The Education Trust - West. Closing the Achievement Gap.

First, on behalf of my colleagues at the Education Trust, we thank the Department of Education, State Board of Education, and Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell for the invitation to provide written testimony regarding the reauthorization of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. This landmark legislation has created a sea change in the way the country thinks about successful schooling. More than any law that came before it, NCLB has focused federal, state, and local policy-makers’ attention squarely on those students who were ignored for generations, namely poor and minority students. For the first time in our history, we have publicly committed to meeting the needs of all children who enter the schoolhouse door, regardless of the background or level of achievement they bring with them.

Of course, with any great change comes great controversy. NCLB has not been popular with many of our colleagues—on both sides of the political spectrum— and indeed, the law is not without its flaws. However, as Congress moves toward reauthorization, we urge California to support and aggressively implement every aspect of the law that keeps our state and our schools focused on bringing all students to proficiency in an aggressive timeframe, and for the federal government to hold the line on equity provisions in the reauthorization. Aggressive goal-setting—all kids proficient by 2014 and having a truly effective teacher in every core classroom, for example — while ambitious, and hard for many to imagine, is precisely the kind of daring thinking that we will need to turn California’s education system around and close the vicious achievement gaps that have hobbled California’s young people and our society for decades.

Our state leaders, lead by State Chief O’Connell, have loudly proclaimed that California will influence the reauthorization of NCLB quite substantially – and it should. We after all educate one of every eight public education students in the country. Most other states are out-performing California though — in reading and math, in elementary and secondary school, for all groups of students, White, Black, Asian and Latino. California’s real problems do not emanate from NCLB and they will not be solved by NCLB, either. In other words, if California doesn’t take the substantive obligations of NCLB more seriously — educating all students to proficient and closing the achievement gap — then no changes to NCLB are actually going to get us the student achievement results state leaders claim to want. Overall, we strongly hope that moving forward California does not exert its considerable influence to deflate strong accountability and aggressive goals for teacher quality. Doing so would be disastrous to California’s and the nation’s poor and minority students.

Citing confusion over two “competing” models of accountability, California has spent much of the last 5+ years pushing to replace the federal AYP system with California’s own API measure of progress. API and AYP measure two different things: progress from the previous year, and progress toward a uniform target, respectively.

We would be making a critical error if we substituted API for AYP. There are many discreet problems with API — among them, API asks that schools reach a target of 800, which isn’t proficient on our state standards; and it allows schools to backpedal because if performance drops one year, the next year’s API target is lower. But our biggest concern with API is that is doesn’t ever demand enough growth to get kids proficient within a specified time period. We believe that by 2014 every student should be reading and doing math on grade-level, or should be on a growth trajectory that promises to get them to proficiency within a specific time period, by a date-certain.

Some argue that assessing growth this way is somehow unfair to schools that serve concentrations of poor children. If schools are making some progress, the argument goes, they should get credit for doing so. We agree, but some progress isn’t enough, especially for students that arrive below grade-level.

If public education is going to serve as an engine of upward mobility, then expectations need to be pegged not just to where students come from, but where they need to go. The reality is that there are absolute standards against which students will be judged, whether they go right to work or into postsecondary education. In the real world, there won’t be allowances based on family background or parents’ education level. Frankly it’s unfair to them not to require schools and districts to take responsibility for all of their students’ proficiency in an accelerated and aggressive time frame. An accountability system that demands marginal progress and minimal growth is simply not enough. API and AYP should and can be combined so that growth is measured and rewarded and yearly targets are aggressive enough to get a student to proficient over the remaining time he or she is in school because otherwise the time for them runs out.

For too many communities throughout California and the nation, the school improvement process has felt like an exercise in labeling and public humiliation, without accompanying help or support. And while it is not wrong to expect school districts and states to take responsibility for helping in their struggling schools, there has not been adequate energy or resources dedicated to building capacity in this area. California could do well for itself in the reauthorization process to acknowledge that it desperately needs more federal help—in the form of solid, widely disseminated research and financial support—about what it takes to turn around chronically low-performing schools, as well as what it takes to boost the academic achievement of students who enter school behind or fall behind over the course of their academic career. Especially high priority should be devoted to answering fundamental questions about best practices for teaching Limited English Proficient students.

But the responsibility doesn’t rest solely with the federal government. California’s Department of Education needs to build capacity to provide technical assistance and learning opportunities for staff in struggling schools, needs to be able to review school and district plans and progress in implementing them, and needs to be able to step in with intensive interventions and supports when a school fails to educate its students over multiple years. In addition, there needs to be much more in the way of high-quality curriculum, instructional units, and assignments, so teachers — in these schools and others — have better materials on which to build. Federal law could help with more targeted resources for these efforts. But the federal government and California also need to get better at identifying successful schools, supporting research into the practices and policies that distinguish these schools, and disseminating best-practice research that is non-political and is readily available to the many administrators who are willing to acknowledge their schools need to improve, and deserve better help in meeting the challenges.

As a country, we’ve made a policy decision to no longer tolerate widespread failure in public education. This marks a historic shift, and one that was long overdue. But the old state and district systems were built when low-performing schools were considered acceptable and even inevitable, and weren’t set up to diagnose problems and intervene in struggling schools.

The federal government can help expand the expertise and the resources focused on turning around persistently low-performing schools. And California on its own should invest much more of its own resources in this area. Right now it isn’t, and demand far outpaces ability to respond.

It is widely known that our high schools are in crisis. Overall achievement in high schools is low compared to international standards, and achievement gaps are wider in high school than in the early and middle grades. While NCLB has focused us more deliberately on high school achievement and achievement gaps, it has done little to improve graduation rates. California should push for improvements to the law here: if schools are held accountable for student achievement, they must also be held accountable for retaining students else we run the risk of letting low-performing students slip out of the system altogether. This is a critical check on NCLB’s accountability provisions.

There are multiple problems with the way NCLB and California have addressed graduation rates to date. First, the federal government has allowed states to define and calculate graduation rates in a way that obscures the drop-out problem. In California, we rely on schools to identify those students who have dropped out—a number that is notoriously hard to pin down and is typically underreported. As a result, California is losing track of drop-outs and misrepresenting the problem to the federal government and the public at large.

In an amazing display of collaboration and progressive thinking, the governors of all 50 states agreed in 2005 to adopt a common, far more accurate method of calculating graduation rate. We believe the reauthorization of NCLB should codify the governors’ commitment, and provide financial and technical resources to ensure that it is fulfilled.

Ultimately, of course, the problem is bigger than just how to count graduates. We have to get much more serious about actually changing outcomes, and incorporate improvement on this measure into the way we assess school progress. Congress left states discretion to set goals for improving graduation rates, but most states set meager goals that expected no more than glacial progress, even from schools where graduation rates are extremely low. California is no exception. In California, high schools must only improve graduation rates by one-tenth of 1% each year (or an average two-tenths over 2 years). That means that a school’s graduation rate could go from 50% to 51% in ten years with no repercussions. When the law is reauthorized, it should require far more ambitious targets. And especially considering California’s extremely low graduation rates for low-income students and students of color as reported by both the Harvard University Civil Rights Project and the Manhattan Institute, schools should be held accountable for improving graduation outcomes for all subgroups, rather than just improving graduation rates on average.

California though should not await pressure from the federal government, and instead should take several steps now to ensure better reporting of how many students we lose before graduation. Those steps include: designing new, tighter rules for tracking drop-outs; providing training to schools to implement the new definitions; and designing audit protocols for ensuring integrity in locally reported data.

In developing the teacher quality provisions of NCLB, Congress knew the importance of effective teaching, and recognized the glaring inequity in teacher distribution. But while NCLB correctly identifies the problem, it hasn’t been as effective in helping public education make much progress. Provisions to equalize distribution of teacher talent haven’t been enforced, and some provisions may actually undermine the NCLB’s intent to correct the inequitable distribution of teacher talent. And unfortunately, as with the accountability provisions, since the enactment of NCLB, California leaders have sought to undermine the equity-focused teacher quality provisions of the law rather than meaningfully implementing them.

The teacher quality provisions in NCLB represent a squandered opportunity of momentous proportions. In some ways, because of California’s weak implementation of NCLB, we are in a worse position to confront problems in teacher quality and distribution than we were in five years ago. NCLB requires that all core subjects be taught by a “highly qualified” teacher, and left it to the state to define what “highly qualified” would mean. California leaders set a very low bar for determining who is a “highly qualified teacher.” Now, official state numbers show (and the public is told) that virtually all teachers are “highly qualified” and that there’s no difference in the quality of educators between high-poverty and affluent schools, or between high-minority schools and those with few students of color.

Rather than confronting the problem of teacher distribution and devising a real plan for addressing it, California has essentially obscured any inequalities in access to qualified teachers. Besides not helping students, these actions convey a cynical message to the public: the achievement gap must be the fault of the kids, their families and their communities, because everyone has a “highly qualified teacher.”

The research is clear that the classroom teacher matters more than anything else we do in public education, and it is also abundantly clear that students of color and students growing up in poverty are assigned disproportionately to our weakest teachers. These issues must be addressed more aggressively in the next reauthorization of NCLB. After years of ignoring the teacher equity provisions of the law, the federal government has finally required states to submit plans to close the teacher quality gap. While this is a step in the right direction, there has been far too little guidance and technical assistance from the federal government in this area. States have been unclear on exactly what they are expected to do to assist districts struggling to equalize teacher quality across schools. Left to its own devices, California unfortunately has not produced a high-quality plan that is likely to succeed. In the reauthorization, the federal government needs to clarify and heighten its expectations, and begin to actually enforce its equity provisions on a concrete timeline.

Furthermore, the federal government and California need to get much more serious about measuring teacher effectiveness. Recent research confirms that there are massive differences in the effectiveness of individual teachers, but the proxies that are currently most popular in measuring teacher quality are turning out to have only limited power to predict who will be effective. The evidence suggests that we should keep quality control on those who enter the classroom, and we should focus much more attention on who stays in the classroom. Once teachers have been on the job for two to three years, they should have to demonstrate that students learn in their classrooms to earn tenure. In essence, we need to move from measuring teacher qualities to teacher effectiveness. Teachers who cannot demonstrate that they can boost student learning should get assistance, but then should not continue teaching if they do not improve. In turn, teachers whose students gain the most should be given significant incentives to stay in the classroom and to teach the most challenging students. NCLB would be greatly improved if it provided incentives to states to make these kinds of meaningful changes to teacher distribution. And California leaders should nobly request that the feds do so.

The so-called “comparability” provision of the law (Section 1120A) is based on the premise that all students should be provided with comparable educational opportunities, even before federal funds are applied. Title I was never intended to make up for inequality created by state and local policy, but rather to provide additional resources for schools on top of the equal distribution of state and local resources. Based on that premise, NCLB demands that districts provide “comparable” educational opportunities in Title I schools as compared to non-Title I schools.

Despite these intentions, high-poverty, Title I schools often get less money than schools with more affluent students in the very same school districts because differences in teacher salaries are not considered evidence in determining comparability. Indeed, NCLB includes an old provision stating that if a school district has a single-salary schedule for teachers, then it has demonstrated compliance with the comparability requirement. While a single salary schedule sounds fair and equitable, it commonly results in vast differences in expenditures across different schools, due to the tendency of more experienced teachers to gravitate to higher-performing, lower-poverty, lower-minority schools. In California, this is happening in almost every one of the 50 largest districts in the state as revealed by a recent series of reports by the Education Trust – West: “California’s Hidden Teacher Spending Gap: How State and District Budgeting Practices Shortchange Poor and Minority Students and Their Schools.”

As a general rule though, schools with more senior, more highly paid teachers don’t offset this expense elsewhere in their budget, and schools with novice teachers don’t get extra money even though their salary budget is much lower than other schools. NCLB currently doesn’t only prevent this from happening, but actually codifies it as an acceptable practice.

An even more insidious practice may be occurring when districts use salary cost averaging to report the use of Title I funds. In other words, districts may be charging the Title I account for an average teacher salary that is higher than the actual teacher salary being paid to the Title I teacher. This represents fraud – the siphoning off of federal funds intended for poor students to subsidize higher teacher salaries in more affluent schools. Pathbreaking research by Paul Hill and Marguerite Roza at the University of Washington reveals that this practice is, in fact, engaged in by school districts. The Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, citing the EdTrust-West Hidden Teacher Spending Gap reports, has urged the U.S. Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, to “determine how many states are using [salary-cost averaging], ascertain what effects the practice may have on Title I grants, and work with states to adopt data collection policies that will make school-level teacher salary data publicly available and to analyze and report on the factors that contribute to the teacher-spending gap, such as personnel and budgeting practices, in order to close the gap in teacher spending and quality within school districts.”^{^[1]} As far we know, Secretary Spellings has not reported back to the Subcommittee.

Federal law should not contain loopholes that exclude teacher salaries from the determination of comparability across schools, and California should have the courage during the reauthorization process to say as much.

Title II provides significant resources that were intended to help high-poverty schools improve teacher quality. Each year, NCLB provides approximately $3 billion in federal aid to help meet the teacher quality goals. By formula, this money is highly targeted to the schools districts educating the most students in poverty. Districts, in turn, are supposed to target Title II resources to the schools that have the fewest highly qualified teachers and to the schools with the most turnover, but have virtually unfettered discretion to use the money as they see fit.

Unfortunately, very little is known about what has happened to the $3 billion every year, and there is strong evidence to suggest that the money has not been targeted appropriately. In November 2005, a Congressionally requested audit by the Government Accountability Office found that Title II was being used to provide professional development to teachers in general, without any focus on the schools or teachers most in need of help. According to the GAO, “only a few of the Title II funded initiatives were directed to specific groups of teachers, such as teachers in high-poverty schools or teachers who had not yet met the [highly qualified teacher] requirements of NCLB.”^{^[2]}When Title II is reauthorized, the law should ensure that money meant for teachers in struggling schools is spent on teachers in struggling schools. California should do this anyway. Under Title II alone, California receives approximately $330 million dollar a year. At the very least, California should make public how and where this money is being spent.

The truth is California cannot meet its goals for student achievement or closing the teacher quality gap, nor can Congress dramatically change the current structure of accountability or teacher quality, because our current data system can only compare different cohorts of students from year to year rather than assessing individual student growth. California, and all states, need to implement a longitudinal data system that tracks individual students over time and connects those students’ achievement results with their teachers. Until then, California cannot do a growth model and it can’t reliably track the distribution of teachers, nor can it truly implement a good definition of graduation rates. State Chief O’Connell has been an ardent supporter of good data, as has Governor Schwarzenegger, yet implementation of a longitudinal data system has been slow and riddled with politics. Federal support and guidance through NCLB can help spur some action. As a state, we should consider the implementation and utilization of a longitudinal data system as one of our highest priorities.

Every year under NCLB, California receives 1.4 – 1.75 billion dollars under Title I, and over 330 million dollars under Title II. California has an obligation to spend this money as the law mandates. To date, it’s questionable whether California has spent more resources fighting the law than it has successfully implementing it. Certainly, there are a lot of ways that NCLB can be improved, but there are also some fundamental ways in which it must not be watered down. There are still many who believe that accountability for student learning is an imposition, and an unrealistic one at that. One reason this critique garners so much support is the pervasive belief that disparate outcomes for different groups of students are inevitable, or at least beyond the power of public schools to change.

We must not back down from the historic commitment to transform public education into an institution that responds effectively to the needs of all students. The reauthorization should send a strong signal that accountability for academic achievement is here to stay. This means aligning our resource allocation, data collection and reporting, and accountability goals with the imperative to educate every child.

Given the magnitude of the challenge, and the steady drumbeat of skeptics and conspiracy theorists, there are still a lot of people both within and outside education who are asking, “Can we do this?” There is ample evidence that we can, and we must. Educating more of our young people to higher levels is imperative to

America

’s security and prosperity in the changing world, and essential and for realizing our democratic ideals.

1 Language in FY 2006 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Federal Appropriations Bill (HR 3010; House Report 109-143).

[2] Improved Accessibility to Education’s Information Could Help States Further Implement Teacher Qualification Requirements, at page 33, Report # GAO-06-25, Government Accountability Office, November 2005.