Failing Schools? Over 50% of California Schools Meet Testing Targets

Collage based on images by Gilberto Filho and albertopg123

More than half of California's schools met their statewide testing goals in 2012, the highest number ever, according to the education department. State Superintendent Tom Torlakson said 53% of schools met or surpassed the Academic Performance Index target score of 800 this year, a 4% increase from last year, according to KTVU. The scores can range from 200 to 1,000, so a target score of 800 is pretty good.

Ten years ago, only 20% of schools met their target score. Over the past decade, schools across the state, at all grade levels, have seen their scores rise dramatically. These gains have occurred despite the fact that funding has been slashed, programs cut, teachers laid off, and course offerings reduced. In other words, teacher productivity and quality have been increasing (assuming you believe that teaching to the test is the hallmark of good teaching).

The sad reality is that schools are now driven more by test scores than almost anything else. Teachers are getting better at getting kids to score higher on these tests. However, they are getting better at it because they have been forced to give up instructional time for test preparation and administration and because they have been threatened with mass layoffs, school closures and privatization of their schools if they did not improve test scores.

Of course, higher test scores do not mean children are learning more. On the contrary, more tests and test preparation translate into less time for critical and creative thinking. It also leads to more stress and anxiety for children and less exploration and fun, which in turn may be helping to turn more kids off to school.

On the other hand, greater testing, accountability, tedium, obedience and regimentation do serve to prepare children for the types of jobs that are available. So maybe we are doing them a service after all.

Arne Duncan: 80% of America’s Schools Are Failing

For once it appears that Ed Deformer in Chief, Arne Duncan, is saying something honest about Ed Deform: NCLB is an utter failure. On Wednesday, Duncan told Congress that over 80,000 of the nation’s 100,000 public schools could be labeled as failing under No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Duncan said that this statistic, based on an analysis of testing trends and the law’s pass-fail school rating system, was the latest evidence of the law’s shortcomings, and called for an overhaul of the law.

According to Duncan, 82% of schools could fail to meet their Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) goals, compared with 37% last year. This would seem like an astonishing jump, except for the fact that not only do schools as a whole need to improve, but each sub-group within the school (e.g., special education, English language learners, low-income, Asian, African-American, Latino, etc.) must also make significant gains.

Even if failure rates remained flat at 37%, the law would still be a failure since its goal was to achieve 100% proficiency by 2014. In actuality, increasing numbers of schools have seen declining proficiency. Take California, for example, where 39% of elementary schools failed to meet their AYP in 2009, while 60% failed in 2010. Nationwide, the number of schools failing to meet their AYP has increased from 28% in the 2006-7 school year, to 37% last year.

Schools face sanctions if they are deemed failures for two or more years. After four consecutive years of failure, they can be forced to convert to charter schools or forced to fire their entire teaching staffs. After three years, they can be forced to hire private outside consulting firms or tutoring services for their students. After only two years, parents have the option of transferring their children to better schools in the area, a process that tends to be utilized mostly by the more economically privileged families, resulting in a worsening of stratification within school districts and exacerbating the downward spiral of test scores at the increasingly poor low income schools.