Education goals discussed by the Legislative Education Study Committee
By Ellen Wedum
Published in the Mountain Times and the Mountain Monthly, November 2007.
October 15, 16, and 17 the LESC, which is a year-round legislative committee, not just an Interim committee, met in Las Cruces. I am going to try to ignore most of the jungle of acronyms (CA, S1, S2, RTC, STEM, DIBELS, SEG, EPSS, for starters) and report some of the information presented in the three-day session.
As most of you know, NCLB is short for No Child Left Behind. AYP means Adequate Yearly Progress, and this is measured by tests required by NCLB that are administered several times a year (and which the school district has to pay for, not to mention taking time out of the regular teaching schedule to administer them). There are something like nearly 40 different areas in which a school is judged, and failing in just ONE of these areas means failure to “make AYP” for that year.
Of the 798 New Mexico schools, 430 of them “failed to make AYP” in the 2006-2007 school year. That’s about 54%. Of the sixty New Mexico charter schools included in this total, 33, or 55%, failed also, so they do not seem to be doing any better than the public schools.
There were 373 schools that failed for the second year in a row, and that is when the penalties start to take effect. At this point the school must “develop an improvement plan.” Seems to me this means taking more time away from teaching for meetings and such. The school district is supposed to provide “technical assistance” AND all students must be offered public school choice, that is, the option of transferring to a higher performing school. Their old school, already struggling with making a ‘plan,’ is supposed to pay for their transportation to the new school. At least the guidelines make some concession to reality by adding the clause “within available funds” to this mandate.
New Mexico was one of the first states to develop a system for assessment, and got penalized for this. For example, NM criteria for counting the performance of students with disabilities, ESL (English as a Second Language), or free-lunch students is that if there are more than 25 in a given catagory, their test scores not only are counted, but are expected to match those of the average learners. States that signed up later set the bar at 100 students, so even in their larger schools they never have to count these scores. Two other variables that can be set by the states are the percent score that counts as “passing percentile” and the questions on the tests themselves.
The Fordham Foundation published a study titled “The Proficiency Illusion” in October. They compared the exams offered in 26 states (including New Mexico) and found that “proficiency” varies WILDLY from state to state, with “passing scores” ranging from the 6th percentile to the 77th percentile. They also found that twice as many of these states have started using easier tests, at least in 2 grades, as have switched to more difficult tests in the last two years.
The study cites the variation in the questions on the tests too. The literacy test for fourth graders in Wisconsin requires the students to look at four simple sentences about dogs and cats and pick out the one that is a statement of fact rather than opinion. In Massachusetts, the fourth graders read an entire paragraph from a story by Leo Tolstoy, with a much more complicated sentence structure, and then select which one of four statements about the ENTIRE PARAGRAPH is a statement of fact.
Now, there is a lot of opposition to standardized national testing, but with this extreme variation in assessment from state to state, what does “100% proficiency in reading by 2013” mean?
The committee heard about many other problems (and some progress—the cyber academy is close to having courses in New Mexico history, and Algebra I, which are to be required for graduation, available online). I was embarrassed to learn, though, that as the LESC and the PED (Public Education Department) seek input from NM schools and school districts, the surveys they have sent out are not being answered by the Cloudcroft School District. One of these surveys asked how the District evaluated the professional development activities they offer the teachers. Only twenty-five of the district superintendents or their staff responded, and Cloudcroft was not one of them. Another LESC survey asked what resources high schools may need to implement the new graduation requirements for freshmen in the year 2009-2010. Sixty-eight of the 158 high schools contacted responded. Was Cloudcroft contacted? A list of teachers participating by district in summer institutes to improve math and science teaching skills showed 39 from Alamogordo and zero from Cloudcroft.
I have gotten the general impression that our new superintendent is only interested in football, but teaching should be a school’s first priority. And we all complain that those folks “north of I-40” never pay any attention to us, but communication is a 2-way street. I hope the Cloudcroft schools will work more closely with the LESC and PED in the future.