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By Kimberly S. Wetzel The majority of California elementary schools will be deemed "failing" by 2014 because achievement benchmarks set by the federal No Child Left Behind act are too difficult to meet, a new study says. Researchers at UC Riverside, in a study published in today's issue of Science, found that though the number of elementary school students testing proficient or above in English and math on standardized tests has increased, those improvements won't be enough to keep up with ever-rising accountability standards in the 2001 act, which call for 100 percent proficiency by 2014. "Yes, there are gains, absolutely," said Mike Bryant, one of the study authors. "But the rate of the legislated expectations is faster than the pattern we observed empirically. When you go out to 2014, a lot of the schools will be well below 100 percent." Researchers analyzed state accountability progress reporting data for more than 4,900 schools from 2003 to 2007. The data included information on how students scored on tests and the number tested. By placing the data in model growth curves, they found that elementary schools improved student proficiency rates over the five-year period, but not enough to meet steadily rising accountability standards. No Child Left Behind, signed in 2001, requires that a minimum percentage of students score proficient on tests, among other things. Improvement rate requirements have been modest so far, but schools must post higher levels of proficiency beginning in 2009 as measured by "Adequate Yearly Progress" to meet the 100 percent target by 2014. Schools that receive federal Title One money and do not make adequate progress two years in a row are placed in "program improvement" status and could face sanctions in the form of restructuring or takeover. Critics of the act have for years complained that No Child is a one-size-fits-all solution to education that puts unnecessary pressure on local schools and sets impossible-to-reach benchmarks. About 59 percent of elementary schools met adequate yearly progress in 2008, a drop from 76 percent last year. Proficiency rate requirements jumped in 2008 by more than 10 percentage points. "To mandate that kids will magically be proficient by 2014, it's a wonderful intention, but it's a pie-in-the-sky dream," said Bruce Fuller, education professor at UC Berkeley who said he was not surprised with the study's findings. "We're going to have schools in very well-off communities that are going to miss their proficiency targets, not because they aren't improving, but because the targets are just impossible to meet." Fuller said the No Child act is akin to telling hospitals they must keep all their patients alive, then penalize nurses when they don't. It doesn't make sense, he said, especially since schools don't get credit for pulling children up from "below basic" to "basic" levels of understanding math and English. Benchmarks "have to be set in obtainable ways, otherwise parents and teachers just throw their hands up in the air and say, 'This is crazy,'" Fuller said. The findings could reflect a national pattern, researchers said. "A state as large as California, with a diverse population, provides a comprehensive data set for these kinds of analyses," said Richard Cardullo, leader author of the study. "Although each state has its own specific assessments and cutoff scores for determining proficiency, what is happening in California is possibly a good indicator of what is occurring in other states, and perhaps the entire nation." |
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