Alternative Approaches to High-Stakes Testing

THE National Education Association (NEA) has been asked whether we endorse petition (see page 273) being circulated by Educator Roundtable that calls on members of U.S. Congress to vote against reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. The short answer? Absolutely not. While initiators of petition are well meaning and share many of same concerns NEA has about NCLB, petition does not represent our views. For example, it calls for dismantling of NCLB and does not propose any positive changes or alternatives, such as those articulated in our own document, ESEA: It's Time for a Change: NEA's Positive Agenda for ESEA Reauthorization. The NEA agrees with many of 16 reasons articulated in petition that argue why law cannot be salvaged. However, association disagrees with petition's conclusion--that NCLB should be repealed. Instead, we believe that several substantive changes that overhaul statute would produce a far better result. In addition, there is no chance that Congress will repeal NCLB. Those who do not articulate a positive set of changes to law will simply not be at table in negotiating any improvements to it. Furthermore, NCLB is current version of Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), so it's not clear what repealing NCLB would actually mean. Eliminating ESEA and its important programs such as Title I? Reverting back to 1994 version of ESEA, which would eliminate key provisions added in 2002, such as strengthened rights for homeless children? Or eliminating law's negative features, such as adequate yearly progress (AYP) and annual testing provisions? Among positive provisions mandated by NCLB is disaggregation of student data. That requirement alone has highlighted deficiencies in educational opportunities for several groups of students. In addition, NCLB has good intentions--closing achievement gaps between various groups of students, raising overall student achievement (at least as measured on statewide tests in reading and math), and ensuring that all students have highly qualified teachers. However, NEA has long argued that law's good intentions have gone seriously awry. While Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has said that NCLB is like Ivory Soap; it's 99.9% pure or something ... there's not much needed in way of change, reality is that it is not working. Among its myriad flaws and negative outcomes are a narrowing of curricula and projection that virtually all schools will eventually fail to meet its one-size-fits all, all-or-nothing AYP mandate. There is also little evidence that NCLB has directly contributed to its own major goal--raising student test scores. In addition, law has significant flaws in how it tests and counts test scores earned by both English-language learners and students with disabilities. And its regimen of consequences, sanctions, and punishments has no research base and has not been shown to help close achievement gaps. Finally, NCLB is seriously underfunded--with cumulative shortfall between amounts actually appropriated and amounts authorized in law exceeding $56 billion over six years. The NEA is not alone in calling for fundamental changes in law. A coalition of more than 129 national groups--including NAACP (National Association for Advancement of Colored People), Children's Defense Fund, National PTA, National Council of Churches, and National Alliance of Black School Educators--has called for 14 changes to law, noting that the law's emphasis needs to shift from applying sanctions for failing to raise test scores to holding states and localities accountable for making systemic changes that improve student achievement.(1) Let's take a look at some of these flaws and failures in more depth. …

This year's Bracey Report begins and ends with the item that will continue to dominate education news: No Child Left Behind. TO PRODUCE last year's report required me to sift through 21/2 drawers full of materials. This year, there were 31/2 drawers. Attention is being paid to public education; much of it is not benign. On the education news front, budgets and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) dominated. Because readers certainly know the budget situation in their own states, we begin with NCLB, in two parts. NCLB: The AYP Trap Last year's report said of No Child Left Behind, [It's] a trap, a Trojan Horse . . . choose your metaphor. These days, Americans speak mostly in war images, so I now call NCLB a weapon of mass destruction targeted at the public schools in a campaign of shock and awe, which, given the incredible underreaction of educators, I must conclude is working. I first expressed that sentiment in an article that no one would publish in April 2002. (The article can be found at www.america-tomorrow.com/bracey/EDDRA.) No one seemed to believe it then. They do now. At the April 2003 meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), several employees of the U.S. Department of Education approached me to express dismay over NCLB and over working for an ideologically driven department. These are sad times, indeed. One career staffer declared that NCLB should be renamed: NCL-B.S. As all Kappan readers surely know by now, all schools must test all students every year in grades 3 through 8 in reading and math, with science to be added in 2006-07. Schools must demonstrate adequate yearly progress (AYP). For a school to show AYP, all ethnic groups, all major socioeconomic groups, English-language learners, and special education students must make AYP separately. Ninety-five percent of each group must be tested, and, if any one group fails to make AYP, the school as a whole fails. The official phrase is needs improvement, but headlines across the nation reveal how everyone actually thinks about it: Most Schools in Failing, Los Angeles Daily News, 24 July 2003; State Adds 544 Schools to Failing List -- for Now, Grand Rapids Press, 12 July 2003; It's Pass or Fail; All or Nothing, Raleigh News Observer, 13 July 2003. Schools must continue to make AYP until, by 2014, 100% of a school's students must score In last year's report, I contended that, while the law allowed each state to define proficient, that wouldn't last and that the NAEP (National Assessment of Education Progress) definition of would come to rule. I claimed that this would happen even though the NAEP achievement levels have been rejected as fundamentally flawed by everyone who has ever analyzed them. This includes the General Accounting Office, the Center for Research in Evaluation, Student Standards, and Testing (CRESST), the National Academy of Education, and the National Academy of Sciences. Even so, in his presidential address to AERA, Robert Linn, co-director of CRESST at the University of Colorado and UCLA, made no attempt to provide or use any definition of proficient other than that rendered by NAEP.1 Educational researchers now assume that proficient means NAEP proficient. Secretary of Education Rod Paige has said that he will use the discrepancy between the performance on NAEP and the performance on state tests to shame schools into better performance.2 Certainly those discrepancies will be there for Paige to point to, and in many instances they will be huge. To see why, we need only look at the Princeton Review's comparisons of performance on state tests with performance on NAEP.3 Ironically, the largest discrepancy is for Texas, the home state of Secretary Paige and President Bush. Texas declared 91% of its eighth-graders proficient in math. NAEP says only 24% of Texas students reach that level. Although there are some states where the differences are small and even four states that have tougher requirements than NAEP (Arizona, Louisiana, Missouri, and Maine), the average difference is 23%, and for 22 states, the difference exceeds 30%. …

Changes Proposed to No Child Left Behind

Under Pressure: Job Security, Resource Allocation, and Productivity in Schools Under NCLB

Today's educators live in fear of draconian consequences of to make yearly under No Child Left Behind Act. Mr. Popham offers sage advice on how to comply with law and not get hurt. ONE OF B. F. Skinner's little-known principles of reinforcement states, If any organism, human or subhuman, discerns prospect of impending pain, that organism will attempt to avoid such This principle, often shunned by strict behaviorists because it seems corrupted by cognitive overtones, was first articulated in 1965 in an unpublished essay. The essay is known chiefly because of Skinner's concluding comment that inside every fat rat is a thin rat yearning for food pellets. Skinner's pain-avoidance principle was somewhat unimaginatively identified by Skinner as pain-avoidance principle. In referring to it, reinforcement theorists typically use its initials: PAP. Pain Potential of a Federal Law PAP, then, describes proclivity of organisms to avoid upcoming pain. And if ever there was a law that possessed enormous potential for inflicting pain, it is surely No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. Signed into law in early 2002, this federal statute is thought by some analysts to be, in fact, an enormous pile of pap. The NCLB pain to be avoided, of course, is associated with formidable set of aversive consequences that kick in when a public school fails to get its students to make adequate yearly progress (AYP), as measured by improvements on approved achievement tests. At best, a school that fails to make AYP is merely regarded by public as ineffectual. However, those failing schools that receive Title I funds are placed on an improvement track that, in time, can improve a school right out of existence. In following analysis, I offer guidance to my public school colleagues who, yearning to dodge distress brought on by NCLB, sometimes operate solely on basis of PAP. First, I will identify a number of tactics currently being employed to escape pain of NCLB and then describe a set of tactics -- not yet widely in use -- that show considerable PAP potential. Following inspirational insight of Stephen Potter, who in 1947 introduced us to gamesmanship as the art of winning games without actually cheating, I shall refer to all of these tactics -- sometimes psychometric, sometimes psychological, sometimes psychotic -- as ploys. More specifically, I will dub them NCLB PAP Ploys. I won't spend much space on array of NCLB PAP Ploys that are already in widespread use. Clearly, word is getting around regarding which tactics can help evade AYP-induced failure. As more educators learn about these federally sanctioned schemes to avoid pain, we can safely predict that education profession's mimicry machine will kick into high gear. My chief purpose here is to introduce educators to a set of inchoate, innovative tactics that, if employed adroitly, will stave off a great deal of suffering. NCLB PAP Ploys Now in Use 1. Challenge chopping. Because a state's yearly NCLB tests must, by federal law, be based directly on a state's challenging goals, and because students' low scores on those tests will lead to AYP failure, some states have tried to minimize NCLB-induced casualties simply by lowering challenge levels of their state curricula. Many educators have already learned to their distress that -- from a public relations perspective -- such wholesale reductions in a state's aspirations must be labeled with consummate care. For obvious reasons, these sorts of endeavors should not be described as expectation lowering, standard softening, or dreaded dumbing down. Indeed, there is even some risk in referring to such an overhaul of state as curriculum revision. Revision, after all, could go either way. The best label for such challenge chopping currently appears to be curricular refinement. …

THE FEDERAL journey into public has followed a long and winding road. Most educators know that the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act is simply the latest version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which dates all the way back to 1965. In the years since its initial passage, the ESEA road has taken a number of turns and has been reauthorized many times, in various forms, under various names. The 1994 reauthorization, for example, was called the Improving America's Schools Act. In the past, ESEA was seen as a positive, supportive law, designed to help local school districts provide equitable and adequate to children who face challenging and expensive hurdles to learning. This segment included students with disabilities, poor children, and children whose first language is not English. About five years ago, ESEA reached a fork in the road, and the decision was made to go down the very different NCLB road. This new path was carved out of the landscape by the kind of high-stakes accountability that is based on inexpensive standardized tests and comes with an extremely narrow focus on low-level knowledge and skills. In addition, NCLB replaces decision making by those closest to the students in the school community (e.g., teachers, parents, school boards, and site-based councils) with rigid control by the federal government. The NCLB path has been fraught with numerous unintended consequences. Most fundamentally, NCLB fails to address the needs of the whole child and reduces the guiding purpose of public from the development of effective and contributing citizens to an unending quest for higher scores on tests that cannot assess what we value most in a democratic society--things like critical and creative thinking, problem solving, effective and persuasive communication, cooperation, perseverance, caring, respect, and appreciation for diversity. These qualities empower citizens to thrive in a democratic society and in our complex, ever-changing world, and they cannot be measured on the easy-to-score, paper-and-pencil tests that are the centerpiece of NCLB's accountability policy. The good news, however, is that these important qualities can be demonstrated by means of 21st-century, real-world, authentic performance assessments and that our schools can be encouraged to foster them through rich, meaningful, empowering learning experiences in caring, high-participation learning environments. The bad news is that NCLB's focus on once-a-year, multiple-choice tests--until 2007 in just two subjects--actually works against such a learner-empowering approach. In other words, the aspirations of Sen. Kennedy and the other architects of NCLB that our public schools would guarantee every child in America, regardless of race, economic background, language or disability, the opportunity to get a world-class have deteriorated into the pursuit of a single reading score and a single math score per year on low-level, paper-and-pencil tests. NCLB's advocates call this achievement--as if there were no other indicators of student learning and performance. Why this profound reduction of aspirations? Because NCLB's accountability provisions mean that the test scores themselves have become the motivators and chief driving force of the system. Educators, students, and their schools face stiff consequences if these predetermined test-score standards are not met every year. Hence, in too many U.S. schools, education for life has been reduced to preparation for tests, and as a result the teachers in those schools are witnessing the serious discouragement of their students and colleagues. The more teachers are compelled to focus on producing scores, the less time they have to focus on the learning that they feel will most benefit their students in the long run. …

This chapter seeks to examine the impact of two federal policies, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), on educators in the USA during the past decade of reform. NCLB was signed into law in 2002 and is having a profound effect on the education of all students, including students considered at risk for academic failure, such as students with disabilities, students from diverse racial and ethnic minority groups, students from low socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds, and students who are Limited English Proficient (LEP), better known as English Language Learners (ELLs). NCLB “moved the federal government’s role in education from being primarily a source of funding—now about 9% of every public school dollar—to being a major factor in shaping the substance of P-12 curriculum and instruction” (Lieberman, 2008: 1). The most central requirements of NCLB relate to accountability and raising academic expectations. This law mandates that all students (including those from the aforementioned groups) must make adequate yearly progress (AYP). The overall goal is that all students should be achieving reading and math at grade level by the end of the 2013–2014 school year. NCLB establishes that all students must be taught core academic content by teachers who are highly qualified. A 2007 report by the US Department of Education (USDOE) states NCLB requires states to set standards for all teachers to be considered highly qualified and districts to notify parents of students … if their child’s teacher does not meet these ­standards. The requirements apply to all teachers of core academic subjects: English, reading or language arts, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, arts, history, and geography and the requirements also apply to teachers who provide instruction in these subjects to students with limited English proficiency (LEP) and students with disabilities. (USDOE/www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/teaching/nclb/execsum.html)

ABOUT THE AUTHORS PREFACE: By What Means? The Devil is in The Details! (Fenwick English). INTRODUCTION: NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND, SYMBOLISM OR REALITY? (Frank Brown and Richard C. Hunter) PART I: EDUCATIONAL EQUITY AND NCLB. Fiscal Equity Under Title I and Non-Title I Schools in Local School Districts. (Jim Lyons). NCLB and Diversity in Schools. (Stephen B. Lawton). School Choice and Equity under NCLB In The Post-Brown Era. (Frank Brown). No Child Left Behind: The Balm of Gilead Has Arrived in American Education. (Philip T.K. Daniel). NCLB and the New ESEA Title I Program: Poverty and Education. (Richard C. Hunter). Reconceptualizing Accountability in Urban Schools. (Carolyn Talbert-Johnson and Charles J. Russo). The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and Charter Schools. (Preston Green and Joseph Oluwole). Struggling to Mend it or End it: Legal and Legislative Issues in the Brief History of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. (Saran Donahoo and Norman Greer). Title VII, Bilingual Education of NCLB and Immigrant Students in Urban Schools. (Reynaldo Contreras). PART II: NCLB AND PROCESS Accountability, High Stakes Testing and No Child Left Behind. (Linda Tillman). Resiliency Among African American male students. (Tawannah Alan). The Achievement Gap and the No Child Left Behind Act: Is There a Connection. (Mark A. Gooden and Teresa Y. Nowlin). Public Education in an Era of Neo-Liberal Globalization: The Broken Promise of No Child Left Behind. (Jite Eferakorho). Democratic Notions Informing Equity in Mathematics Education. (Lecretia A. Buckley). Public School Choice: The New K-12 Desegregation Model? (Dawn G. Williams). The Role of Parents under NCLB. (Richard C. Hunter). Educational Equity, Globalization, and the No Child Left Behind Act. (Frank Brown). Immigration, Urban Schools, and Accountability. (Xue Lan Rong). A Nation Still at Risk: No Child Left Behind and the Salvation of Disadvantaged Students. (M. Christopher Brown II, T. E. Dancy II, & Nicole Norfles).

Control over education is a power that the Constitution reserves for the states, not the federal government. But, for the reasons Ms. McColl explains in this article, answering the question she raises in the title is not such an easy matter. THE No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, has become a symbol of all things good and bad in education. While the basic concepts of the legislation -- accountability for results, research-based education programs, increased parental options, and expanded local control and flexibility -- have wide support, some critics have argued that NCLB has failed to deliver.1 Others have focused on how best to implement its provisions.2 Although this scrutiny of the requirements and outcomes of NCLB is crucial to the policy debate, the law has largely escaped a more fundamental review, and answers to the following questions are needed: Has Congress overstepped its legal authority with No Child Left Behind? Is NCLB a constitutional exercise of congressional power, or does it infringe on states' rights? What is the role of the U.S. Department of Education (ED) in addressing ambiguities in the law? Answering these questions requires a close examination of federalism as it is expressed in the U.S. Constitution and interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court. call to examine the law in this light comes with a warning: reaching conclusions about whether Congress acted within the limits of its constitutional authority may cause some discomfort. Liberals may find their customary inclination to favor a more expanded role for the federal government to be in conflict with their concern about the substance of NCLB. Conservatives may similarly find their general bias in favor of states' rights to be in conflict with their support for the accountability and school-choice elements of NCLB. And if the courts ignore, as they should, both the politics surrounding NCLB and its education reform goals, the results of a legal challenge could be interesting, indeed. A conservative Supreme Court may ultimately conclude that President George W. Bush's education agenda exceeds constitutional bounds. Is There Constitutional Authority for NCLB? There is little dispute over whether NCLB represents an unprecedented level of federal involvement in the affairs of our public schools. However, there is disagreement between the law's supporters, who hail this federal intrusion into state and local education as effective national reform, and its detractors, who argue that the intrusion consists of a set of politically motivated mandates that are detrimental to our schools. language of NCLB speaks to the sweeping authority intended by its passage: The purpose of the title is to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging state academic achievement standards and state academic assessments. To accomplish this, NCLB sets extensive requirements for states, including establishing an accountability system and staffing schools with high-quality professionals. This level of federal intrusion into a domain typically under state control raises legal questions because Congress must act within the limits of federal authority established by the U.S. Constitution. Constitution reflects a careful balance between the powers of the federal government and those of the states. James Madison argued, The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.3 Constitution defines this balance in the 10th Amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. Past court decisions, most notably San Antonio v. …

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act (US Government, 2001), the current iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, makes it clear that states, districts, schools and teachers are accountable for the education of English language learners (ELLs), as well as all other students. To implement an accountability system, NCLB requires states to create content standards (a set of curricular goals and objectives) for English language arts, mathematics, and science. They must also develop and administer assessments that measure student progress toward mastery of these content standards. Finally, states, districts, and schools must demonstrate that they are making adequate yearly progress toward bringing all students to a previously established level of mastery of these standards (called Proficient) with the goal that by the year 2014 all students will achieve this level.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the policy process that led to the passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in the United States and the Bush Administration's role in this process.Design/methodology/approachThe research design is historical and archival. A description of the NCLB Act is given and the major provisions and implementation are focused upon. How the Bush Administration helped create the opportunity to pass the NCLB Act by building coalitions, and how public opinion affected the evolution of the policy process is focused upon. Finally, a description is given on how policy ideas like the concept of “accountability” shaped the policy process, and both inspired and constrained the Bush Administration.FindingsThe paper argues that the Bush Administration helped create the opportunity to pass the NCLB Act by building coalitions, and public opinion affected the evolution of the policy process. Policy ideas like the concept of “accountability” shaped the policy process, and both inspired and constrained the Bush Administration.Research limitations/implicationsThe case is limited to the United States and NCLB, although those cases are particularly important in North America and in evaluation‐based research.Practical implicationsThe paper shows how a policy designer can be limited both by political initiatives and his or her own conceptual grounding.Originality/valueThis paper is one of the first to connect the policy process that guided President Bush's design of the NCLB legislation with the concept of “accountability”. Accountability is a foundational concept in the design of quality assurance systems.

This study explored the effects of high-stakes testing and accountability on the fundamental practices associated with middle school philosophy. Participants were middle school educators, including administrators and teachers, from Pennsylvania middle schools. An online survey was used to collect data for this study. The survey addressed the following middle school practices: grouping for instruction, developmentally appropriate instructional practices, interdisciplinary and integrated curriculum, interdisciplinary teaming and planning, and advisory programs. Participants were also encouraged to add comments throughout the survey. Findings revealed that since the implementation of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the associated high-stakes tests, developmentally appropriate practices in middle schools have been altered to provide additional time for test preparation. In many cases, tested subject areas (specifically reading, writing, and mathematics) were given more instructional time during the school day. Furthermore, special area subjects (i.e., electives) were often sacrificed and, in some cases, advisory time was used for remediation. Implications for practice focus on the need to maintain a balance between test preparation and practices deemed appropriate for middle school students.

Stanley Pogrow shares a decade's worth of experience in developing an approach to teaching math to upper-elementary and middle school students that simultaneously increases basic skills, improves problem solving, raises test scores, and sparks student interest in math. For details, read on. MY WORK over the past 24 years has focused on using technology to produce more sophisticated forms of learning after the third grade. This work started with the Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) program for Title I and learning-disabled students. (For more information on the HOTS program, visit www.hots.org.) We used lessons learned from this pioneering effort as we developed Supermath, an alternative approach to teaching math to all students. Supermath provides interesting opportunities for districts to better meet the accountability challenges of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) while also producing reflective mathematics learning as celebrated in the November 2003 issue of the Kappan. Background Of Supermath In the early 1990s, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the development of Supermath as part of an effort to produce new and innovative approaches to and materials for teaching mathematics. In designing Supermath, we sought to develop an approach that would simultaneously increase students' basic skills, problem-solving ability, test scores, and interest in math. We aimed to achieve these results for both advantaged and disadvantaged students and to be far more successful in doing so than conventional approaches, even those that used technology, had been. Given these ambitious goals, it was clear that the Supermath materials would have to be creative and engaging and would have to incorporate and systematize powerful curricular and pedagogical techniques. The use of technology to improve learning has traditionally focused on presenting content in an individualized fashion and then testing students. Fancy graphics and animation are used to intrigue the students. Technology serves to automate instruction rather than to create new forms of instruction. While this approach has value, it generally produces gains only in the early grades -- and primarily on the program vendor's test. There are more creative simulations and tools available on which to build new approaches to instruction. But, while valuable and able to provide for exploratory learning, these technologies tend to be hit or miss and place heavy burdens on teachers to figure out how to use them effectively. It is also hard to demonstrate the impact that these simulations and tools have on improved content skills and test scores. HOTS demonstrated that it was possible to use technology systematically in ways that produced progressive outcomes -- comprehension and self- concept -- while also producing even greater gains on traditional achievement measures, such as test scores. The primary lesson from HOTS is that developing a more powerful approach to learning requires insight into what is inhibiting learning and ideas about how to overcome these inhibitors. Then, and only then, should one think about using technology to improve instruction and student performance. In the case of HOTS, I discovered that for disadvantaged students the key inhibitor of reading comprehension and general learning was not understanding understanding, a problem that could be addressed only through intensive conversations about ideas.1 Based on this insight, HOTS uses technology to provide students a common experience that serves as the basis for shared conversations, much as a family uses life experience as the basis for dinner-table conversation. In this approach to technology use, curriculum and training were designed to generate an environment conducive to sophisticated and intensive Socratic conversation and to maintain it over the one- to two-year period needed to develop students' sense of understanding. Using technology indirectly to promote conversation, as a table setter so to speak, worked powerfully. …

Public elite and specialized high schools in New York City have a very low enrollment of Black and Latino students. Project 2011 is an intensive preparatory instructional program to improve acceptance rates for Black and Latino children to the eight specialized public high schools in New York City. Initiated and funded by District 17 and 18 of the New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE) and supported by Kaplan K12 Learning Service, Project 2011 offers curriculum and training for the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT), which is the only eligibility criterion for acceptance to New York City specialized high schools. Pre-test and post-test assessments that were administered to participating students indicated that the program significantly improved students' performance on a practice test. Implications for student achievement and factors that influence their scores on the SHSAT, standardized tests, and school work are discussed.Keywords: specialized high schools, SHSAT, high schools, high school admissions process, equal educational opportunityLITERATURE REVIEWSince the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ruling over half a century ago, concerns over equal educational opportunity continues to be widespread (Muller, Riegle-Crumb, Schiller, Wilkinson, & Frank, 2010). Many studies reveal circumstances that restrict access to education in academically competitive public high schools due to the use of a singular assessment to determine placement. New York City (NYC) Public School system's elite and specialized high schools are strongly impacted by inequality and access to education (Gootman, 2006; Mazie, 2009; Santos, 2012). The resulting impact on Black students is strongly evident in the research (Banchero, 2012; Deresiewicz, 2008; Muller et al., 2010).The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 addresses the issue of equal access to education and calls for a movement to increase academic standards (Mazie, 2009). In accordance with NCLB, many cities, like New York City, have been recognized for addressing the racial achievement gap in early education. However, they have not been as successful at the high school level, particularly at their top public schools, which require an entrance (Gootman, 2006). According to Dobbie and Fryer (201 1), exam schools make up over half of U.S. News and World Report's top 100 American high schools, and 20 out of 21 high schools designated as the 'public elite' by Newsweek (p. 1). Governments, such as China, Malaysia, Romania, Singapore, and Turkey, also use entrance exams to determine admission into their secondary schools (Dobbie & Fryer, 2011). The existence of exams schools in the U.S. has sparked intense debate on issues of educational inequality, particularly among political philosophers who are knowledgeable of public education systems and recognize the need to move beyond discussions of civic education to promoting educational parity (Mazie, 2009).Equal educational opportunity for all students is particularly important because research shows a direct correlation between academic success in high school and SES of future generations (Muller et al., 2010). Muller et al. (2010) recognized stratification in educational opportunity that extended beyond expected socioeconomic status (SES) differences to race. Specifically, the study mentions African American and Latino students' differential educational opportunities in comparison to their White counterparts. Furthermore, unequal public funds for education have always been a problem in the United States. Even private funds raised by the parent-teacher associations (PTAs) are impacted by the socioeconomic status of their communities (Mazie, 2009). Schools in lower SES communities are often deprived of basic and necessary educational materials. Compounding matters, Johnson, Richeson, and Finkel (2011) posit that students from lower SES environments, which are disproportionately Black and Latino, also encounter negative psychological influences. …

WHEN EDUCATORS open their Fibber McGee's closets of past reforms, a pile of silver bullets will spill out onto the floor. For at least the past 20 years, the sense of public confidence in public education has been fed by an arsenal of such quick, often creative, but largely unsubstantiated remedies for turning schools and kids around. And the pile became much larger this fall. The highest-caliber bullet of all--the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act--landed on top of the pile. But it was not the only presumed salvation of the public schools to lose some of its luster recently. Collecting data about these failed silver bullets can often tell us more than we've known before. The first National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report on reading and math scores that fairly reflects changes under NCLB showed essentially that, so far, this silver bullet is pretty much of a dud. Reading scores were flat, and math scores were up only a bit. Despite statements by the Bush Administration that sought to put a happy face on the findings, the NAEP data showed that progress had been better before NCLB became law than it has been since it was enacted. The data also indicate something that few pundits seem willing to acknowledge. Since the passage of NCLB, about four years ago, changes in the demographics of the student population have accelerated, and schools all over the country are feeling the impact of more English-language learners than ever before. It is to the schools' credit that NAEP reading scores--in the early grades, at least --did not go down. Moreover, the very slight improvement in math scores could be attributed partially to the fact that math test items in the early grades, and even to some extent on the eighth-grade tests, do not require advanced reading skills. (Another possible explanatory factor is that the efforts of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics have given us some semblance of national math standards and that these standards have been in various stages of implementation for more than 15 years.) The NAEP data also underscore the accident-of-birth unfairness built into state accountability systems. The erratic performance of students on state measures of achievement, compared to their performance on NAEP, demonstrates that students in some states are being held accountable for much higher levels of performance than students in other states. And no state has made much progress, as revealed in the NAEP scores. Some 20 states claim to have made progress on their own eighth-grade reading assessments between 2003 and 2005, but only three showed any progress at even the basic level on NAEP. And, according to the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, only eight of 25 states that did announce progress on their own fourth-grade reading tests had more than one-third as much progress at the basic level on NAEP. As might be expected, proponents and opponents of charter schools took the very same data and came up with different analyses. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools found them to be making more progress than other schools; the American Federation of Teachers found them to be making less, even after accounting for student-level racial/economic variables. Another silver bullet to land atop the pile of spent ones is the grandiose array of promises made by Edison Schools, Inc. In the immortal tradition of Edward R. Murrow's series You Are There, I was there when Tennessee entrepreneur Chris Whittle announced that he would launch a network of at least 100 new schools that would rival public schools in terms of technology and student achievement. …