about which of the two women is taller and which is shorter. "Dr. Richardson is taller than Ms. Vierra," a participant said. "Ms. Vierra is shorter than Dr. Richardson."

This, Moses said, was what he calls "people talk," or describing something in common terms.

Then Moses asked the group what feature of the women the exercise focused on: Was it their weight? Their shoe size? No.

"The feature we're talking about is their height," he said. "Now write a sentence that starts with the feature, 'The height.' "

People read their sentences aloud. Some wrote that the height of Dr. Richardson "surpasses" the height of Ms. Vierra. Others wrote that the height of Dr. Richardson "is more than" or "is greater than" that of Ms. Vierra.

"That's feature talk," Moses said.

Then participants took turns drawing symbols to represent their sentences. And finally, Moses translated the picture sentences into conventional symbols by writing:

H(Dr. R) > H(Ms. V)

H(Ms. V) < H(Dr. R)

From there, he said, students learn the concept behind terms like x > y and y < x.

"The letter x is a conventional way of representing a feature, in this case the height," said Moses, who studied math philosophy at Harvard and is on the faculty of Florida International University.

Participating in the Algebra Project means a lot more than changing the way math is taught.

It also requires that schools commit to the program for five years and offer the Algebra Project classes to a substantial number of students performing in the lowest quartile on state tests. Schools must also release teachers for training in the Algebra Project technique, provide teachers with graphing calculators and other technology, and hire enough teachers so that students can take 90 minutes of math each day.

"The main cost is getting these extra teachers," Moses said.

He suggested the Sacramento community begin to identify teachers and schools that want to participate in the program. Once the schools and teachers are selected, the program could start with a few eighth- and ninth-grade classes in the 2008-09 school year, Moses said.

The Algebra Project and affiliated efforts now operate in Chicago, Boston, Miami and Jackson, Miss. Schools in Milwaukee, Oakland, Atlanta, Indianapolis, San Francisco and Los Angeles also have participated at different times in the Algebra Project's 20 year-plus history.

The Algebra Project grew out of Moses' experience volunteering in his own children's classrooms in the early 1980s. Before that, from 1961 to 1965, he headed the voter registration drive in Mississippi as part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a key group in the civil rights movement.

"We used the right to vote as a tool to organize sharecroppers so they could demand their political access into the political system," Moses said. "What we're doing now is using mathematics and math literacy as an organizing tool for the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the sharecroppers across the country to get them to access their educational and economic opportunities."

Adam Berman, director of curriculum for the Grant Joint Union High School District, was among the educators at Friday's meeting. Afterward, he said he wants to learn even more about the Algebra Project.

"It involves concepts that are promising for closing the achievement gap," Berman said. "We'll investigate this further."

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