Popham, W. James (2005) America’s "Failing" Schools: How Parents and Teachers Can Cope With No Child Left Behind. New York: Routledge.

Pages: 157     Price: $25.00     ISBN: 0-415-95128-3

W. James Popham is an emeritus professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Trained in curriculum and instruction, he taught instructional methods for prospective teachers and evaluation and measurement. He currently focuses his work on educational testing and is a nationally recognized expert.

As the title implies, Popham's book is aimed at practitioners and parents and is an attempt in layman's language to explain the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) school evaluation process and some inherent problems that Popham maintains need to be addressed in order to improve the requirements of the statute. His view is that without addressing the problems in the NCLB legislation many schools will mistakenly be identified as "failing." Conversely, he contends that without the appropriate measures, schools who are meeting the testing requirements may not be providing suitable and satisfactory instruction to the student body. Popham is not against accountability. On the contrary, he is for accountability and does not disagree with the intent of NCLB to improve learning in America’s schools, just the process.

Popham advocates alterations to the requirements of NCLB legislation. A central theme reiterated throughout the book is that the "defensibility of any evaluation of a school's quality via students' test performance is almost completely dependent on the nature of the test being used" (p. 19). He believes that for tests to be fairly used they must be appropriate and instructionally sensitive in light of the amount and depth of the content to be tested; provide clear descriptions of what is to be tested for students, parents, and teachers; and must assess diagnostic data provided to teachers, students, and parents on student mastery of content standards. He espouses the use of student work samples that are scored by outside evaluators using rubrics, the use of appropriate affective data using anonymous surveys gathering students' attitudes and interests, and non-test academic indicators such as graduation rates, attendance rates, etc. in addition to suitable standardized tests.

In discussing NCLB, the author points out what he considers major flaws in the legislation. The fact that states determine the type of tests to use to measure their content standards along with establishing the difficulty levels and the time it takes to develop new tests coupled with the expectation that all students can pass with proficiency within the timeframe in the bill are unrealistic. Other concerns expressed are the testing of students with severe cognitive deficits and the dilemma for schools with large numbers of student subgroups more likely to be labeled failures.

Popham states that in many instances, state curriculum officials first identified a set of content standards for their state. Then they assessed students' mastery of those state-sanctioned content standards with statewide standards-based tests (either state developed or commercial). He asserts that in many states "instructionally insensitive" tests are then used to measure school progress. One type of tests that Popham identifies as inappropriate is the traditionally constructed achievement tests (i.e., California Achievement Tests, the Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills, etc.) which were never intended to be used as a method of evaluating schools but rather to provide teachers and parents with information on a student's relative performance compared to other students. Another set of tests Popham discusses as inapt for NCLB's school evaluation is standards-based tests that fail to measure the full set of content standards on which they are supposedly based. He claims many of these tests rely on far too many standards resulting in sampling rather than testing all. Test result reports to teachers contain little information that would help them with instructional improvement. He contends that the intent of NCLB was to have tests that provided diagnostic information and criticizes the lack of reporting standard-by-standard results for districts, schools, and individual students. Without meaningful results appropriate instructional decisions cannot be made. If the state's content standards set forth the skills and knowledge to be learned, they can be developed into instructionally supportive tests that provide school evaluation accountability information and information to assist teachers in instructional improvement based on the data.

The book's ten chapters and concluding remarks are easy to read and understand covering many topics – Annual Yearly Progress, School Report Cards and Sanctions, and different measures of assessment – concisely. This book contains relatively complex information about testing and the NCLB legislation, but explains it in simple terms. It also includes a chapter on the recommendations of the Commission on Instructionally Supportive Assessment (of which Popham was a member) as well as a concluding chapter calling on parents and educators to become knowledgeable on the type of test their state uses and includes questions to ask state and local school officials. His belief appears to be that changes should be addressed state by state.

Popham's information in the book would have been enhanced if he had included references for some of the claims he made about state tests. For parents and teachers, a chart of the states and the types of tests being used at the time of the writing of the book would have been helpful. He does include a brief annotated bibliography for those who would like to read and delve into NCLB and high-stakes testing. That said, it is well-written for the intended audience.

Reviewed by Darlene Bruner, Ed.D., an Associate Professor and Masters' Program Coordinator at the University of South Florida - Tampa. Dr. Bruner has extensive experience as a teacher, school principal and district instructional supervisor. She teaches courses in leadership, law and curriculum. Her research interests concern the work culture of schools, principalship, curriculum, school reform issues and laws relating to accountability.