NCLB and State Testing:

Kim Geyer, 451 Denny Road, Valencia, PA 16059
Mars School Director
May-June 2004

In the perfect world of NCLB, all students, will be 100% proficient in both reading and math by the year 2014, simultaneously, all schools will meet adequate yearly progress….just how schools and states arrive at this noble goal will be uniquely different from one and other. USDOE officials claim NCLB provides flexibility to states and schools in implementation and measuring AYP. To some degree, they are correct, in that each state has a different starting point in remodifying their education system to align themselves with the NCLB Act, but, share the same common ground in the long-range struggle to ascertain the end results of the Act itself.

In the years to come, it will be interesting to see a diverse cross section of the country attempt to claim success in achieving such goals as required by NCLB. Before NCLB’s Act of 2001 implementation in 2002, specifically the late eighties into early 1990’s, our country was content to measure academic progress of students through state academic standards or outcome based education standards, in the event one’s state was fortunate enough to have them to begin with. It was not until 1994 when the federal government stepped into the state education arena with the passage of Goals 2000, Title 1 reauthorization (HR 6), and School To Work, that states lost control of what they once had, as pertaining to genuine and unique state standards, as well as, local control of standards and curriculum in classrooms.

Here in Pennsylvania, state outcomes of Outcome Based Education were in fierce scrutiny by public outcry demanding measurable and understandable academic state standards….instead, the political power play response chosen by the Ridge Administration was to change the semantics of the same outcomes as contained in the combined Chapters 3,5 & 6 of the education regulations and have everyone believe they were something different by calling them “academic standards” in 1993-94 and later in 1998-99, Chapter 4 education regulations.

During that same time, the standards movement created forward momentum in 1994 when Congress revised the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to require states to adopt utilizing high academic standards and utilize standardized tests that judged student performance against the standard benchmarks. At this particular point in time, Pennsylvania’s state assessment’s original intention was to measure school performance, building by building, within a respective district.

Again, Pennsylvania chose to use the same controversial state assessment, PSSA, and utilize it for individual student achievement of the academic standards. Not much was changed in design and modification of the PSSA other than the purpose and intent. Despite nine years of public outcry and public scrutiny of the test, it was not until statewide and mounted pressure in 2004 that the PDE had an independent contractor investigate the PSSA for validity and reliability of the state standards and curriculum as outlined in Chapter 4.

Meanwhile, other states were no better in their advancement to comply with the greater role the federal government seeked to play in the education arena until the passage of The Improving America’s School’s Act in 1994. States were dragging their feet, so to speak, and most were incompliant in adhering to the new changes and mandates required. With the passage of HR6 of 1994 requiring that states had to have Goals 2000 in place in order to receive Title 1 funding, states were forced into stepping up their progress with all the newest adaptations, by accepting Goals 2000 as a funding inducement, which in the past had been promoted as “voluntary” assistance. Every state not wanting to lose their accustomed funding of Title 1, swiftly signed onto Goals 2000. Every state! States use to getting their own way about things in the past quickly learned that the federal government meant swift business. States were told that their state standards were required to mirror the national standards. States thinking they could devise and craft their own academic standards after signing onto Goals 2000 were mistaken into thinking they could do things differently and resort to their old ways to doing things their own way. Instead, States soon learned they had signed away their state academic standards and local control of classroom curriculum. So, in essence the federal intrusion into our public schools transformed public education as we knew it in 1994. It was not until the NCLB Act of 2001, that states again were hammered into compliance of the new state standards (which were to mirror the national standards) and into mandated state, as well as, national testing requirements.

By the 2005-06 school years all students, in all states, in grades three through eighth grade must take annual statewide reading and math tests. Simultaneously, States must have adopted science standards in 2005. By the 2007-08 school year, States must give at least one annual science test in each third-fifth grades, sixth-ninth grades, and tenth-twelfth grade span to measure the new science standards. More significantly, all students must be proficient in reading and math by 2014. The criteria that constitutes adequate yearly progress in one state doesn’t necessarily apply to another. Each state is unique and each state has their own diverse way of obtaining the ultimate goal of NCLB which will be vastly demonstrated through various testing mechanisms, formulas, criteria, benchmarks, not to mention revised definitions of proficiency…leading us to an education climate where there is no one size fits all. Some states are taking great strides to revamp their testing requirements, while others are choosing to do little modification and tweaking….there appears to be no consistency across the board, as long as the regulations and requirements of the mandates are met and achieved.

The May 2003 report issued by the U.S. General Accounting Office on established testing requirements of NCLB showed:

· The NCLB Act will cost states between 1.9 billion between 2002 and 2008 and that is not in the event of custom designed state assessments. This figure is if states utilize tests that are multiple choice and easy to score.
· The report noted that if states choose to utilize a combination, such as Pennsylvania, where there is a state assessment that contains open ended, multiple choice, and then hand scored written essay portions to increase costs $5.3 billion
· Increased costs to testing are related to more time and labor intensiveness assessments, such as custom designed testing. Innovation appears to come with a high price tag.
· Only four states (Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania) use a combination of state and local assessments.
· Iowa and Nebraska are the only two states utilizing a local assessment in order to achieve AYP under NCLB. Their state laws forbid state assessments causing the federal level to keep their testing systems intact as is.
· Thirty-six states utilize a combination of multiple-choice and open-ended questions.
· Twelve states utilize only multiple choice questions for their state assessment.
· Thirty-two states will need to develop nine or fewer tests to align themselves with NCLB.
· Twenty states will need to develop or augment ten or more to align themselves with NCLB.
· Kentucky has requested under their state accountability plan to keep their current system which is based on assessing students on a two-year cycle instead of the annual assessment as required by NCLB.
· States such as Missouri and Oregon are no longer utilizing tests not required by the federal government, such as local assessment.
· Texas is revamping their state assessment to more rigorous standards, while Michigan is reducing the percentage of their students needing to pass the state test from 75% to 40% for the attainable goal of proficiency.
· Colorado, Louisiana, and Connecticut are changing their proficiency definitions and criteria to be considered “proficient” in their states.
· Maryland reached national news last year when they totally scrapped their state assessment after millions of dollars and are starting over from scratch.
· 25% of states offer their assessment in a language other than English, utilizing mostly Spanish.
· New York and Minnesota offer their assessments in as many as four various languages in addition to English.
· Various districts across twenty-one states are now implementing Value-Added Assessment.

< Back to No Child Left Behind