While the federal No Child Left Behind legislation has forced
California schools to focus on raising standardized test scores of
low-achieving students, even high-achieving schools may have
trouble meeting the performance targets required by the act in
future years.
California schools may face additional challenges when
attempting to meet English-proficiency targets because of the
state’s large quantity of immigrant students and those from
immigrant families who do not speak English as a first
language.
While test scores for English language learners are reported
separately from the general student population, No Child Left
Behind requires that all students, including English-language
learners and special education students, to be at or above the
proficiency level in math and English by 2014.
Lindi Dreibelbis Arthur, director of assessment, research and
consolidated programs at La Cañada Unified School District,
said that while the high target of act is a “laudable
goal,” it doesn’t take into consideration that some
students within the public school system may have a harder time
achieving target levels in standardized tests.
UCLA student Lucero Chavez, who is a part of the Student
Initiated Outreach Committee and the Chancellor’s Enrollment
Advisory Committee, said she believes the act is detrimental to
English-learning students because it forces them to take the same
standardized tests as native speakers.
“A lot of students become apathetic to the tests because
they have to take so many tests that they might not even
understand. They will start to fill in whatever, and the scores
don’t accurately reflect the performance of students or the
schools,” she said.
Chavez added that the act might be more beneficial if all
schools had the same resources and same student demographics.
“The school system hasn’t been equal for many years.
It’s not fair for the schools that have a lot of immigrant
students who haven’t mastered the English language and for
schools that just don’t have the resources to improve
standardized test scores so fast.”
According to a recent policy brief written by Jamal Abedi for
the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and
Student Testing at UCLA, almost all schools will fail to meet the
target requirements in a few years based on current
improvement.
Ron Dietel of CRESST, who studied the No Child Left Behind Act
and data on English-language learners, said there are virtually no
schools with all students at advanced or proficient levels on their
testing assessments.
“If high-achieving schools districts like La Cañada
are not making the grade now, you can’t expect that every
other school in California or the nation will have 100 percent
proficiency in a few years,” Dietel said.
Presently, schools with English-language learners, students from
low-income families, or special education students who do not meet
the yearly testing targets for the school can be considered as
meeting adequate yearly progress if test scores of that group
improve by 10 percent the next year.
According to the policy brief, while the separate reporting of
test scores for at-risk students allows for a way to monitor their
progress and lower achievement gaps, schools with many subgroups of
students are at a disadvantage.
If one subgroup of students fails to meet the yearly improvement
target, the whole school will be considered to have failed for the
year.
Dietel said that based on data from 2002, most English-language
learners were at the below-basic or far-below-basic levels.
But as those students improve, they move out of the
English-language learner designation so that very little
improvement in test scores is actually seen in that group.
“It’s kind of like having a really good football
team and every time the team is made up of all seniors,”
Dietel said.
When schools do fail to meet performance targets, they can
potentially face sanctions ranging from having to pay for tutors to
help low-achieving students to being reconstituted, meaning the
principal and teachers can be reassigned to different schools.
Dietel said No Child Left Behind has certainly gotten the
attention of schools, which are desperately trying to raise test
scores. But though test scores overall have been improving, more
schools are being categorized as “needs improvement”
because they cannot improve test scores fast enough.