Superintendents Suggest Fixes For 'No Child'
Some Support National Testing Standards

By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 1, 2007; B01

The superintendents of the Washington area's two largest school systems say national standards are needed to measure achievement among public school students, a sharp contrast to other educators who are asking that the federal government have less involvement in the schools, not more.

The support for national tests from the superintendents in Fairfax and Montgomery counties, as well as the superintendent and School Board of Arlington County, is one of the most surprising messages being sent to Congress by area educators hoping to influence efforts to revise the five-year-old No Child Left Behind law.

Interviews with Washington area school leaders and a review of their statements show them in sympathy with nationwide public school support for rating schools by individual student progress, giving more time to bring non-English-speaking students up to annual benchmarks, providing more freedom for parents and teachers to decide how much students with learning disabilities need to improve, and spending more federal dollars to improve teaching quality and increase instruction time.

But by supporting national testing and learning standards, a position that Congress has rejected in previous years, some Washington educators are giving new life to a movement whose most outspoken supporters have been academics and pundits, not school administrators.

"I've never figured out why in the world we wouldn't have a national education standard," said Montgomery County School Superintendent Jerry D. Weast. "We have standards for toys and everything else."

Congress might vote on whether to revise No Child Left Behind this year. With criticism of the law ratcheting up, changes are likely.

Jack D. Dale, superintendent of Fairfax County schools, called the current system "incoherent, contradictory and inconsistent." Arlington's School Board, using an argument advanced by Superintendent Robert G. Smith, said No Child Left Behind "provides neither high consistent standards nor consistent measures for accountability."

Some local school leaders say they would like to expand the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally financed sampling of student progress, to create a national learning standard. Arlington officials suggest that a revised federal law include a much larger sample of students so that the achievement tests would be given to all school systems and every school. This year's test was given to about 700,000 students.

Dale wants to turn the No Child Left Behind system upside down. Instead of states creating individual tests and the federal government devising the sanctions and supports for low-scoring schools, he would prefer that the federal government provide the tests. Every school could see where it stood on a national scale, and each state could decide what to do to encourage improvement in low-performing schools.

The views of Dale, Smith and Weast are at odds with many in Congress, who agreed to the unprecedented federal intrusion into schools only because each state retained the power to create testing standards and determine to a great extent how many of its schools would miss the new learning targets. Supporters of a more nationalized system say their views are influenced by the difficulty in figuring out what works with so many different state standards.

What is left unsaid is that in part because of unusually high household incomes and education levels in such school systems as Fairfax and Montgomery's, students in those counties will look very good, on average, on any national scale. And students in poor districts in all likelihood will be at a disadvantage.

Local educators are also asking that annual school assessments focus on how much each child has improved, instead of how much this year's students improved as a group compared with last year's.

"Current testing methods do not gauge or quantify growth over time," said Prince George's County Superintendent John E. Deasy. "In order to know if students are truly not being left behind, we must track the progress of the same students as they move from grade to grade and provide supports, if needed, to improve."

Emphasizing the improvement of each child, sometimes called the "gain score" or "growth model," is a part of a package of revisions suggested by the Alexandria-based National School Boards Association. "Growth is a more accurate measure of success, particularly for students who are traditionally at risk," an association report said. The association's proposal has been endorsed by school boards in Frederick, Howard, Arlington, Fairfax, Fauquier, Prince William, Spotsylvania and Stafford counties, as well as Manassas and Fredericksburg.

Several local educators said they support a revision of the law that would make it less likely that schools would miss federal targets just because a few students had missed a few questions on one test. Frederick County school board member Bonnie Borsa called the current setup an "all-or-none" system and said it "does not take into consideration the number of students who do not show proficiency or by what degree they missed the mark."

Several local school leaders said the law also puts too much emphasis on labeling schools that missed the mark as "needing improvement" and too little emphasis on helping them improve. "The data is being applied arbitrarily and used as a hammer and not as a way of improving achievement," said Dennis Kellison, superintendent of Winchester public schools in Virginia.

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee said: "Instead of relying solely on tests, we must meet the demands of our low-performing schools with intensive assistance and support. We must support especially the social, emotional and intellectual needs of students and find innovative ways to engage parents in the education of their children."

Many local educators said they were unhappy that students with learning disabilities often have to take exams given to students without disabilities and be judged by standards considered inappropriate for them by their parents and teachers. Dale has suggested to Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), a co-author of the No Child Left Behind law, that such students be judged by their progress in meeting the goals in their individualized education plans, drawn up by their parents and teachers, and not by federal benchmarks.

Some parents of disabled students have said, however, that without the federal benchmarks, school systems would have fewer incentives to give children the challenging lessons they need. Weast said he was also concerned about "watering down our expectations."