Ed Trust Press Room

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

July 27, 2006

CONTACT:

Claire Campbell (202) 293-1217, ext. 351

KATI HAYCOCK’S TESTIMONY TO THE HOUSE EDUCATION AND WORKFORCE COMMITTEE ENDORSING GROWTH MEASURES

(Washington, D.C.) –

Mr. Chairman, Mr. Miller, and Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify this morning regarding the potential of growth measures to improve school accountability determinations.

As you know, I head the Education Trust, an independent, non-profit organization focused on improving achievement and closing gaps between groups, pre-kindergarten through college.  In that role, I and my colleagues do a lot of work with both states and school districts, including frequent opportunities to advise on and observe the effects of accountability systems.  I also served as one of ten members of the Peer Review Team assembled by Secretary Spellings to advise her on proposals for the Growth Model Pilot program.

My simple answer to your overarching question is, yes, incorporating growth measures can improve accountability systems. They don’t in and of themselves ensure improved education for all students, but growth measures can help in several important ways.

First, using growth measures can help education leaders to prioritize the schools that need the most help. Giving schools credit for growth in students’ learning can help distinguish between schools where, though students are not yet proficient, they are on a trajectory to become proficient soon—and those where students are on a trajectory to nowhere. These more nuanced determinations can help to ensure that help and resources are targeted to the schools and students with the most acute needs.  

Second, establishing credit for growth can help to ensure that schools don’t focus inordinate attention on students who are just below proficient, but rather seek to grow the knowledge and skills of students at all ends of the achievement spectrum—including the middle-achieving low-income and minority students who could become high achievers with more challenging instruction. 

Third, the inclusion of growth measures can help education leaders to set stretch goals for all schools, including the higher achieving schools that Bill Sanders often calls the “Slide and Glide” Schools. 

Finally, establishing credit for growth can reduce the perception of some that the NCLB accountability system is arbitrary and unfair, especially to schools that receive large numbers of underprepared students.

That said, suggesting that the inclusion of growth measures can improve accountability systems is different from guaranteeing that it will. So rather than spending my time with you extolling the virtues of growth measures, let me focus instead on what I think I’ve learned about the principles and conditions that must undergird these or any other changes in accountability systems.

But first a word about the peer review process.

The Peer Review Process

In November 2005, the U.S. Secretary of Education announced a growth model pilot program, with the stated goal of informing the reauthorization of NCLB.  Several months later, she named a panel of ten peer reviewers.

The peer reviewers represented a broad cross section of experts and stakeholders, including practitioners from state departments of education and school districts, as well as outside researchers, assessment experts and child advocates.  The group included both liberals and conservatives. 

Despite our different perspectives, however, we reached consensus on every significant aspect in our review of the states’ growth model proposals. Indeed, our conversations were so constructive and substantive that the peer review panel took the extraordinary step of publicly releasing a statement of principles—signed by every member of the team--to help inform subsequent discussions of these issues. I’ll draw from that statement in just a moment.

I do, however, want to share what were perhaps the two most important findings from our work:

• First, despite perceptions that it is unnecessarily rigid and crude, the current AYP system actually gets it right most of the time.  In both states that were approved to implement growth models, most of the schools that didn’t make AYP without a growth component also did not make AYP with a growth component. As it turns out, schools with low achievement also tend to be schools with low growth. In each state, fewer than 50 schools that made growth targets had not made AYP under the current rules.

• Second, in most cases, growth to proficiency is actually a higher bar than the current status system. In North Carolina, for example, if accountability determinations were based solely on growth, fewer schools would have met their goals. Why?  Because a lot of schools that are now over the status bar are actually not growing their students’ knowledge and skills very much. 

So growth isn’t an easier standard at all.  But, done right, it can both enhance the fundamental fairness of the system and provide the more nuanced information necessary to help leaders target resources and assistance to the schools and students with the most acute needs.

Principles

So what are the principles that should undergird this or any other change in the NCLB accountability system?

First and foremost, we must be very clear that any old growth won’t do.  Congress must insist on growth to proficiency.  It’s important to recall why you focused the nation on the goal of student proficiency in the first place. 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.

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. A growth model can provide incentives to focus on students at all levels of achievement, but the goal must still be proficiency for all students.

Some argue that this is somehow unfair to schools that serve concentrations of poor children.  Our collective responsibility, however, must be to the students themselves.  And frankly it’s unfair to them not to require schools and districts to take responsibility for student achievement.

Second, once a student’s growth trajectory is established, it’s the school system’s responsibility to catch the student up within the designated time frame. If the expectation is that a student will reach proficiency in three or four years, the targets should not be reset downwards nor should the time frame generally be extended.  Otherwise, students will never actually be expected to be proficient.

Third, as the peer review committee suggested, growth models should set goals for proficient students. This is especially important because many students who perform at the proficient level one year will not be proficient in subsequent years without explicit attention to their needs.  This is one of the reasons why, in recent years, we’ve observed a pattern on both NAEP and state tests in which more students are proficient on elementary tests than in the middle or high school grades. Growth models should orient educators toward students’ success in successive years.

Fourth, any growth models should retain NCLB’s historic focus on individual students. If, as some suggest, we look at the average growth for a whole school, high growth with some students will mask the stagnant or slow growth – and even the academic decline – of other students. One of NCLB’s strengths is that it does not allow schools to compensate for the under-education of low-achieving students by having a greater number of advanced students. Likewise, schools should not compensate for some students’ stagnant growth by showing greater growth with higher-achieving students.

Looking at the growth of individual students over time requires assessments that are aligned from year to year and longitudinal data systems. Many states still do not have these in place, limiting their ability to implement growth models. The quality of assessments and data systems is critically important to the accuracy and validity of growth measures, so focusing on state capacity and resources in this area needs to be a priority.

Finally, it is important to ask the question, “growth to what?”  Just as averages can mask under-achievement by some groups of students, so too can standards that are not sufficiently rigorous. If schools can meet their goals not only based on students that are meeting standards, but also on growth toward these standards, it becomes even more important to have meaningful, high-level standards. As Congress considers allowing states to incorporate growth into accountability, it is important to revisit the hands-off approach that has ignored the rigor of state standards.

Accountability Alone Is Not Adequate

Improving NCLB’s accountability system is an important undertaking, and the inclusion of a growth component guided by these principles can help.

But we need to keep all this in perspective.  Even the best accountability system is essentially a signaling system, helping educators, policymakers, and the public-at-large to understand whether schools are meeting their goals.

I’m the last person to dismiss the power of accountability systems to improve coherence and focus in systems of public education that often lack both. Certainly, there is evidence that standards and accountability help: This year’s edition of Education Week’s Quality Counts report concluded that states with stronger implementation of accountability have seen appreciably bigger gains on NAEP, bolstering earlier findings from a study by the RAND Corporation. And NCLB’s focus on accountability for different groups of students has provided critically important leverage to get systems of public education responding to the needs of low-income and minority students.

What’s really important, however, is improving teaching and learning. No amount of tweaking the accountability system will solve the serious, systemic problems plaguing our public schools. Indeed, I worry that, unlike in other countries, where leaders adopt standards and accountability systems and then move quickly to improvement activities, we Americans keep focusing the bulk of our energy on making accountability systems ever better. 

There are some critical improvement issues that demand their own attention:

Capacity to turn around struggling schools: 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.

We need to rapidly expand the expertise and the resources focused on turning around persistently low-performing schools. The current budget proposal to dedicate $200 million to the school improvement fund is a good idea, in part because it sends a signal to the states that this is a priority. But right now states aren’t investing enough of their own resources in this area, and demand far outpaces ability to respond. 

Teacher Quality: We cannot close achievement gaps without closing gaps in access to teacher quality. Recent research from Illinois documented that students who studied all the way through Calculus in schools with the lowest teacher quality learned less math than students who only went through Algebra 2 in schools with just average teacher quality. Yet Congress has continued to pour billions of dollars into systems, ostensibly to help educate poor kids, only to have systems provide these students with the least access to qualified teachers and high-quality teaching.

Recently, for the first time in the four-year history of NCLB’s implementation, the U.S. Department of Education required states to develop equity plans to ensure poor and minority students get their fair share of teacher talent. And Congress has encouraged innovation in teacher assignment, evaluation, and compensation by creating the Teacher Incentive Fund. These are important steps, but raising teacher quality and ensuring equal access to effective teachers must remain a bipartisan priority.

Title 2 of NCLB is by far the biggest investment in raising teacher quality, especially in school districts with high proportions of low-income students. With Title 2, Congress gave districts virtually unfettered discretion to use the money as they saw fit. The result has been general programs that diluted the targeted support envisioned by Congress, with no discernable impact on teacher quality distribution despite a $3 billion annual investment. Congress should conduct an intense inquiry into how Title 2 is being implemented and stipulate better targeting, but should not cut $300 million from the program, as is currently proposed.

Curriculum development with aligned benchmark assessments:  In the early days of standards-based reform, leaders thought that standards themselves would provide sufficient guidance to teachers about what to teach and to what level.  They believed that teachers themselves would figure out how to get students to those standards.

It turns out that most teachers neither want to develop their own curriculum nor have the skills to do it.  Rather, they need coherent, well-designed lessons, units and assignments that they can use day to day.  Fortunately, states and districts are doing more and more along these lines, in part to try to reach their accountability goals. 

They are also doing more with the kinds of regular, teacher-friendly, “benchmark” assessments that teachers need to gauge their students’ progress toward state standards.

While states and districts have increased their activity and funding in this arena, the federal government could play an important role in bringing these practices to scale by targeting grants in this area to jurisdictions that have good data systems and want to submit these activities to rigorous evaluation, so that lessons can be learned and widely disseminated.

Conclusion

I wish I could report to you that the culture of accountability and continuous improvement had permeated public education, so that you could hand back more discretion to the states to set accountability on their own terms. But nothing in our history or the current climate suggests that we have made enough progress on this front. In fact, some of the push for growth models is a ruse to distract attention from the stark reality that many of our schools themselves must grow a lot, and fast. Several of the states that clamored the loudest for growth models did not even apply for the pilot because they do not have the requisite assessments or data systems in place. For some of the most outspoken critics, the focus on growth amounts to little more than an attempt to diminish public support for meaningful accountability.

Incorporating growth is a good idea and Congress should not be deterred because some of its boosters have mixed motives. But it does mean that you must be vigilant in scrutinizing proposals to ensure that core principles are preserved and strengthened.

Strong accountability is the most important leverage we have to focus public education on continuous improvement and the quest for equal educational opportunity. The consequences of weakening accountability will reverberate in the nation’s military preparedness, economic vitality, and social cohesion.

Basing school accountability determinations on measures of individual students’ growth over time can improve accountability, and those improvements can help ensure that public education targets its resources to the students who need the most help. I do not in any way want to diminish the importance of getting accountability systems to be as good as they can be.

But we have got to get beyond this never-ending quest for the perfect accountability system and turn to the hard work of curriculum development, teacher professional development, and leadership training for principals.