By Gene Meyer | Kansas Reporter
TOPEKA —Tammy Bartles, the mother of a Tonganoxie Elementary School fifth-grader, says she's glad Kansas education leaders are cutting state ties to federal No Child Left Behind Act education rules.
"It will allow us to get back to teaching instead of pounding information into students' heads," said Bartles, also the incoming state president of the Kansas PTA.
Few parents, or professional educators for that matter, would quarrel with the federal plan's goals, which require all U.S. schools to bring all school children to higher levels of reading and math proficiency by 2014, Bartles said.
The problem has been execution. Pinning the program's success on how small groups of hyperactive 10-year-olds, for example, fill in tiny boxes on state-issued standard test forms with specific questions does not gauge what children are learning, Bartles said.
"The problem is it is too inflexible," Bartles said. "Requiring schools to bring everyone up the same level by a certain date doesn't allow schools to focus properly on their most troubled schools."
Missing deadlines has profound consequences for schools too. No Child Left Behind allows parents to more easily transfer their children out of schools and districts that don't meet annually rising performance standards. Schools that lose students also lose $3,780 per pupil in general state aid and other state and federal assistance.
Kansas State Board of Educationmembers moved this week to avoid what would be a financial calamity for many of the state's 286 school districts by seeking a federal waiver from a requirement that all schools hit the final proficiency standards by 2014.
How well Kansas students have fared under the program, which was the centerpiece of former President George W. Bush's education policy when it was enacted in 2001, isn't clear.
Kansas students' performance on reading and math proficiency improved for the 11th consecutive year, according to Kansas State Department of Education's latest State Report Card for schools released Tuesday.
Some 87.6 percent of the students tested turned in scores in the top three of five performance levels for reading and 84.7 percent achieved similar scores in math.
But two other performance yardsticks show different results.
Statewide Kansas test scores on ACT college entrance exams, which are averaging 22 points out of a perfect 36, have been flat for the past five years, said Ed Colby, senior communications associate at ACT Inc., the Iowa City, Iowa, research, testing and consulting organization that runs the tests. Only 28 percent of the 18,700 Kansas students who most recently took the test achieved scores high enough to be counted as fully college ready in reading, English, math and science.
Most Kansas statewide reading, writing and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, tests have changed little since 2000, according to the U.S. Education Department, which counts the test results as the broadest national measure of how school systems compare state by state. The federal Education Department reports those results on the Nation's Report Card. The Nation's Report Card is a U.S. Education Department report that has measured state and national academic achievement in reading, math, science and other disciplines since 1969.
"Fourth-grade math tests have improved significantly, but that's about it," said Arnold Goldstein, program director for the federal Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics.
One reason those different tests yield different results is that each measures something different, said Neal Kingston, director of the Center for Testing and Evaluation at the University of Kansasin Lawrence. The center runs the Kansas tests that show up on the state Report Card. The Kansas Report Card is a more detailed report on Kansas academic achievement, focused on curriculum requirements set by the state board of education.
The math and reading scores in the Kansas Report Card are based on specific standard statewide tests all students take annually in grades three through eight and once in high school. They specifically cover lesson material required by the state Board of Education, Kingston said.
"NAEP tests aren't tied to any curriculum," he said.
The NAEP results measure broader knowledge, by showing how well students answer specific questions that are the same for all states.
ACT tests also are not related to curriculum. The tests are a combination of multiple choice and essay questions designed to gauge high school students' general knowledge and their ability to do college-level work.
" No one test should carry all the weight (for policy analysis), because each has a different purpose," Kingston said. "Society looks for nice easy solutions, those are seldom found."
Another reason that the different tests may be confusing is the definitions each uses to measure change will vary widely, said Dave Trabert, president of the Kansas Policy Institute, a Wichita think thank that advocates free market solutions for public policy issues.
The institute is a sponsor of KansasReporter.org and maintains a link on its website.
For example, Kansas 11th graders can be counted as making satisfactory reading progress even though state education department reports also show that 54 percent of them can't read 11th grade work with full comprehension, Trabert said.
For parents trying to determine how well local schools are preparing their students for college or life, the confusion in measuring students' achievement "is just craziness," said Karen Wagner, president of the Shawnee Mission Area Council PTA in Overland Park.
"Why don't we have tests that follow students through school so we can track progress?" she asked.
"Instead we get year after year of new third graders or new seventh graders who are all different from those who were tested before," said Wagner, who has a high-schooler and a fifth-grader in the Shawnee Mission schools.
LEARN MORE
Kansas Board of Education
KansasOpenGov.org
The Nation's Report Card
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