Friday, March 30, 2007

Pundits Weigh in on NCLB Reauthorization; Growth Models Given Best Chance of Passage

Title1Online prognosticates the future of NCLB by surveying 5 education experts. Here's what they see:

Growth models are in. So is a permanent reshuffling of the order of school improvement sanctions.

Expanding testing exemptions for students with disabilities? Not likely. The same goes for expanding high school assessments and allowing incentives for states to participate in some form of national standards.

With Congress beginning to wade into the turbulent waters of reauthorizing No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the Title I Monitor asked five of the nation’s top education experts and policy wonks to evaluate the leading proposals submitted thus far.

The biggest non-surprise: Virtually no-one believes that NCLB will be reauthorized on schedule this year. That item scored the lowest of all: 2.2 on a scale from 1 to 10 (see chart). It is also hardly news that fostering growth models and allowing schools in improvement to implement supplemental educational services (SES) in their first year scored high (9.4 and 9, respectively), as both issues are mainstays of several reauthorization proposals, including President Bush’s. Growth models base school accountability on the growth in individual students’ achievement, while “flip-flopping” the order of public school choice and SES has already been allowed on an experimental basis.

But aside from these issues, there was a surprising consensus on some hot-button items, in addition to a significant disparity on some proposals that could portend intense debates to come.

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