Is Education Reform Working in Georgia?
As another school year in Georgia enters “testing season,” all of us hope for more encouraging academic results. Being 50 th on the SAT and 49 th in high school completion – no matter how hard one tries to “spin” it – are deathblows to economic development and prosperity in this state. What kind of business wants to locate in a state where barely half of all high school freshman receive a high school diploma in four years and SAT scores have ranked in the bottom five nationally for at least the past decade? Certainly not businesses that rely on intellectual capital, unless they are willing to import that intellectual capital from other places. Unfortunately, the business trend is to take the work to the intellectual capital, wherever it is in the world. If Georgia, and the rest of the United States, is to remain economically competitive, it must focus on the quality of its education system.
History of Current Reform Legislation
In 2000, the Georgia legislature passed The A+ Education Reform Act of 2000, a sweeping piece of education reform legislation. One year later, in 2001, Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Although both pieces of legislation had common themes, such as accountability, assessments, and teacher quality, NCLB dictated the final version of education reform. Georgia reforms not addressed in NCLB – smaller class sizes, more funding, stronger curriculum – moved forward simultaneously, although some were put on hold and others were never implemented.
NCLB greatly expanded the federal government’s role in education, despite the fact that states have historically been responsible for education. From a financial perspective, the federal government plays a relatively minor role in funding education – it only provides about 7% of the funds spent on elementary, middle and high school education. In the past, federal funding has been targeted for students who are at risk or who have been discriminated against, e.g., students with disabilities, minority students, poor students, and non-English speaking students. States and local systems that received federal funds for these students had to follow the rules set forth by the federal government for these programs. So, for example, if a school received special education funding to educate a disabled student, the special education services provided to that student had to comply with federal special education rules, like writing an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) for that student.
NCLB departed from previous federal education legislation in a major way by requiring all the schools in a state to follow the rules rather than just the schools or programs that received federal funds. In the past, for example, only Title I schools (schools with high poverty rates) that received Title I funds had to follow the federal rules. Now all schools have to follow the federal rules for any school to any receive federal funds. Some states have threatened legal challenges and others have claimed that they would refuse all federal funds, but so far no state has the resources or fortitude to take on or ignore the federal government.
State Standards are Poor
Like the A+ Reform Act of 2000, NCLB has several strengths – it requires that students be assessed in key grades and subjects to measure individual student progress; it requires that test results be analyzed to insure that all types of students are making progress; it requires that all teachers and paraprofessionals be highly qualified; and it provides consequences for schools that are failing to meet educational standards.
But NCLB also has several major flaws. First and foremost, it permits each state to set its own standards and devise its own assessments. Georgia’s assessments are the Criterion Referenced Competency Tests (CRCTs) in grades 1-8, and the End-of-Course-Tests (EOCTs) in grades 9-12. Georgia educators determine what the passing scores on each test should be. In some cases these passing scores are pathetically low – a student may only need to get 25 questions out of 60 correct in order to pass.
This lack of rigor is apparent when Georgia results are compared to a national benchmark, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. A 2006 study of state assessments by The Education Trust (www.edtrust.org) reveals how poorly Georgia’s results compare to national results. For example, although 87 percent of 4 th graders pass the Georgia CRCT in reading, only 26 percent meet the national NAEP standards. This gap, found not only in Georgia but in other states as well, indicates that state tests are too easy. NCLB would have been so much more effective if it had chosen the assessments that were to be given in key grades and subjects, rather than let each state race each other to the bottom for an easy test for its students to pass. Certainly, lulling students and their parents into a false sense of security about their proficiency in core academic subjects is not promoting real academic achievement.
Poor SAT Results
What is the reaction when Georgia’s SAT results are published? Horror? Dismay? Embarrassment? A determination to work harder? Sometimes, but more often it is denial or an attack on the assessment itself. How many times have we been told that the reason Georgia ranks so poorly on the SAT (tied with South Carolina for 50 th in 2005) is that too many students take the exam? This has become urban legend in Georgia, despite evidence that the overwhelming majority of students who take the SAT have college preparatory diplomas, which, by definition, should be preparing them to do well on the SAT. (See www.GeorgiaEducation.org for in-depth SAT analysis.) Even when we only compare Georgia to other states with similar demographics and similarly high participation rates, Georgia still ranks last.
What Georgia’s performance on the SAT tells us is exactly what is was designed to do – it tells us how well our students will fare in higher education. Unfortunately, we don’t have that many eligible students to send to college – only 56 out of every 100 high school students will finish high school. This is one of Georgia’s best kept educational secrets – that we rank 49 th (ahead only of South Carolina) in high school completion, according to the Manhattan Institute (www.manhattan-institute.org). As with its state developed assessments, Georgia officially reports a much higher completion rate, using a formula that paints a much rosier picture than the national numbers reveal.
Georgia, like other states, will be able to “spin” its educational results with impunity unless rigorous standards are set nationally and measured by uniform assessments. It should still remain to the states and local communities to determine how to meet the standards, but NCLB should establish the same standards for all students in every state.
Teacher Quality
Another fundamental flaw is how NCLB defines teacher quality. To its credit, NCLB acknowledges that teacher quality and student achievement are intrinsically linked. Unfortunately, NCLB equates teacher quality with certification rather than with a teacher’s effectiveness in the classroom. If a teacher meets the state’s certification requirements, NCLB deems that teacher to be highly qualified. Thus, you will see headlines in your local papers announcing that 99% of Georgia’s teachers are highly qualified. Don’t be lulled into a false sense of security.
NCLB’s definition of teacher quality fails to include a measure of the primary outcome – how much did the students in the class learn? This is a marked departure from what the A+ Education Reform Act of 2000 had planned, which would have required an analysis of student achievement as one measure of evaluating teachers. Currently, teacher evaluations in Georgia do not have to include an analysis of the academic performance of the students. Teacher evaluations can be solely based on observable teacher outputs, e.g., were lesson plans handed in, was the teacher present more often than not, was the teacher able to avoid sending students to the principal’s office, was the classroom neat and tidy? Imagine a high school football coach whose success is measured not by the win-loss record of his team, but by how many practices the team has, how hard the coach works, how well the parents like the coach, and how good the field looks.
Teacher resistance to evaluations based on student achievement is the true barrier to meaningful education reform. Teachers will often say they shouldn’t be measured by levels of student achievement because they have too many “fill in the blank” kinds of students. To be fair, the measure of student achievement must be valid and differences in student demographics must be taken into account. All across Georgia, we have examples of schools with challenging demographics outperforming all other schools in Georgia. (See Similar Schools at www.GeorgiaEducation.org )
How do we raise standards when faced with a teacher shortage? Launching new teacher recruitment programs, similar to Teach For America, aimed toward retiring baby boomers might capture some of the intellectual capital that will be leaving the workforce relatively soon in huge numbers. Alternative certification programs based on demonstrated competencies should be encouraged. These and similar efforts might solve both the shortage and quality issues.
Linking Student Achievement to Teacher Pay
Teacher evaluations based on student achievement might also lead to improvement in education if such evaluations were used to determine teacher pay. This might attract more of the best students into the teaching profession. It is not necessarily the level of pay that discourages the best students from entering teaching, but the compression of the pay scale. Researchers compared how many students in the top ten percent of the high school graduating class entered teaching in the 1960s compared to the 1990s and found that very few (1 in 10) were entering in the 1990s compared to the 1960’s (4 in 10). Researchers originally thought that this was due to the fact that women (the bulk of the teaching workforce) had many more career choices in the 90’s than in the 60’s. But interviews revealed another reason - many bright women stated that they would not be rewarded for excelling in teaching as they would be in other professions. The most effective teacher in the building would make the same amount of money as the least effective teacher in the building after 20 years because the teaching pay scale rewards longevity, not excellence.
Georgia has certainly raised the pay scale for teachers. Since 1993, average teacher pay has gone from $30,000 to $45,000 – a 50% increase. A recent national analysis of teacher pay ranked Georgia number one (#1) in average teacher pay when the cost of living is taken into account. (Over this same period, SAT scores went from 47 th to 50 th.) Raising salaries alone will not improve teacher quality. It will take time to attract more students at the top of the class into the teaching profession. Today, at most colleges and universities, education majors generally have the lowest average SAT score by major. Teacher preparation programs have been weak on content and long on what is known as pedagogy (how to teach).
Student achievement levels, particularly in math and science, demonstrate that math and science teachers who do not have the requisite content knowledge themselves cannot be effective in teaching the content to their students. (Once again, the fallacy of certification intrudes – these teachers may be certified and thus “highly qualified” but they certainly aren’t effective in the classroom.) Teachers who come out of college not knowing math and science, or how to read or write well themselves, will not be successful in teaching their students math, science or how to read and write. We need to do a better job of recruiting, preparing and supporting teachers if we want to develop the teaching workforce necessary to improve student achievement in Georgia and across this nation.
What is the Penalty for Failure?
Another major flaw of NCLB is that its “sanctions” are essentially meaningless. The first sanction that is imposed for failure to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) is public school choice. Any student who attends a “Needs Improvement” school (labeled as such when a school fails to make AYP for two successive years) is entitled to choose to go to another public school in the school district. In Georgia, many school districts only have one elementary school, one middle school and one high school, so there is no choice. In other districts, there is such overcrowding, especially at the “good” schools, that there is no room for more students. Even when available, very few students have exercised this right, and ironically, it tends to be the students with the most motivated parents who opt out, rather than the neediest students.
The next sanction under NCLB with little hope of solving the problem is the requirement that students be offered tutoring. Because there are limited resources available for tutoring, the tutoring services must be offered to the poorest and lowest performing students first. Unfortunately, there are no professional tutoring services in most of the counties in Georgia, so most schools ask teachers to stay after school and be the tutor. Some might question the efficacy of that strategy. To date, there is no data available that evaluates the effectiveness of NCLB tutoring.
The remaining “sanctions” are just as illusory – corrective action, restructuring and state take-over. The state doesn’t have the resources to take over schools and there aren’t thousands of well-qualified teachers and principals sitting at home waiting for the call to replace their “restructured’ peers.
Voucher proponents argue that the consequence of failure should be choice. They argue that public education has forfeited its right to a monopoly on education because the results of its efforts are so dismal. Voucher proponents advocate a free market model. It remains to be seen whether NCLB will be amended to allow choice across a spectrum of educational settings – public, private, charters, and home schools. It will be up to the states to determine the parameters of choice, e.g., will private schools be required to accept students without discriminating and use the same assessments and publish the results? Many proponents of choice believe that competition will drive improvement, a view supported by two recent Harvard studies of the Milwaukee voucher program that showed dramatic improvement in test scores at the public schools most impacted by voucher programs.
CONCLUSION
Somehow we need to fundamentally change the way we educate children in this state and in this country if we have any hope of maintaining our competitive edge in the world. We seem to be trying to get to the moon with a horse and buggy – no matter how hard we try it is not going to happen. In addition to raising standards, improving teacher quality and providing meaningful consequences, we need to embrace technology and all that it offers in radically changing the “who, what, where, why and when” of instruction. We need to listen to what the students of today are telling us – too much in education is pointless and endless. We need to listen to what employers are telling us – they can’t find workers with the basic skills they need. We need to listen to college professors - too many students come to college and can’t do basic math and writing. We need to ask ourselves – as a society, are we willing to do what it takes? Or are we more willing to face the consequences?
Cathy Henson is the President of GeorgiaEducation.org, a past Chair of the Georgia State Board of Education, and a past President of the Georgia PTA.
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