Other states are making greater efforts to scale back testing. In Maryland, according to a draft plan , only 45 percent of elementary-school scores will be based on state tests — though it remains to be seen whether the feds will approve this approach.
No Child Left Behind used student proficiency to measure schools — and one all-but-inevitable consequence is that school ratings are tightly associated with poverty. A number of researchers have argued that this approach unfairly penalizes schools for the students they serve and deters teachers from working in those schools. Certain civil rights groups, though, say this method is important in order to maintain high standards and identify schools that need the most help. Under ESSA, this positive correlation is likely to remain.
High-poverty schools will probably still be far more likely to be identified as low-performing, since states, as required by the statute, will continue to use proficiency or overall performance. Most states also plan to use measures of student growth, which are less tightly associated with poverty. Other common indicators, like chronic absenteeism and high school graduation rates, are also tightly related to student income.
A review by the Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank, found that only a handful of states would likely be fair to high-poverty schools. Matthew Di Carlo of the Shanker Institute, a think tank affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers, came to a similar conclusion.
In other words, schools had less incentive to help kids far above and far below proficiency. A number of states seem to have taken this to heart. To do that, some state plans emphasize student growth or judge schools based on average overall test scores.
Several states plan to use those measures for a majority of their elementary and middle school ratings. Still, proficiency continues to play a major role in many state plans. Read more about accommodations on standardized tests. People have mixed feelings about NCLB.
On the positive side, many believe NCLB led to a greater focus on struggling students. The law set the expectation that they learn alongside their peers. By making schools report results by subgroup, NCLB shined a light on students in poverty, students of color, those receiving special education services, and English language learners. NCLB pushed schools to give struggling students more attention, support, and help. More students graduated under the law.
The graduation rate for students with specific learning disabilities increased from 57 percent in to 68 percent in On the other hand, some say that NCLB focused too much on standardized testing. This left little time for anything else kids may have needed or wanted to learn. Certain penalties, like requiring school improvement plans, were reasonable, critics said. Critics linked several cheating scandals to NCLB, citing the pressure on teachers and educators to perform.
This includes the reporting of school results, inclusion of kids, and research-based instruction. Individualized Education Program. In some districts, merely drawing attention to racial or other disparities was enough to drive real changes.
No longer able to coast on the strength of their high-performing majority, districts such as Beverly adopted new programs aimed at identifying and helping struggling students who might otherwise have fallen through the cracks. Beverly had some important advantages. It is a relatively wealthy district in a state that spends more per student than all but a handful of others. Although education policy has moved on from No Child Left Behind, its impact on data remains. It will be up to interest groups and parents to use that data to push for change, said Lorraine McDonnell, a University of California, Santa Barbara, political scientist who recently published an article on the history of federal testing requirements.
Tens of thousands of schools ended up facing No Child Left Behind's sanctions. In mid, more than 6, schools were being restructured, meaning they'd made it all the way through the penalties without improvement.
Thousands more had been required to take some of the less drastic steps. It didn't get every child up to grade level in reading and math by mid But it did produce some improvement, at least in math. The effects were greatest for African-American students and for students from low-income families. But that improvement wasn't enough to close the large gap between black students and their peers. Sean Reardon at Stanford found that, nationally, the law didn't achieve its goal of closing achievement gaps, even though some states saw some improvement.
Detangling which school improvement steps were effective is particularly difficult, and it makes it hard to prescribe what steps states and districts should take. Research in North Carolina by Thomas Ahn and Jacob Vigdor found that the most effective interventions were at opposite ends of the spectrum: Schools that had missed the progress goal for only one year and weren't yet facing consequences improved. So did schools that faced the biggest consequence, a total restructuring.
But everything in between — transfers, tutoring, a new curriculum or hiring consultants, threatening to restructure — didn't help much. This could be because many families didn't, or couldn't, take advantage of the options schools were supposed to offer them after failing to make progress for two or three years.
Some studies found that tutoring was helpful, particularly if students attended for more than 40 hours, but many others found no effect. A large study of six school districts in three states found tutoring had no significant effect on students' math and reading test scores.
Studies found the same in Milwaukee and Minneapolis.
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