Sol Stern’s recent post illustrates a policy that is particularly rife for abuse. Credit Recovery and seat time programs CAN produce some real good. But if you want to conclude that that magic asterisk approach is producing real gains …? Given my experience with human nature, I mostly assume that those programs are just lies piled on lies. Why do you think they create those prgrams anyway? If you were producing an accountability program, would you give every lower level adminstrators the keys to the system and provide no oversight if or when they fabricate data?

When there is that much smoke, there must be fire. I hope that all of that money hasn’t been wasted. I wish we could have put that money into approaches that have a much higher chance of sucess with a much lower down side. But given their record, I wouldn’t believe a thing that comes out of NYC.

Which gets us back to NCLB and its meager positive effects. If we knew that its accountability provisions would underachieve so much, we would have not passed the law. Why follow a samiliar path for NCLB II, hoping for something different to happen by the time we get to NCLB III or IV or V? And its not good politics either to keep throwing good money after bad just so we can use the wors “accountability.”

Finally, when you raise and spend that much money, you also have a lot of good people investing a lot of their sweat and soul into it. We’ve expended immense amounts of human resources trying to make NCLB-type of accountability work. We’ve burned out a lot of good people. Frankly, it bother me more when we squander all of that human capital more than the loss of money.

Do you know of any other examples of administrators who increased funding to such an extent over the same time period? What NAEP results were produced in those districts?

This fits a national pattern where the 90s prompted huge gains in state tests, and even though the rate of improvement slowed under NCLB, we have a decade and a half of huge gains in elementary scores, smaller gains in middle school, and in high school …. no signs of progress.

If these positive numbers were real, wouldn’t we be seeing an increase in NAEP in NYC and elsewhere, even in middle school and even in high school?

My experience is just anecdotal, but I sure would trust it more than I’d trust NYC numbers. As the classes who raised test scores in elementary and middle school reach high school, we see that they are less and less prepared. I doubt there are many teachers who are surprised. Everyone should have known that that was a risk we were taking with NCLB I.

And to confirm Cerf’s argument, if scores go up for low-income students during this economy, we know those numbers are bogus. Even if classroom instruction was becoming more effective at an optimum rate, we humans don’t have the power to outrace the decline that inevitably follows economic downturns. It is not criticism of educators or any policy. It is no criticism of the best Olympic runner to say that he or she can’t win the Kentucky Derby.