Education Week - January 15, 2014 - 9

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No Child Left Behind Law
Turns 12. Now What?
| POLITICS K-12 | Flashback, 12 years ago: President George W. Bush
travels to Hamilton, Ohio, to put his signature on a law that was
supposed to forever change the nation's schools by giving the federal
government far more say over accountability, particularly for poor
and minority children. In exchange, schools were supposed to get
vastly more federal resources.
Even at the signing, some folks privately expressed doubts
about the law's vision. Today, if you threw a rally to keep NCLB
the way it is, no one would show up, as Sen. Michael Bennet,
D-Colo., likes to say.
On this birthday, the law hits its dozen-year mark in which it
specifies that, technically, all children are supposed to be "proficient"
in reading and math. And a child who entered the 1st grade when
NCLB passed is now a senior in high school, taking the SAT and
sending off college applications.
Of course, the deadline comes with a big asterisk, as the law has
some built-in breathing room so that not every kid has to score
proficient, as long as the major at-risk populations make gains.
It's really (mostly) academic at this point. Nearly every state has
a waiver from the law. And bills under consideration in Congress to
reauthorize it would amount to a significant watering-down of key
provisions, putting states largely in the driver's seat.
What's more, other than the first few years of implementation,
Congress didn't come anywhere close to providing the promised
funding boosts to the major formula programs in NCLB.
Nearly everyone agrees the law is due for a makeover, but there is
little agreement in Congress on what structure the new law should
have, and there's almost no chance for new resources (the usual
sweetener for reauthorization), so it's difficult to see a road forward.
-ALYSON KLEIN
Weingarten Backtracks on Using
'Value Added' for Evaluations
| TEACHER BEAT | American Federation of Teachers President
Randi Weingarten has announced that she'll call for the end
of using "value added" measures as a component in teacherevaluation
systems.
Politico first reported that the AFT is beginning a campaign to
discredit the measures, beginning with the catchy (if not totally
original) slogan "VAM is a sham." We don't yet know exactly what
this campaign will encompass, but it will apparently include an
appeal to the U.S. Department of Education, generally a proponent
of VAM.
Weingarten's announcement is less major policy news than it is
something of a retreat to a former position. In 2008, she said that
educators have "a moral, statistical, and educational reason not to use
these things for teacher evaluation." Two years later, she stated that
student test scores could be appropriate if they measured growth in
learning and were coupled with other measures.
So what accounts for this reversal?
Weingarten told Politico that the situation in the District of
Columbia, where a contractor goofed up more than 40 teachers'
scores, was essentially the straw that broke the camel's back. On
Twitter, she cited research that has found the VAM estimates to be
quite volatile from year to year.
Weingarten's decision has probably been bolstered by an increasing
anti-testing sentiment within the union. There's a political element,
too: Factions within the AFT deeply critical of testing have gained
power.
Stanford Engineer Develops
Virtual Science Labs for MOOCs
| CURRICULUM MATTERS_ | MOOCs, or massive open online courses,
have been slowly making their way into the K-12 arena, though
there's continued debate about whether the model is a good fit.
Now, an engineering professor at Stanford University has devised
a way for students in MOOCs to conduct virtual lab experiments-an
"iLab," as he calls it-that's scalable and cost-friendly.
According to The Stanford Report, the iLab built by Lambertus
Hesselink and colleagues is completely virtual. For instance, in
building a diffraction experiment, the team rigged a camera to take
snapshots of every possible permutation of the experiment. So when
students interact with the controls, they see a video of what would
have happened if they'd done the physical experiment.
The Report also notes that this sort of virtual experiment is
inexpensive, can be created in "just a few hours," and can be used by
as many students as needed at once.
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EDUCATION WEEK | January 15, 2014 | www.edweek.org | 9
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Education Week - January 15, 2014

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