House lawmakers take up Senate Bill 107 today.
The measure outlines standards the state will use to judge school success or failure.
It also describes actions schools must take if they are struggling.
The bill would meet New Hampshire’s requirements under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
But critics worry the standards are meaningless, unfair and costly.
NHPR’s Dan Gorenstein reports.
Senator Jane O’Hearn, of Nashua, chairs the Senate Education Committee.
She sponsored Senate Bill 107.
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:02 the point of 107 is to have a uniform statewide accountability bill…under the federal law, it has to be the same for every school in the state.
That federal law is the No Child Left Behind Act.
Signed last year, the law attempts to improve education by holding schools accountable to federal and state standards.
If New Hampshire doesn’t meet the federal requirement, it risks losing some 60 million dollars a year in federal funds.
So Senate Bill 107 contains three major provisions.
The first meets the criteria set up by No Child Left Behind Act.
The Act wants to measure something called Adequate Yearly Progress.
Education Commissioner Nick Donohue.
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:00 …This AYP is a combination of some very ambitious improvements on test scores, graduation rates, keeping fewer and fewer kids back. And it says that everybody needs to be measured on these measures.
Perhaps the most contentious of all of these measures for educators is the provision that calls for yearly testing.
The debate centers around two theories of testing.
One that sets a bar all students in a particular grade must meet to pass.
The other is what is called gains-based testing.
It measures each child on the progress he or she makes each year.
Mark Joyce, with the New Hampshire School Administrators Association believe that method is more equitable.
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:00 if you have a community that has a real disadvantaged population, or a school, their students may be reading below grade level, but will have made extraordinary gains during their time in school b/c of where they started. Maybe they started in a home that had no books at home. Maybe it was illiterate. Or were learning another language, but yet there growth was astounding as being a part of that school.
SB 107 doesn’t allow gains-based testing.
But Education Commissioner Nick Donohue says he is trying to convince state and federal officials to adopt the approach.
The state must also establish a system of rewards and consequences for all of its schools, as part of its accountability system.
Unlike state standards that must be uniform, the rewards and consequences system can be different.
Senate Bill 107 lays out the consequences for schools that do not receive federal funding.
Republican Senator Jane O’Hearn.
3:14 … if they don’t have one, to write one. There are certain guidelines within that school improvement plan that they have to follow. Such as making sure their budget is aligned in order to meet the needs of their schools. To take a look at their curriculum, to take a look at their testing program, to disaggregate their data to figure out what is causing schools to not improve.
But half of the schools in New Hampshire receive federal funds due to a high number of poor students.
These are called Title 1 schools.
And they face a much stiffer set of consequences if they don’t show adequate progress.
Like reduced budgets or firing all staff.
Commissioner Donohue says there may be some problems treating poor schools differently from wealthier schools.
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:28 … I think the prospect of having two schools that are doing equally well to have dramatically different responses doesn’t make sense to folk…the conundrum is that I am not sure we want to adopt whole-part and parcel all the consequences in NCLB, b/c one, I think they are more onerous than people will accept. And two, I am not sure they will lead to improvement.
Another concern with Senate Bill 107 is that it seeks state money.
That would help fund schools that need improvement, but don’t receive money through No Child Left Behind.
House lawmakers and local school boards have loudly voiced opposition to plans that require any state spending to meet the federal obligations.
Commissioner Donohue understands the reluctance of some state policymakers to part with money right now.
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:48 I don’t want the resource part to be the thing that makes or breaks this. It is about standards, it’s about what NH expects from its schools, and if it takes a small amount of money to move some schools, we want to do it the right way. So we will start with lower figures. We need to prove our case in terms of helping schools, and its then that we should come back and say this is a worthy investment.
In the budget that just passed the house, lawmakers have allotted five hundred thousand dollars to non-Title 1 schools to meet federal and state standards.
But behind all of this talk over gains-based testing, adequate yearly progress, No Child Left Behind, and systems of consequences, lies one fear, that New Hampshire’s system of educational accountability will resurrect debate over the term adequate education.
And that term is at the heart of the Claremont decision.
For NHPR News, I’m DG.
