Nation needs to change the way student achievement is tracked, measured

Monday, Aug. 8, 2011 | 2 a.m.

The Clark County School District last week was placed on a watch list of districts that have failed to achieve standards set under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

The district made the list by failing to make “adequate yearly progress” in two of the past three years based on standardized test scores. That didn’t surprise school administrators, who noted that state reading standards went up this year, which caused scores to go down significantly.

As we have noted before, there are problems with education in Nevada, and the schools need to improve. However, the No Child Left Behind Act is hardly the gold standard for judging educational achievement. The law, the hallmark of George W. Bush’s education policy, demands that public schools meet a complex matrix of unrealistic goals. As Paul Takahashi reported on the Las Vegas Sun’s website, the law requires that schools hit achievement goals in 45 categories, and it takes an all-or-nothing approach. Failure in one category is the same as failing in all.

To top it off, by the 2013-14 school year, every student is supposed to hit proficiency standards on math and reading tests. It’s laudable to want every student to achieve, but it’s an unrealistic goal that has only served to frustrate academic achievement.

The law’s mandates have put a tremendous amount of pressure on teachers and principals to get students to pass standardized tests as a show of achievement. As a result, teachers teach to the test, which is a poor way to educate students. It doesn’t teach them to think as much as it teaches them to fill out bubbles on a test form. Standardized tests also do a poor job of measuring the achievement of many student groups, such as those in special education classes. The consequences for schools and districts that fail to hit the achievement standards can be harsh, given the all-or-nothing approach.

Some states have asked for waivers from the law’s requirements and others have decided to ignore the law. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has called for new achievement standards, and he is correct. The nation needs a new education policy. High standards are good and needed, but they are meaningless unless they are realistic.

Nevada is moving to a new standard of measurement called the growth model. It will track student achievement beyond the year-to-year comparison of standardized tests. It is designed to give educators a better picture of how a student is — or isn’t — progressing.

“We see the growth model as the wave of the future,” said Pedro Martinez, the School District’s deputy superintendent of instruction. “Annual Yearly Progress is a one-year measure, and it’s either you did it, or you didn’t. The growth model is a much more comprehensive measure.”

Clark County Schools Superintendent Dwight Jones helped develop the model when he worked in Colorado, and it promises to be a useful tool that should help improve education in Nevada.

But that alone won’t be enough. It will take broader changes in how we educate children, and we have outlined many issues in the past — from making it easier to fire bad teachers to putting more money in education and spending it wisely.

The bar for achievement needs to be set high, but the bottom line is the schools need to have the ability to reach the standard.