The legislation “demands results and accountability but allows states the ability to chart their own course to higher achievement for students,” said Polis in a release. “There is no substitute for improving student outcomes and ensuring that every graduate is ready for college or a career, but where No Child Left Behind was prescriptive and punitive, the Growth to Excellence Act is flexible and focused on what helps better prepare students to succeed and graduate.”

The bill grew from Colorado’s experience as a participant in the Growth Model Pilot Project started in 2005, which allowed states to experiment in tweaking the No Child Left Behind Act accountability system. The idea was to look beyond the one established achievement standard and seek to reward schools that were successful in helping students significantly advance in their learning.

Provisions of the Bennet-Polis-Udall Growth to Excellence Act would allow states instead of the federal government to set measures of achievement and to base those measures on test score growth and high school graduation rates; replicate success by recognizing top-performing schools and districts; and seek to more accurately measure student progress by allowing states to use “adaptive assessments,” which “dig deeper into a student’s knowledge base to better measure knowledge or ability.”

Before being appointed to the Senate, Bennet was superintendent of the Denver Public School system and he has championed education reform on Capitol Hill. He spoke with passion last fall in the Senate chamber about what he characterized as the comically frustrating shortcomings of No Child Left Behind, describing the law as the worst kind of federal overreach. In explaining the priorities of the new Growth to Excellence bill, he emphasized the need to grant local parties the power to shape achievement and assessment efforts according to varying contexts.

“We developed a School Performance Framework in Denver to measure the progress of actual students year over year that served as the foundation for the Colorado growth model, which is now being used or pursued by more than a dozen states,” he was quoted in a release. “Our model has provided the country with an innovative example of how to measure student progress in real and meaningful ways.

“This bill builds on Colorado’s example and ensures we are working towards a sane and useful accountability system that gives every kid a shot at a quality education. I commend Congressman Polis for taking up this bill in the House of Representatives. It is an excellent counterpart to the bill Senator Udall and I have introduced in the Senate.”

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“As a former superintendent who has been on the receiving end of No Child Left Behind, I know that well-intentioned ideas from Washington often do not make sense once they reach the classroom,” Bennet said today in a release. “In a system where kids living in poverty face a 9 in 100 chance of graduating from a four-year college, parents, children and educators aren’t concerned with where a fix comes from. They just want the problem solved, and unfortunately, dysfunction in Washington has held up a fix in Congress.

“Now, Colorado has received relief from many of the one-size-fits-all elements of No Child Left Behind that disempower the people who are closest to our kids. This exemption will remove bureaucratic barriers to innovation and reform and allow Colorado to focus on what matters: improving outcomes for kids.”

Obama is granting waivers to ten states– Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oklahoma and Tennessee. The administration is working with New Mexico to help it meet the requirements for the waiver and nearly 30 additional states are applying for the same exemption.

A signature domestic policy of the Bush years, No Child Left Behind requires all students to be proficient in reading and math by 2014. Educators have long felt the policy a draconian and ill-considered attempt to boost student performance by holding teachers to inflexible one-size-fits-all benchmarks. The effect, critics say, is that instructors simply “teach to the test” instead of taking a more organic approach to the way children learn.

“The goals of No Child Left Behind were laudable, but it has suffered from poor implementation and has been loaded with burdensome one-size-fits-all standards, making it difficult for our children to succeed in the 21st century,” said Udall in a prepared statement. “I’ll continue to work with my colleagues to improve the law, but until that happens, I’m glad the administration has recognized the reality that Colorado has developed a better way to hold kids and teachers accountable through its nationally recognized growth model. As the author of a bill that would build on that model nationally, I appreciate the administration’s decision today. And I’m proud Coloradans will be able to continue our efforts without being held back by onerous federal government standards.”

States receiving waivers must set new targets for improving achievement, reward schools making the best progress and aid schools that are struggling most.

Bennet has aimed at reforming No Child Left Behind almost since the day he arrived in the Senate. He helped write the Growth to Excellence Act meant to remake the controversial policy and made news last fall with an impassioned floor speech excoriating his colleagues for stalling action on the bill, which is still in committee.

“You know why people are fed up with this place?” he said. “It’s because they don’t think the debate we’re having is about them. They think the debate we’re having is about us. And they’re right about that…

“The teachers all across this state want us to lift this burden from them, in my view the biggest federal overreach ever in domestic policy. That’s what this bill does, not for ideological reasons, but to respond to the voices of our teachers, respond to the voices of our superintendents.

“[The bill] responds to the voices of our parents who are sick and tired of the almost comical but to them painful measures of annual progress, the idea that we’re going to label all of our schools failing by 2014 because we have a completely made up accountability system in Washington DC. This bill does away with that!”

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2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney (Pic by Gage Skidmore, via Flickr)

Mitt Romney, the GOP presidential candidate who edged out an eight-vote victory over Rick Santorum in the Iowa caucuses, has a long track record on education that includes standardized testing and accountability, charter schools and school vouchers.

Education Week writes:

Romney has a long record and a lot of ideas on education redesign. He’s a fan of standardized testing, and has credited the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 with providing a much-needed boost to accountability. In fact, he was one of the NCLB law’s biggest champions when he ran for president back in 2008. But this year, he has also emphasized the need to step up the state role when it comes to K-12.

The No Child Left Behind Act — signed into law in January 2002 by George W. Bush and supported by the Obama administration — mandated standardized testing that evaluates teachers by score results. In late 2011, the Obama administration offered states “waivers from the most onerous requirements of No Child Left Behind.”

Public school advocates who oppose mandatory standardized testing to determine teacher salaries and state and federal funding for public schools have called for a National Opt Out Day on Jan. 7.

Romney, according to Education Week, “also complimented President Barack Obama’s signature education reform program—Race to the Top—saying the program “had done some good things.”

Race to the Top, “a competitive grant program,” was launched by the Obama administration in 2009 to “encourage and reward States that are creating the conditions for education innovation and reform.”

The program provides funds to states that reform education in four areas: adopting standards and assessments that prepare students for work and college; building data systems that measure student growth and success; recruiting, training, rewarding and retaining effective teachers and principals; and turning around the lowest achieving schools.

Education Week adds that Romney has “called for getting rid of teacher salary schedules, but said he’d like to pay beginning teachers more. He also waded into the culture wars, saying he thinks students should be taught about the advantages of marriage.”

Education News reported last September that Romney also supports charters schools, school vouchers and “currently supports the federal government’s involvement in education and would keep in place the No Child Left Behind act created under President Bush in 2001.”

His amendment, one of a handful passed so far by the HELP committee as it undergoes a markup of the sweeping K-12 education bill authored by leading sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), would lift the restrictions currently in place that bar states from testing students based on their current skill level.

Just like the higher education entrance assessment the GRE, Sen. Franken’s amendment opens the door for states to use Computer Adaptive Testing (CAT), software that increases or decreases the difficulty of questions based on the test taker’s response. Present state efforts, like Oregon’s, to incorporate CAT have been stymied since current law views such methods as introducing questions not on level with the skill level of middle of the road students.

“I’ve traveled all over Minnesota and heard from principals, teachers, and administrators who say they need a better way to measure the growth of their students, because the current testing system just isn’t working,” Sen. Franken told TAI in an e-mail.

CAT methods of student assessment, Franken said, can assist teachers in identifying a student’s strengths and weaknesses in real time, since results for the tests are generated immediately. He described the current testing standard — states issuing exams and receiving results months later — as an “autopsy” of student skill-level rather than an evaluation.

“When the results finally come back, it’s too late to do anything for students who are failing, said Franken to TAI. “Computer adaptive testing gives our teachers the tools and information they need to help our kids succeed in the classroom. I’m pleased that my provision was approved during the HELP committee markup this afternoon.”

Frequent criticism of the assessments borne out of the No Child Left Behind era is that they focus on getting students up to speed on a certain level of proficiency.

During the markup, Franken said of the few things he liked about No Child Left Behind was its name. “Well you’re leaving that kid behind, you’re leaving this kid behind,” he added.

A fact sheet e-mailed to The American Independent by Franken’s staff included the following analysis of assessments:

Fixed form tests allow students who are high-performing to look good all year with out much effort and struggling students who work and grow dramatically to still be counted as under-performers. Students and teachers are not accurately assessed and evaluated, and it makes it more likely that these students will not get adequate attention from teachers.

The amendment clearly states that a CAT evaluation method is not mandatory.

The reliance on technology has been one of the prevailing themes of the current markup session to reauthorize ESEA, the 1965 law passed by the Johnson administration that outlines the federal government’s role in education spending.

Computer systems were presented as solutions for creating cross-tabulation systems that would determine the performance of a subset of student groups, like African American females, and monitoring the matriculation of eighth graders to better understand high school drop out rates.

Known as “comparability of services,” it forces states and districts that receive Title 1 funding — federal money meant to bolster schools with high percentages of low-income students — to spend a near equal amount on poor and affluent schools. Lawmakers are taking up the issue since Title 1 funding comes to roughly $14.5 billion, meaning how states demonstrate their compliance with the provision matters a great deal.

The guidelines are complicated but over the years school districts have perfected tactics that allow them to get away with providing more funding to wealthy schools than high-poverty schools. The resultant discrepancy leaves the United States as one of three countries in the wealthy group of nations called OECD that spends more on wealthier schools than poor ones.

“We can no longer allow children’s Zip codes to determine the quality of their education, wrote HELP committee member Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) to the American Independent. “We need to ensure that our sparse federal dollars actually go to the disadvantaged children they were intended to serve, while also encouraging more equitable spending locally among schools.”

To that end, the bill to replace NCLB — co-written by HELP committee chair Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and ranking member Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) — would greatly improve the equitability of school spending. If passed, it would close a loophole that inaccurately represents how much funding poor schools receive, much to their financial detriment.

Under NCLB, districts display compliance with equal school spending by reporting the average salary amount teachers receive. However, that tactic obscures the major reason economically disadvantaged schools receive fewer local funds than wealthier schools: salaries at more affluent campuses are significantly higher since they hire more experienced instructors.

Moreover, teacher compensation makes up roughly 80 percent of school funding, and wealthier schools have more teachers to achieve smaller class sizes. The Harkin-Enzi bill would eliminate that method of reporting funding. Doing so, according to a GAO report, would mean augmenting the habits of 80 percent of surveyed schools.

A fairer way, analysts say and what the Harkin-Enzi bill is striving to achieve, is basing the reporting on spending per pupil.

Funding discrepancies are made much more explicit when teacher salaries aren’t assumed to be equal, and districts must then shore up the difference by sending more dollars to poorer schools.

Closing the comparability loophole is a good thing. For the first time, policymakers and the public will have transparent reporting of funding disparities between schools,” says Anne Hyslop, an education analysts at Education Sector. “Most importantly, it’s good for low-income kids, who are more likely today to be taught by inexperienced teachers.”

One aspect of the spending gap not addressed by the Harkin-Enzi bill is how similarity is defined. Earlier in the year, Sen. Bennet wrote a comparability spending bill with Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) that would allow no more than a 3 percent difference in funds allotted to poor and wealthy schools. The current standard is 10 percent.

School districts that have adopted the new reporting measures witnessed a jump in the amount of dollars poorer schools received. In Oakland, funding for low-income elementary schools increased 24 percent. The increased flexibility allowed principals to expand learning time in the classroom and add more teachers–techniques studies show improves student learning.

Some education stakeholders worry the new education bill would force schools to ship teachers to poorer districts to satisfy the comparability rule. During the hearing today, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) had an amendment approved by the committee that assuaged those fears.

“It clarified that school districts don’t have to force teachers to transfer between schools to equalize funding between higher and lower income schools,” said Alexandra Fetissoff, spokesperson for Sen. Franken.

Though esoteric, the amendment was important since it keeps the onus on local authorities to find ways of incentivizing highly trained teachers of accepting jobs at low-income schools, an imperative set forth by lawmakers from both sides of the aisle who don’t the new federal education law to seem too invasive.

Also, the proposed bill doesn’t change the formula for how schools receive Title 1 funding. Currently, the majority of funding is based on a simple calculation of whether the student population has at two percent of its population qualified as low-income.

The Early and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was swept into law under the Johnson administration in 1965. It outlines a wide array of funding procedures and the federal government’s role in local K-12 education. No Child Left Behind is the current iteration of that law and has been due for an overhaul since 2007. As its rules have placed burdensome expectations on local school administrators and labeled close to half of the schools in the country as failing, both sides of the aisle have called for its replacement.

To relieve states of NCLB’s punitive sting, The White House has offered states a quid pro quo arrangement to opt out of the law in exchange for increased accountability and oversight standards valued by the administration.

“I haven’t been here a long time and I’ve spent a lot of time complaining about how the place works,” Bennet said, pacing at the podium, his voice rising, his hands at times folded in front of him modeling a posture of frustrated restraint. “I implore the senator from Kentucky to reconsider his objection [to continued debate]… Finally, after two and a half years, there’s a bipartisan piece of legislation in front of the committee and we’re told that meeting for two hours is too long…

“You know why people are fed up this place? It’s because they don’t think the debate we’re having is about them. They think the debate we’re having is about us. And they’re right about that.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act would remove the yearly progress reports mandated by the Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act. It would also lift penalties imposed on schools that fail to meet annual standards set by No Child Left Behind, focusing accountability on only the lowest performing schools.

Indeed, the bill seeks in general to lower federal involvement in education, a proposal normally likely to draw the support of small-government lawmakers like Paul.

“The teachers all across this state want us to lift this burden from them, in my view the biggest federal overreach ever in domestic policy,” Bennet said. “That’s what this bill does, not for ideological reasons, but to respond to the voices of our teachers, respond to the voices of our superintendents.

“[The bill] responds to the voices of our parents who are sick and tired of the almost comical but to them painful measures of annual progress, the idea that we’re going to label all of our schools failing by 2014 because we have a completely made up accountability system in Washington DC. This bill does away with that!”

The remarks came during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee markup session, a session where committee members amend and rewrite legislation. Bennet was superintendent of the Denver public school system before being appointed to the senate in 2009 and he seems to prize his work for the HELP committee and his work on this bill in particular.

Senator Paul, who won his seat in the Tea Party wave election last November, expressed frustration that he didn’t have time enough to fully consider the roughly 800-page bill. He derided the process as unrealistic and said the public had been locked out of the debate.

Committee Chairman Tom Harkin from Iowa pointed out in response that the committee held ten public hearings on the legislation in 2010 and that the bill had been in the works for years. As a HELP committee member, Paul could have taken time since assuming office to familiarize himself with the legislation, he said.

Bennet told Paul that while they were dithering over politicized chamber rules, teachers were at work in Colorado, at 11:15 pm, preparing for classes.

“When people see the political games that are being played here, when they see people who are unwilling to work together and they are killing themselves to deliver for our kids, I’m not sure there’s anything more backhanded we could do.”

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Writing on the opinion page of today’s Washington Post, U.S. Senator from Colorado Michael Bennet tells a scary story about education in America.

The kids he writes about are not waiting for superman, so much as they are waiting for one good teacher, one involved parent, one community committed to its schools.

Essentially, he says it is not enough that the children of U.S. senators and the children of journalists get a good education, but that every child should get a good education.

When federal money goes to schools, he says it needs to go to the schools that need it most.

From his column:

There are 100 members of the U.S. Senate, and they and their desks fit into a relatively small room where history is made from time to time. Imagine, as I have occasionally, that the chamber was a schoolroom and those 100 senators were American children from poor families.

Of our student-senators, only 14 would be able to read properly by the fourth grade — fully 86 would not. By the time our group reached eighth grade, only 12 would read at grade level and just 13 would be proficient eighth-grade mathematicians.

By the end of 12th grade, 57 of us would still be around to graduate high school. Of our graduating class, 19 would go to college, with more than a third needing at least one remedial course. Only nine of 100 would ultimately graduate from a four-year college into an economy in which a degree is becoming a necessary, though not always sufficient, passport to the middle class.

These outcomes reflect a very cruel, but astonishingly accepted, reality in our country: that the quality of your education is largely determined by the Zip code into which you are born. We tell our children this is the land of opportunity while denying them one of the most fundamental opportunities of all. This is the brutal plight of America’s poor children as Congress takes up the work of fixing No Child Left Behind.

…

Our work will be easier if we in the Senate recognize as our own the educational challenges facing children in poverty. As the father of three girls, I doubt very much that if any one of us faced the same odds for our children, we would remain in Washington very long. We would rush home from the Senate floor to make sure that our kids were in the best school with the best teachers. Shouldn’t there be the same sense of urgency about the education of every child in America?

Pundits have long argued, writes the Education Equality Project, that the most important element of school reform involves making sure all students have access to good teachers:

“The single most important factor in determining [student] achievement is not the color of their skin or where they come from,’’ says President Obama. “It’s not who their parents are or how much money they have-it’s who their teacher is.” Without “the right people standing in front of the classroom,” the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution concludes, “school reform is a futile exercise.”

And yet, according to the Education Equality Project, studies show that districts routinely put the least-qualified teachers in front of the most needy students:

How wide is the teacher effectiveness gap in high-poverty schools? A recent study in Los Angeles of 9,400 math classrooms in grades 3-5 found that students in the district’s poorest schools were nearly three times as likely to have teachers from the bottom quarter of teachers (measured by teacher effectiveness in raising math achievement) than students in the district’s most affluent schools. At the same time, the Los Angeles study shows that effective teachers have a profound impact on student learning. On average, students assigned a teacher in the top quartile increased their math achievement scores 10 percentile points more than students who had a teacher in the bottom quartile—a huge one-year gain.

In New York, writes Samuel G. Freedman in the New York Times, unions finally agreed to  make it easier to remove bad teachers from classrooms in 2005:

During my own 20 years of observing and writing about public education in New York, I’ve seen firsthand how exasperatingly difficult it has been for principals to oust abusive, incapable or negligent teachers who are protected by a powerful union. Instead, some principals would privately agree to swap problem teachers in a process known as “trading turkeys.” Others would offer such teachers a positive rating if they used their seniority to transfer to a different school.

The transfer rules were ended in 2005, under an agreement between the city and the teachers’ union.

But New York is hardly a model of reform. Freedman goes on to explain that now New York teachers   accused of wrongdoing end up in the city’s infamous “rubber rooms,” where teachers are paid to show up for weeks, months, or even years while their cases are arbitrated in a seemingly endless process.

Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education

In an interview with The Colorado Independent, Van Schoales, urban education officer for the Piton Foundation, points out that Colorado–which is currently writing its Race to the Top application–could certainly choose  to cease the practice of shunting inadequate, unqualified teaches to low-income schools.

But Schoales also pointed to a federal requirement that states have as many school districts as possible—and their superintendents, board presidents and union presidents—sign on to the state’s application. He worried that such a strict buy-in requirement will push the state to leave controversial proposals about what to do about inadequate teachers out of its application.

According to the Times editorial, Duncan is not the first to fail to require districts to reform this practice. President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 also originally aimed to stop the practice of sending unqualified teachers to the most challenging schools. But then the Bush administration backpedaled.

The country would be much further along on the reform trail had the Bush administration followed the law. Instead, it allowed the states to define away the problem by re-labeling the existing, inadequate teacher corps as “highly qualified.”

The U.S. Congress tried again to keep unqualified teachers out of high-needs schools when it passed the stimulus act, writes the Times. But Congress, too, backpedaled, eventually couching the issue in “euphemistic language that asks the states to describe in vague terms whether the teacher corps is “highly qualified.”

The Times argues that this time around a timid White House is hoping to save the controversial issue until next year—and deal with it as part of the re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

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Monday, the Common Core Standards Initiative, a project of the National Council of Governors and the Council of Chief State School Officers, released the first official draft of standards in English language arts and math, standards that it hopes will one day be adopted by every state in the nation. Currently, 48 states have signed on to the project, expressing interest in voluntarily adopting the standards once they are written. (The not-surprising exceptions are Texas and Alaska.)

Colorado appears significantly on board with the project by virtue of the fact that it was one of six states asked to review the standards before they were made public—this, despite the fact that it is currently in the process of revising its own standards.

The Washington Post provided a concise summary of the debate over common standards for the nation:

The 2002 No Child Left Behind law left it to states to determine what students ought to learn in reading and math and how they ought to be tested. As a result, the benchmarks for proficiency in those subjects vary widely from coast to coast.

Proponents of national standards say it is folly to have such uneven expectations for students when the United States trails several countries in Asia and Europe on international exams. Opponents point to a long tradition of local control in American schools and say the federal government should not dictate what is taught.

The release of the standards follows a report, released Friday, from the Colorado Legacy Association, the nonprofit arm of the Colorado Department of Education. The report devoted a full page to suggesting that allowing local school districts to decide what and how students should be learning is not necessarily the best and highest system:

Our constitution (specifically, Section 15 of Article IX of the constitution) provides that local school boards shall retain control of instruction for schools in their districts. This language reflects the populist movement of the late 19th century, when our constitution was drafted…

Too many times, however, the phrase “local control” has been used in Colorado for the purpose of resisting necessary transformation. Local control has become a shield by which both the state and districts justify inertia, rather than a critical directive about the importance of maintaining and supporting local involvement in education. We cannot maintain this stance any longer if we want a truly excellent education system.

Local control in Colorado should not mean that districts are excused from incorporating new and higher academic standards that meet the requirements of our changing society.

The report went on to suggest that local school districts should still be used to incubate innovative ideas, which can then be adopted statewide.

If states actually adopt the common standards, they will presumably be followed by a nationwide exam in lieu of the current statewide exams. The Common Core Standards acknowledges that such an exam is likely, but insists that it may actually be in the form of several kinds of assessments, given throughout the year:

States know that standards alone cannot propel the systems change we need. Assessments aligned with the common core state standards will play an important role in making sure the standards are embedded in our education system.

Some states will voluntarily come together to develop new innovative, common assessments as part of the Race to the Top program. However, states do not want to see one national assessment given once a year that relies on multiple-choice items. A common assessment system will include multiple forms of assessment so that what a student knows and can do, not the form of the assessment, determines performance. An assessment system must provide assessment for learning as well as assessment of learning.

Want to read and comment on the proposed common standards before the October 21 deadline? Go here.

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According to the Colorado Department of Education, 64 percent of Colorado 8th-graders scored proficient or better on the 2005 CSAP test. On the NAEP test, though, only 32 percent were deemed at least proficient. The result is that parents are being told by the state that their children are ready to move on, when in fact they might not be.

A few more startling comparisons from 2005:

4th-graders, math:
CSAP: 66% proficient or better
NAEP: 39%

4th-graders, reading:
CSAP: 64%
NAEP: 37%

From the Stateline article:

Welcome to the era of high-stakes testing, where persistently low scores mean principals can get fired and states can take over failing schools. No Child Left Behind requires U.S. schools to make steady progress, so that by 2014 every student is proficient in math and reading. But to ensure cooperation, Congress left it up to each state to measure how well its pupils were doing.

Although the goal was transparency, results have been less than clear. While states report growing percentages of students are proficient, the verdict is considerably worse on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), an exam dubbed “the nation’s report card” that is given to a sampling of students in all 50 states.

The discrepancies in some states are alarming. In Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia, far more students rated proficient on the homegrown tests in 2005 than on the NAEP exam

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