Senate gets ready to take the test

NCLB rewrite will wrestle with how much is too much

WASHINGTON — If there is one thing that the divided U.S. Congress can agree on, it’s that the federal No Child Left Behind education law is woefully outdated.

The law, enacted in 2001, aimed to make states more accountable for the millions of federal education dollars they receive each year, in large part through standardized student testing.

No Child Left Behind did, in fact, force states and local school districts to focus on improving student test scores, paying particular attention to minority and developmentally disabled children who often lagged behind. But many parents, teachers, administrators, state education leaders and members of Congress — including those from New Mexico — complain that the law overemphasizes standardized testing at the expense of classroom instruction that prepares students for the next grade level, college or the real world.

The political calculus on the standardized testing issue is tangled, with Republicans in Washington generally pushing for less testing — or at least fewer federal testing mandates — and Republicans in New Mexico generally favoring tests as a measure of progress.

Democrats and teachers’ unions in New Mexico argue that testing requirements — with results factored into teacher evaluations — are unfair and counterproductive to effective classroom teaching. Meanwhile, many Democrats in Washington are averse to proposals to minimize the federal testing mandates.

NM views

In the eight years since the No Child Left Behind law expired, Congress has been unable or unwilling to rewrite and re-enact the contro-

versial law, which states must still adhere to unless granted a waiver by the U.S. Department of Education.

With Republicans now controlling the House and Senate, the political inertia surrounding the expired education law appears to be dissipating. Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican and former U.S. education secretary under President George H.W. Bush, last week convened a Senate education committee hearing to begin rewriting the law. Rep. John Kline, a Minnesota Republican who is chairman of the House education committee, is expected to follow suit.

“They seem to be focusing on the real issues, so I think it’s going to be a priority,” said Sen. Tom Udall, a New Mexico Democrat. “I want it to be a priority.”

In Journal interviews last week, Udall and the three other Democrats in New Mexico’s congressional delegation agreed the NCLB law needs to be rewritten and standardized testing de-emphasized — at least somewhat. But they also cautioned against stripping away too much federal oversight as part of the legislative overhaul. The Department of Education uses testing and achievement scores to track progress.

“It’s important that the federal role in education is not drastically reduced,” said Rep. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M. “That’s one of the most important roles of the federal government — oversight.”

Rep. Steve Pearce, the New Mexico delegation’s only Republican, said he would prefer that the feds leave education policy strictly to the states, echoing a common theme of conservative Republicans.

“We’re trying to make a system work that is like a Model T (antique car),” Pearce said of No Child Left Behind. “You can add all the grease and oil you want, but it’s still going to be a Model T. It’s time to rethink education as a whole.”

Back home

Meanwhile, Republican Gov. Susana Martinez and her education secretary-designate, Hanna Skandera, say that while the federal No Child Left Behind law is outdated, student testing is critical to evaluating teachers and sparking educational progress.

“As we look toward reauthorization … we need to focus on the fact that school accountability is absolutely important,” Skandera said in a Journal interview. “But it’s got to be done at the local level, not defined or dictated by the federal government.”

In the absence of an up-todate federal education law, New Mexico and some other states are operating under waiver extensions that allow them to accept federal dollars in exchange for tying student test scores to their new teacher evaluation system, among other requirements.

New Mexico also included the adoption of the Common Core State Standards as part of its waiver. Forty-six states have adopted the Common Core State Standards, but Indiana has since repealed the standards and other states have introduced legislation to repeal. New Mexico state education officials remain committed to Common Core. Common Core is an unprecedented nationwide effort to ensure students in every state are taught — and tested on — the same set of high academic math and reading standards.

In November, New Mexico was among seven states the U.S. Education Department deemed eligible to apply for a four-year waiver from the requirements of No Child Left Behind, compared with threeyear extensions for most other states.

Train wreck?

Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico has two young sons who attended public elementary schools in Albuquerque before the family moved to the Washington, D.C., area in 2013. Heinrich said he has firsthand knowledge of the testing burden placed on New Mexico children and that testing is going to be a big part of the discussion” as Congress moves for- ward with its NCLB overhaul.

Heinrich’s kids are now in public schools in suburban Maryland, which is also wrestling with complaints about federal testing standards. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, has called education reforms to meet federal mandates in Maryland “a train wreck.”

“There is broad consensus that NCLB needs to be rewritten, that it’s not meeting the goals that were articulated when it was created,” Heinrich said. “The difficulty is going to be how it should be rewritten. I do think there is too much testing, and too much testing that is not useful to instruction.”

Heinrich said if the federal government is going to maintain national testing policies, it needs to do a better job.

“We have an existing role represented by No Child Left Behind that I don’t think has been as helpful as it should be,” he said. “We need to get that right. We need to rewrite it in a way that better aligns with local goals without being redundant, so you’re not having situations where kids are being tested on a state test, a federal test and a local test, and losing a big chunk of their annual school year to evaluation that could be spent on instruction.”

Former Sen. Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat, was one of the key architects of the No Child Left Behind Law and worked with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, current House Speaker John Boehner and former President George W. Bush to pass the legislation in 2001.

Bingaman said the overemphasis on testing isn’t all the federal government’s fault and that Common Core has helped ease the burden.

“A substantial amount of the testing, states were doing before the federal law ever passed,” Bingaman said, stressing that testing remains the best way to account for federal education spending. “The solution is not to quit testing but to consolidate the testing. This movement toward Common Core standards, I think, makes that feasible. Most states are signed up and sticking with the idea of common standards, so you’re to a point where, if you test to see if students are meeting those standards, that should be adequate for the federal government to decide whether its concerns are met.”

Bingaman also positioned himself as a relatively rare — at least these days — defender of No Child Left Behind.

“I think that the law, overall, has had the effect of making schools reassess what they were doing,” he said. “The idea that each state has to have a plan for improving student performance and then demonstrate by testing that they are actually improving performance has been a positive thing.”

Alexander, the current Senate education committee chairman, disagreed. He has floated a draft “discussion” bill that offers two paths forward on student testing: Let states decide how much to test or retain the federally driven testing provisions contained in the expired NCLB law.

Alexander wants the committee to pass an NCLB rewrite by late February. Last week, he made clear which path on testing he prefers.

“Given all of the great progress that states and local school districts have made on standards, accountability, tests and teacher evaluation over the past 30 years, you’ll get a lot more progress with a lot less opposition if you leave those decisions there,” he told an education hearing on Capitol Hill last week. “I think we should return to state and local school district decisions for measuring the progress of our schools, and for evaluating and measuring the effec- tiveness of teachers.”

Like Bingaman, Udall said federal testing mandates help provide proof that federal taxpayers are getting an adequate bang for the bucks they spend on education.

“The states run the education systems, but let’s not forget how much money comes in from the federal government — targeted money to try to do a better job for students and teachers,” Udall said. “We do a lot in teacher training, and we try to target the students who aren’t doing well and who are under-achievers. When you spend those kinds of dollars, we have to make sure there is accountability — some kind of measurement — and that’s where you get into the testing arena.”

NM spending

New Mexico spends about $2.6 billion annually on elementary and secondary education, with state and local funding accounting for the vast majority — just under $2.4 billion of that amount, according to the state Legislative Finance Committee.

Gary King, a Democrat who ran for governor last year, said during the campaign that he might be willing to give up the tens of millions of dollars in federal education funding simply to get out from under burdensome federal testing requirements.

Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham, D-N.M., said the Obama administration’s approach to education over the past six years has exacerbated a problem of too much testing created by No Child Left Behind. Citing New Mexico as a prime example, she said states have shifted their focus from prac- tical classroom instruction to teaching for test preparation. She also said that, in many cases, teachers haven’t been adequately trained to prepare students for the tests.

“The Obama administration has been part of the problem, and what I mean specifically is they have really worked to give states the flexibility to figure out teachers’ accountability,” Lujan Grisham said. “But that accountability has (reduced) states’ investments in helping teachers succeed and instead penalizes teachers by not having them be a part of the evaluation process and by not including them in how the testing apparatus should look. The states are (implementing) their own tests that don’t quite work. New Mexico is a lead example on where those struggles are the most defined and having the most devastating impact, which has led to the kind of teacher vacancy we have.”

Skandera insisted that New Mexico’s education policy is helping to expose poorly performing schools and turn them around.

“We have a school grading system that has been very powerful in helping parents identify effective schools, and helping school leaders identify strengths and weaknesses in their schools,” she said. “It’s important that every state — like New Mexico — has a plan to intervene in schools that are struggling. Making sure we know how our students are doing is absolutely a civil rights issue and we should own that across the nation.”