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SOE Faculty Working With the No Child Left Behind Act
Joanne Carlisle Researches Impact of Michigan's Reading First
Within two years of Joanne Carlisle’s arrival in Ann Arbor from Northwestern University, where she had been a tenured
faculty member teaching courses on learning disabilities, literacy, and language,
she was called on to provide technical assistance as the Michigan Department
of Education applied for a large Reading First grant in 2002, seeking new monies
available through No Child Left Behind. Eventually, she agreed to conduct
the statewide evaluation study of the resulting project.
Dr. Carlisle explains her research interests in Reading First, saying, “I started out working with adolescents who were struggling with reading disabilities. Very soon I became interested in moving back down, to get at these much earlier, to work on the prevention of disabilities. Studies indicate that if you provide intense services in grades K-3 for all struggling students—not just those with classic dyslexia, but also English language learners, students in high poverty urban schools—you can massively reduce the number of language and reading difficulties later on, and that is what Reading First is directed to do.”
Carlisle makes distinctions between various parts of the NCLB legislation,
seeing differing theories of action behind some provisions. “The Reading
First provision (Part B) is set up to help schools and districts with the neediest
readers. A school or district participating in Reading First can’t just
buy a new comprehensive program. There is a broader purpose. The law lists
five purposes, including these: providing teachers with professional development
and other supports ‘so that they have the tools to effectively help their
students learn to read.’ The assessment component includes ‘screening,
diagnostic, and classroom based instructional reading assessments,’ not
just high-stakes tests,” Carlisle notes. She regards the Reading First
provisions in NCLB as less punitive, less regulatory, more amply funded, and
more supportive than other aspects of the legislation. “In a sense, you
could look at Reading First as a new form of comprehensive school reform,
more comprehensive than previous models that were programbased, such as Success
for All and America’s Choice. There are reasons to think it m
ay do better,
but the jury’s still out,” she says.
She is collecting data on every child and teacher in each of the 22 Michigan districts and 119 schools now involved in the project. One of the important features of the research: sharing findings with schools and districts as she goes: “We’ve produced reports for every school and every district, and we share these. We feel obligated to share data we’ve collected that will help these schools and teachers improve their programs.”
This article appears in the Fall 2004 edition of Innovator.
Steve Raudenbush Explains "Scientifically-Based Research"
In February 2002, Assistant Secretary Neuman invited her UM SOE colleague, Steve
Raudenbush to present at a seminar in Washington, DC, which focused on the
topic of scientifically-based evidence or research. Professor Raudenbush, known
internationally as one of the pioneers of hierarchical linear modeling, a statistical
method for analyzing complex data sets, explained to the audience that it was
indeed possible, and sometimes quite useful, to conduct ethical, randomized
experiments in education. Raudenbush argued that “our best ideas about
how to improve teaching ought to be tested scientifically.”
Once Raudenbush began studying the evaluative aspects of NCLB, however, he found that the measures currently being used for high stakes decision-making were “scientifically indefensible.” His study will soon be published in a monograph, “Schooling, Statistics, and Poverty: Can We Measure School Improvement?” which will be distributed to 10,000 educators by ETS, a non-governmental organization that constructs some of the standardized tests used by NCLB to measure school progress.
Based on an empirical analysis of four data sets spanning elementary and high school years, he concludes that “A reassessment of approaches to accountability appears essential….Holding educators accountable for their contributions to student learning is a laudable goal and one potentially powerful lever for school improvement. But the amount and quality of data must be reasonably aligned with the uses of data.” He calls for combining “information on student learning with information on school organizational and instructional practice, allowing a triangulation of evidence that would supply greater confidence in inferences about the functioning of particular schools."
This article appears in the Fall 2004 edition of Innovator.
Lesley Rex Explores Effects of High Stakes Testing on Teachers' Practices
Observing the effects of high stakes testing accountability from the perspective
of teachers in classrooms, Associate Professor Lesley Rex has investigated
the impact of the Michigan MEAP test. In a recent article published in the
Teachers
College Record (June 2004, pp. 1288-1331), she and research assistant
Matt Nelson present ethnographic profiles of two Michigan high school teachers
who attempted to respond to mandated accountability measures, including required
test preparation. They describe how the two teachers unwittingly stymied their
own test preparation objectives, despite powerful personal commitments, targeted
professional development, specialist support, and site leadership. Rex and
Nelson illustrate the powerful influence of teacher beliefs and dispositions
on policy enactment. They conclude that “Teachers’ choices about
how and what to teach in preparation for a test emerge not from following,
disobeying, or transcending rules. Rather, teachers act practically in the
moment, over time, and in different but related contexts based upon what they
are able to discern as honorable and necessary amidst conflict and ambiguity.” They
add that “increasing external accountability measures on teachers is
counterproductive when they compete with teachers’ internal accountability,” and
argue that there is a need to support professional development initiatives
that “defuse … escalating teacher outrage, diminishing morale,
and the exiting of committed teachers…from teaching.”
This article appears in the Fall 2004 edition of Innovator.
Elizabeth Sulzby and Deanna Birdyshaw Help the Bronx Strengthen Early Literacy
In Savage Inequalities and Amazing Grace, author and activist Jonathan Kozol
depicted impoverished children in the Bronx borough of New York City. In September
2003, SOE Professor Elizabeth
Sulzby and teacher education and outreach staff
member Deanna Birdyshaw began 3 years of research, professional development,
and classroom support in the South Bronx, traveling those same streets. Supported
by funds from an Early Reading First grant, available through NCLB, at the
invitation of district leaders, Sulzby and Birdyshaw work in seven of the lowest
performing schools in New York City and the nation. 64% of the children in
these schools are Latino; 34% are African American, and at least 95% are on
free lunch. The purpose of the grant is to help preschool teachers learn how
to expand children’s oral language and basic understandings of reading
and writing using Sulzby’s Kindergarten Literature Program (KLP), a research-based
program for preschool/Head Start and kindergarten classrooms.
Sulzby says, “The professional development sessions and support provided to teachers in their classrooms put into practice a simple but profound set of activities, and support teachers as they learn to recognize, respect, and understand child literacy development. Teachers collaborate to select interesting books, easy for little hands and fingers to open and page through. They learn to read engagingly to young children, reading the books over and over, just as loving parents and relatives often do in their homes.” Based on Sulzby’s research in emergent reading and writing, they engage the students in deep discussions of ideas in each book and topics that con-nect across the books and also invite the children to “read your own way.” Teachers also invite children to “get your idea for what you want to write about,” discuss their ideas, and then write using forms seeming to imitate writing that their teachers, parents, and other adults do. Teachers and parents in the community are becoming aware that children’s scribbles, drawings, and strings of letters can stand for meaningful stories and messages and that children will “read” from them. Teachers are also learning how to measure, with validity and reliability, children’s progress toward learning how to read and write in conventional ways, based on their learnings in preschool. Sulzby and Birdyshaw are seeking additional research funding to further test and document the work in the Bronx. Sulzby says, “In addition to having a chance to work with a great colleague and friend, this project pulls together work I have done with low income, African-American and Latino children and their teachers in Michigan, Illinois, and other parts of the country.”
This article appears in the Fall 2004 edition of Innovator.
For more on NCLB and Faculty Research, See "Resources"