Growth Model Pilot

Jason Kessler
Fundamentals of Curriculum Development
Dr. Jay Dugan
Position Paper #2 Growth Model Pilot

On January 8, 2002, the whole world of education would never be the same. Congress passed No Child Left Behind, a program spearheaded by then President George Walker Bush. The implications of this legislation sent shock waves throughout school districts. Wholesale changes needed to be made in order to achieve AYP for state standardized testing. Essentially schools were now being held accountable for how well their students did on standardized testing. If they didn’t make AYP, there would be a series of actions that would be taken to help the school make AYP or penalize the school for it failure.
The concept of leaving a child behind is horrifying and that is why the bill was made into a law with bipartisan support. The premise of making sure that all children will receive a quality education and trying to narrow the achievement gap was a great idea, but the government gave education the goals, no map/plan to achieve those goals and punished the schools if they didn’t attain the goals even if they were improving. This changed on November 21, 2005 when U.S. Department of Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced a pilot program, Growth Model Pilot. According to nclb.gov, spellings claimed that this program “Growth models give schools credit for student improvement over time by tracking individual student achievement from one year to the next”.
The pilot program was initially approved to be done by four states (North Carolina, Tennessee, Delaware, Arkansas) and a fifth, Florida was eventually accepted into the pilot. Currently there are fifteen states participating in the program. The state participating in the pilot must adhere to the seven core components of NCLB. According to Ed.gov, these principles include the following:
1. Ensure that all students are proficient by 2014, and set annual goals to ensure that the achievement gap is closing for all groups of students;
2. Set expectations for annual achievement based on meeting grade-level proficiency, not on student background or school characteristics;
3. Hold schools accountable for student achievement in reading / language arts and mathematics;
4. Ensure that all students in tested grades are included in the assessment and accountability system, hold schools and districts accountable for the performance of each student subgroup, and include all schools and districts;
5. Include assessments in each of grades 3-8 and in high school for both reading/language arts and mathematics, and ensure that they have been operational for more than one year and receive approval through the NCLB peer review process for the 2005-06 school year. The assessment system must also produce comparable results from grade to grade and year to year;
6. Track student progress as part of the state data system; and
7. Include student participation rates and student achievement on a separate academic indicator in the State accountability system.
The positive aspects of the pilot are its corrective nature in regards to the pitfalls of the 2002 NCLB doctrine that turned the education world upside down. First of all, it has a more reasonable method for holding schools accountable for the previously mentioned seven core components. This achieved by tracking individual student improvement as a method of achieving AYP instead of reaching a specific percentile. This is a much more precise way to indicate student progress and also ensures that school who are making headway are not being penalized. If a school in an inner-city with a population with low SES and history of low test scores is making changes and improvements they should not get the book thrown at them. For example, if Lincoln High School has ten percent of their students in the desired percentile and the next year twenty percent of the students score in the desired percentile, the students have improved by one hundred percent. Under previous stipulations they would have failed to reach AYP. Under the growth model pilot each students score would have been analyzed and show each performed. Schools should be judged on improvement not be mandated to some seemingly unobtainable goal.
When the pilot is implemented, a focus is then shifted to individual growth. Teachers can design assessments and learning experiences that are authentic to each student which would allow for more individualized education. The shift in focus on teaching to a test and more to improvement and growth of each individual would lead to a swing educational philosophy. Along with tracking individual growth, the schools which are excelling will stand out, while other who are either maintaining the status quo or digressing will also stick out like a sore thumb. This leads to healthy competition between schools to become better at what they do, which should be a focusing on developing students prepared for the future.
The final positive aspects to the pilot are the lack of need for new assessments or data collection. Each state will continue to use the existing assessments and methods for data collection; they will just be judge on a different interpretation of the data which is being collect. Every students score will be analyzed and kept on file to ensure that they are improving.
Essentially NCLB was a program with excellent principles, but with several quirks to the program. Schools where asked to reach a percentile regardless of what their starting point was and that just was not fair. Individual progress must be rewarded and applauded and if the education system is ever going to narrow the achievement gap, programs like the Growth Model Pilot should be used to focus on individuals in the group, not the group as a whole. In fact a goal of achieving a certain percentile goes against the ultimate goal of leaving no child behind. Individualization in education, testing and data collection is the wave of the future and will lead to progress for years to come.