At a meeting tonight, our district superintendent said he's driven by one thing: having all children at proficiency.
I came home and found this report which helped me understand why his statement made my brain hurt.
http://www.epi.org/webfeatures/viewpoints/rothstein_20061114.pdf'Proficiency for All' � An Oxymoron
By Richard Rothstein, Rebecca Jacobsen, and Tamara Wilder
Paper prepared for the Symposium, "Examining America's Commitment to Closing Achievement Gaps: NCLB and Its Alternatives," sponsored by the Campaign for Educational Equity, Teachers College, Columbia University, November 13-14, 2006
Richard Rothstein (riroth@epi.org) is a Research Associate of the Economic Policy Institute. Rebecca Jacobsen (rjj7@columbia.edu) and Tamara Wilder (tew2101@columbia.edu) are Ph.D. candidates in Politics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Here are some excerpts:
Proficiency for all is an oxymoron, as the term 'proficiency' is commonly understood and properly used.
We show that by ignoring the inevitable and natural variation amongst individuals, the conceptual basis of NCLB is deeply flawed; no goal can simultaneously be challenging to and achievable by all students across the entire achievement distribution. A standard can either be a minimal standard which presents no challenge to typical and advanced students, or it can be a challenging standard which is unachievable by most below-average students. No standard can serve both purposes � this is why we call 'proficiency for all' an oxymoron - but this is what NCLB requires.
The movement away from scale and norm-referenced score reports has resulted in the politicization of standardized testing.
The irresponsibility of NCLB's expectation of 'proficiency for all' should not lead to the abandonment of goals for the improvement of student achievement, nor does it suggest that public education systems should not be accountable for realizing challenging degrees of improvement. We describe a simple statistical procedure, inspired by 'benchmarking' practices employed in the business world, which can be used to establish strenuous but realistic goals for improved achievement by students at all points in the distribution. Benchmarking permits a sophisticated return to norm-referenced measures of academic achievement, something not new to education but which has been abandoned in the NCLB legislation.
