A wicked case of CIMS and CIPS

One hundred thirty-two schools here failed to meet the 2004 standards under the No Child Left Behind Act, Maine Education Commissioner Sue Gendron announced this week, and the public reaction was … silence. That is likely not what the drafters of NCLB had in mind when they announced the federal government was going to force states to hold schools accountable, but I think in that silence are the beginnings of a reformed NCLB that will please both federal officials and local educators, many of whom currently loathe the act.

NCLB, one of President Bush’s major domestic achievements, tries to keep no child from being left behind by measuring the academic progress of groups (fourth-graders, say) and more specific sub-groups (low socio-economic fourth-graders). Some other subgroups are special education, limited-English proficiency and various ethnic identities. Attendance and participation are also important – at least 95 percent of each group and subgroup here must take the Maine Educational Assessment to meet the federal rule.

Maine students are tested in fourth, eighth and 11th grades, which means, cumulatively, a local school system has a total of 84 ways to fail – or, technically, not make adequate progress – each year. If a specific school fails three years in a row, federal penalties go into effect: Parents can send their children to other schools; superintendents can be condemned to the dunk-tank of perpetual public opprobrium.

Only it’s not working out that way, and the finely diced subgroups may be the reason. You could see this in the news stories that followed Commissioner Gendron’s announcement of the latest results. A school would get placed on the trouble list (continuous improvement monitor schools – CIMS) or the worse, two-year failure list (continuous improvement priority schools – CIPS) and the principal or superintendent would explain what subgroup failed to achieve adequate yearly progress. Immediately, what sounded like a significant shortcoming became a minor infraction, almost a technicality.

Maybe those low socio-economic fourth-graders fell a few points short of progress or maybe the special education students didn’t match expectations. When you swing from the general accusation of a failed school to the specific of limited English proficiency eighth-graders failing, on a two-year average, to sufficiently advance their test scores, outrage takes a holiday. So does interest. Other states are reporting that very few parents are using the option of moving their children to another school if the current school doesn’t meet its goals; Maine likely will find the same lack of response in those few areas where this is possible.

Perhaps the federal Education Department sought this level of public forgiveness, but I doubt it. And it certainly doesn’t want the opposite – large groups of parents blaming a specific subgroup of students at a school failing to make progress. This is a challenge, but, like all challenges, also an opportunity.

Debate over NCLB’s reauthorization begins next year, and when it does the federal Education Department would be wise to go back to all those teachers it offended by saying, at the beginning of the reform, they weren’t qualified to teach and it should admit it was wrong. In fact, suggest the local school boards and not the states decide who is qualified to teach. After all, what do the feds care whether a teacher has the proper number of hours studying a particular subject as long as that teacher can inspire students to reach new heights in the classroom and score well on the state exams?

That way, the department could emphasize what NCLB really is: an outcomes-based reform that tries to provide every subgroup of students with a high-quality education. An entirely noble goal. Tell the teachers they are trusted as professionals, until proven otherwise through NCLB.

Officials in that department also should inform states that the one- or two-year results for the listings are inadequate and so are the blanket CIMS and CIPS ratings of schools, because they do not distinguish among the failure to make progress for the same subgroup year after year, for different subgroups each time or whether the failure is a participation problem. Before a school gets on a bad-boy list it should show a pattern of inadequate instruction for the same group or subgroup in the same academic area. Parents, whether their kid is affected or not, would be interested in knowing these sorts of results and, by making the standard multi-year, it shifts the focus from a particular group of students not measuring up to the school itself.

Julian Haynes, retired from the University of Maine System as director of Policy Analysis and Research and currently advising Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe on NCLB, points to two other problems in Maine. Schools have until 2013 to reach 100 percent proficiency in reading and math (the levels are currently around 34 percent and 13 percent respectively), but what counts for proficiency in Maine is a much higher standard than what is considered proficiency in most other states, making the goal harder to reach. Compounding this is a path chosen by Maine, a slow increase in standards for the first three years, then a small jump, then “a balloon payment,” says Mr. Haynes. “Proficiency requirements increase almost logarithmically and many schools will have difficulty with that.”

What about the idea that all groups and subgroups will become 100 proficient by 2013 or any time at all – can this really happen? “No, I don’t think so,” he says, “but we should be able to bring low-income, African-American, Hispanic, special education, all the subgroups, up to a point of, if not eliminated gaps, at least greatly reduced gaps.”

That, ultimately, was the very good point of a reform with a very rocky beginning: It is making certain, in a public way, that no students, or, really, no group of students, are forgotten. Time, more flexibility from the feds and the state willing to make changes of its own, could turn NCLB into the success it deserves to be.

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News.