High-Stakes testing and the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) have roots in Dallas ISD

The story of high-stakes testing and the  test and punish requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) includes a role played many years ago at Dallas ISD.  

The early role played by Dallas ISD in the development of the test and punish "accountability" movement started with a Commission For Educational Excellence (1990-91) appointed by Dallas ISD Trustees and headed by Sandy Kress - an attorney who moved to Austin,Texas and later became "the principal architect of Texas’s accountability system."

I served on that Dallas ISD Commission For Educational Excellence (1990-91) and supported a minority report dissenting from certain recommendations made in the full Commission report to the Board of Trustees.
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Rewarding Effective Schools -Theory and Practice in an Outstanding Schools Awards Program (March 1997)

William J. Webster Robert Mendro Donna K. Bearden Karen L. Bembry Heather R.Jordan

Dallas Public Schools Introduction

In 1990, the Board of Education of the Dallas Public Schools established a Commission for Educational Excellence to examine the instructional aspects of the District and to make any necessary recommendations to help improve the education of the District's students. Among the Commission's recommendations was to establish a method to identify effective schools and teachers relative to their students' outcomes. Further, the Commission recommended that the most effective schools be rewarded and the least effective schools be helped to assist them in improving their students' outcomes (Commission, 1991). Adopting the Commission's recommendations, the Board directed the administration to develop a system for a) identifying effective and ineffective schools in an equitable fashion and b) rewarding effective schools for their achievements. The system was to be based primarily on student achievement but to include and allow for non-achievement variables. Awards were to be sufficiently substantial to have meaning to the participants. The system was developed and put into place in the 1991-92 school year. Effective and ineffective schools have been identified each year and, in the 5 years of the program, approximately 11 million dollars have been awarded to staff members.

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A large part of the high-stakes testing and No Child Left Behind story was recently told in a January 13, 2013 article written by Tom Paulken in the publication - The American Conservative. 

• Texas vs No Child Left Behind - The state where it all began turns against the Cult of Educational Testing--and the interests behind it.

meckert75 / Flickr

By Tom Pauken • January 23, 2013 - The American Conservative

"Seventeen months from now, every American student will be proficient in reading, and mathematics. On what basis do I make such a bold claim? It’s the law.

When the No Child Left Behind Legislation was signed by President George W. Bush 11 years ago, it required that by the end of 2013-2014 school year, “all students… will meet or exceed the State’s proficient level of academic achievement on the State assessments.”

If you find it absurd that we can make all our students above average with the stroke of the presidential pen, you’re not alone. The 100 percent proficiency goal of NCLB is now widely acknowledged to be a pipe dream. Recent trends indicate that schools are not even headed in the right direction; and, in much of the press, the 100 percent proficiency goal has become something of the punch line of a joke. Meanwhile, in a move that tacitly acknowledges the unworkability of the current law, the Department of Education is granting NCLB waivers to states which will make it easier for them to skirt the requirements."

More Here

"Texas is where the failed policies of NCLB, along with an almost pathological obsession with testing, had their start.

"For the past two decades, excessive emphasis on high-stakes standardized testing and a one-size-fits-all focus on preparing all students for college came to dominate education policy in Texas and later, in Washington, D.C. with the passage of the Bush-Kennedy “No Child Left Behind” legislation. In addition, vocational education came to be neglected—even denigrated—in this massive push to make all students “college-ready.” Meanwhile, the principle of local control over education (which historically had been a deeply-held belief of Goldwater-Reagan Conservatives) was abandoned by Republican politicians in Texas and Washington, D.C., in their rush to be known as “educational reformers.”

"The principal architect of Texas’s accountability system was a lawyer from Dallas named Sandy Kress. The most thorough analysis of Kress’s role in pushing Texas’s education policy in the direction of a high-stakes testing system was one written by Mark Donald for the October 19, 2000 issue in the Dallas Observer right before George W. Bush’s election to the presidency. Entitled “The Resurrection of Sandy Kress,” Donald’s article described how Democrat Kress and Republican Bush came to be close allies in pushing Kress’s vision of “educational accountability.”

"Moreover, Sandy had not exactly distinguished himself in the early 1990s when he chaired the board of the Dallas Independent School District (DISD), during one of the most tumultuous periods in DISD history.

"Many students get frustrated with the current one-size-fits-all test-based system with its emphasis on pushing everyone towards college; and they drop out because they don’t see education as relevant to them.

"Texas policy-makers are coming to the realization that the high-stakes accountability system is fundamentally flawed.

"Even longtime proponents of high-stakes, standardized testing are starting to question the wisdom of the current system of school accountability. As reported by Paul Burka in Texas Monthly, the former commissioner of the Texas Education Agency, Robert Scott, made this startling admission in a speech to the Texas Association of School Administrators: “I believe that testing is good for some things, but the system that we have created has become a perversion of its original intent, the intent to improve teaching and learning. The intent to improve teaching and learning has gone too far afield, and I look forward to reeling it back in.”

Alexander "Sandy" Kress
Partner, Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer and Feld, L.L.P.
Alexander "Sandy" Kress is an attorney at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer Feld & LLP in Austin, Texas, focusing on public law and policy at the state and national levels. He formerly served as an education advisor to President George W. Bush. Prior to that, he served as president of the board of trustees of the Dallas Independent School District.

What Passes for School Reform: "Value-Added" Teacher Evaluation and Other Absurdities

Alfie Kohn - Posted: 09/ 9/10  - HuffPost
 

"The less people know about teaching and learning, the more sympathetic they're likely to be to the kind of "school reform" that's all the rage these days. Look, they say, some teachers (and schools) are lousy, aren't they? And we want kids to receive a better education -- including poor kids, who typically get the short end of the stick, right? So let's rock the boat a little! Clean out the dead wood, close down the places that don't work, slap public ratings on these suckers just like restaurants that have to display the results of their health inspections.

More Here 

"Unfortunately, the people who know the most about the subject tend to work in the field of education, which means their protests can be dismissed. Educational theorists and researchers are just "educationists" with axes to grind, hopelessly out of touch with real classrooms. And the people who spend their days in real classrooms, teaching our children -- well, they're just afraid of being held accountable, aren't they? (Actually, proponents of corporate-style school reform find it tricky to attack teachers, per se, so they train their fire instead on the unions that represent them.) Once the people who do the educating have been excluded from a conversation about how to fix education, we end up hearing mostly from politicians, corporate executives, and journalists.

"This type of reform consists of several interlocking parts, powered by a determination to "test kids until they beg for mercy," as the late Ted Sizer once put it. Test scores are accepted on faith as a proxy for quality, which means we can evaluate teachers on the basis of how much value they've added -- "value" meaning nothing more than higher scores. That, in turn, paves the way for manipulation by rewards and punishments: Dangle more money in front of the good teachers (with some kind of pay-for-performance scheme) and shame or fire the bad ones. Kids, too, can be paid for jumping through hoops. (It's not a coincidence that this incentive-driven model is favored by economists, who have a growing influence on educational matters and who still tend to accept a behaviorist paradigm that most of psychology left behind ages ago.)

"Reform" also means diverting scarce public funds to charter schools, many of them run by for-profit corporations. It means standardizing what's taught (and ultimately tested) from coast to coast, as if uniformity was synonymous with quality. It means reducing job security for teachers, even though tenure just provides due-process protections so people can't be sacked arbitrarily. It means attacking unions at every opportunity, thereby winning plaudits from the folks who, no matter what the question, mutter menacingly about how the damned unions are to blame."

'Test and Punish' is old testament education in a new testament world

"Texas Education Agency Commissioner Robert Scott said today that the state testing system has become a "perversion of its original intent" and that he was looking forward to "reeling it back in." Addressing 4,000 school officials at the Texas Association of School Administrators' annual midwinter conference, Scott said that he believed testing was "good for some things," but that in Texas it has gone too far. He said that he was frustrated with what he saw as his "complicitness" in the bureaucracy that testing and accountability systems have thrust on schools." Commissioner Robert Scott - Texas Education Agency (The Texas Tribune-1-31-12)

Today marks the beginning of  'Test and Punish Week' in Texas. School children all over the state will be offered up on the altar of so-called "accountability" and subjected to a narrow testing regime that will be used to punish their schools, their teachers and the students.

Exams start today for the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR).  The test results will not be used to determine how to help students.  The results will be used to punish - punish - punish.

Politicians are destroying public education with a mean-spirited regime that turns schools into testing factories instead of educational centers for the development of children in all areas of their lives. Everything is reduced to a high-stakes test that undermines public confidence in public education.

Citizens of Texas have indicated many times in recent history that they are willing to support public education. Politicians use education as a political football - they defund public education and then label it a failure with testing regimes.

I grew up in the segregated South - the daughter of a maid. My mother - a single parent - was a domestic worker like those described in the recent award-winning book and movie - The Help. For the first six years of my life, we lived in public housing. All of my education - K-12, college, and graduate school - was obtained at public and state-supported schools.

No doubt the segregated school I attended as a child would have been labeled a "failure." Yet, I went to college and graduate school from this segregated school that might have been closed under the 'Test and Punish' regime that is destroying public education in America.

Good luck, students and teachers.

You are living in a time of mean-spirited Old Testament 'Test and Punish' education in a New Testament world.

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 Gary Miron, professor of education at Western Michigan University (Valerie Strauss - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post)

"The increasing focus and reliance on standardized tests to evaluate schools and teachers is resulting in cheating. That’s probably inevitable. But it’s also probably minimal. The bigger problem is a more serious type of cheating – one that’s perfectly legal and apparently acceptable. Students are being cheated of a broader education that emphasizes a balance of creativity, extracurricular activities, foreign languages, higher math and science skills and other opportunities due to the over-emphasis on testing for basic math and reading. In this sense, a fixation on testing cheats not only our students but also their communities and the future employers who will depend on their creativity and can-do problem-solving. And our democracy is certainly cheated when our youth are unprepared for healthy civic engagement.

Yes, it is important for reporters and others to seriously pursue stories about schools engaged in wrongful practices. The groundwork done by the Cox reporters is part of that (although I wish they had pursued their investigation further and more carefully before publication). But we as a nation are missing the forest for the trees. No cheating on tests is as serious as the cheating done by the tests."

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McKinney mom prevents children from taking STAAR test