NCLB Outrages
Ohanian Note: Just for the Kids/National Center for Educational Accountability is also a member of the alliance Bracey describes below.
The Alliance Alert is available online .
From: GERALD BRACEY
To: Education Writers Association
Sent: Tuesday, May 10, 2005 6:05 PM
Subject: Alert against Alliance Alert
Dear Education Writers Association Member
What follows is an illustration of how advocates slice and dice data to present the picture they want you to see. Be wary.
The Achievement Alliance is a new group sponsored by the Business Roundtable, the Education Trust, the National Center for Education Accountability, the National Council of La Raza and the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights.
Their bulletin, Alliance Alert, says the Alliance "has as its purpose providing accurate, nonpartisan information about student achievement and the No Child Left Behind Act."
If the Alert I just received is typical, they're off to a lousy start. The opening sentence of the first section says "It is commonly thought that NCLB prohibits schools from providing instruction in social studies, science or the arts." I have never met anyone who thinks this.
The Alert quotes from a Washington Post story by Gene Weingarten about a remote island off Alaska. Weingarten says that the school on the island used to teach Siberian Yupik, but the course requirements of NCLB, the principal tells Weingarten "leave no more hours in the day to teach it." Well, "leaving no more hours in the day to teach it" is quite different, at least in my mind, from prohibiting all those things the Alliance alleges people actually believe. Maybe Weingarten, a novice about NCLB believes in the prohibitions' no doubt the principal doesn't.
It gets worse. The summary blurb for the next item says "At Dayton's Bluff, African American and Hmong students outscore White Minnesotan children in math." This is not true.
Dayton's Bluff is in a tough section of St. Paul and has made progress, but the statement is still not true.
It is true that at the 3rd grade a higher proportion of black kids in Dayton's Bluff scored 3 or better on the 5-point scale of the state's math test. But, hey, we're talking about 16 kids and 3rd grade math is pretty easy to manipulate. Even so, they don't score higher. The average score of black kids in Dayton's Bluff is 1501, a lot higher than blacks in St. Paul generally (1333) or the state (1353), but the statewide white average is 1557.
I'm not sure where the Alert is coming from when it talks about Hmong kids--there are only 7 Asian/Pacific Islanders in 3rd grade, too few to report--their cells are blanks. It appears that the Alert is reporting data from 2 years earlier.
At the 5th grade in math, neither the proportion scoring three or better or the average score is higher than for whites statewide. The black kids in Dayton's Bluff do have a much higher proportion of kids scoring 3 or better than blacks statewide and their average score is higher, too.
Asian kids exist in sufficient numbers at the 5th grade to report, but their results are not as good. Forty-four percent score 3 or better, compared to 81 percent of whites statewide. Their average score is 1454 compared to 1451 for St. Paul Asians, and 1493 statewide. Statewide whites scored 1567.
But...One of the principles of data interpretation in Bail Me Out! is "watch for selectivity in the data." The Alert only mentions 3rd grade. As we've seen, the claims don't hold for 5th grade. What about reading, a much more important skill than elementary math?
At the third grade, both black kids and whites statewide have 80% scoring 3 or better. The black kids at Dayton's bluff scored 1490 compared to 1570 for whites statewide (and 1387 for blacks statewide).
At the 5th grade, where students are supposed to be reading to learn, not learning to read, things don't look so good. Only 34% of the black kids at Dayton's Bluff score 3 or better compared to compared to 48% of blacks statewide, and 80% of whites statewide. The average score for black students at Dayton's Bluff is 1361, for blacks statewide 1412, and for whites statewide, 1617 (1301 for Asians at Dayton's Bluff).
So the Alert gives us the relative good news at third grade in a somewhat misleading fashion, but completely omits the not-so-good news at fifth grade. Selectivity at its worst.
From what I'm told, the Dayton'a Bluff administration and teachers are hardworking and doing what they can to improve things and for that they certainly deserve credit. But for the Achievement Alliance to puff them up and propagandistically present the school from a Polyanna perspective as generally being a high achiever doesn't help the school at all. It only destroys whatever credibility the Alliance might have had.
— Gerald Bracey
Education Disinformation Detection and Reporting Agency (EDDRA)
2005-05-10
INDEX OF NCLB OUTRAGES
