Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.
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The evidence that the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is not working as intended continues to accumulate. Faced with extreme pressure to improve test scores quickly--without the benefit of educational reforms that have been proven to improve test scores quickly--states are finding ways to creatively interpret the requirements and fudge the results.
One particularly harmful way that school systems have “met” the requirements is by retaining low-performing students. If the low-performing students are held back in the third grade then they will not be tested in the fourth grade. A school system can make its average test scores appear to be improving by essentially deleting the lower scores from the average in this manner.
This practice is just what early critics of the Act feared. Holding students back greatly increases the likelihood that they will drop out of school.
The educational researcher Walt Haney is the one who has discovered this practice in Florida. The state was celebrated for producing a large increase in test scores. But it simply held back more black third-grade students. Below are excerpts from Haney's report, “Evidence on Education Under NCLB (and How Florida Boosted NAEP Scores and Reduced the Race Gap).”
When results of NAEP [National Assessment of Education Progress tests] for 2005 were released, the state of Florida seemed to have made remarkable progress. . . .
Florida’s fourth graders seemed to have moved slightly ahead of fourth graders nationwide on the NAEP 2005 math results. But even more startlingly, Florida seemed to have made dramatic progress in reducing the “race gap” in achievement.
But what had really happened in Florida? It turns out that the apparent dramatic gains in grade 4 NAEP math results are simply an indirect reflection of the fact that in 2003-04, Florida started flunking many more students, disproportionately minority students, to repeat grade 3.
. . . these were disproportionately more Black and Hispanic children (15-20% of whom were flunked) than White ones (about 4-6%% of whom were flunked in grade 3). Thus it is clear that the NAEP grade 4 results for 2005 reflected not any dramatic improvements in elementary education in the state. Rather they were an indirect reflection of Florida policy that resulted in two to three times larger percentages of minority than White children being flunked to repeat grade 3.
This is, regrettably, a tragedy in the making. Research now makes it abundantly clearly that flunking children to repeat grades in school is not only ineffective in boosting their achievement, but also dramatically increases the probability that they will leave school before high school graduation . . .
High stakes testing – by which I mean making important decisions based on test results alone – has been increasing in recent decades in the U.S. This trend by no means began with the NCLB Act of 2001, but it certainly has been fueled by the NCLB legislation. The mania to make test score averages appear to increase has resulted not just in fraud in Florida, but also to school administrators in at least three jurisdictions (in Texas, New York and Alabama) actually pushing
young people out of school in order to make high school test results look better. (The three cases are documented in our report The Education pipeline in the United States, 1970–2000, Haney et al., 2004).
If the black high school graduation rate declines in the near future, many people will see this as further “evidence” of a cultural crisis in black America, but at least some people will know that it is an effect of the terrible No Child Left Behind Act which is literally leaving black children behind. There are ways to increase black test scores and graduation rates, but with No Child Left Behind effective rhetoric won and effective educational policy lost.
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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.
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