This piece originally appeared in Kappan magazine.
Ten years later, the signing ceremony of the No Child Left Behind Act seems like a fantasy: President George W. Bush seated at a quaint wooden desk in the gymnasium of Hamilton High School in Ohio in early 2002, with liberal lawmakers Ted Kennedy and George Miller and conservatives Judd Gregg and John Boehner standing shoulder-to-shoulder behind him, smiling broadly.
Today, Republicans and Democrats are at each other’s throats in Washington. The left and right deride NCLB as a federal power grab. How could the law have gone so wrong?
NCLB’s authors had two primary objectives: helping disadvantaged students achieve at higher levels by introducing universal minimum proficiency standards in every state and pressuring educators to meet the proficiency objectives.
NCLB was a necessary if insufficient step towards the high common education standards of advanced industrialized nations that we’ve sought to reach. When today’s school reform movement began three decades ago, schools’ expectations for students aligned closely with students’ race and class. The nation’s industrial economy had let many workers into the middle class without much of an education, and the civil rights movement had only recently won its demands for equal treatment for all races.
But many public schools continued to track students into watered-down and dead-end courses well after the reformers of the 1980s declared we needed an education system that delivered a rigorous education to all students. So, eventually, we got NCLB, with its demands that every state set high standards, measure student performance, and hold schools accountable for results. Too many local educators failed to lead, so they were forced to follow.
Liberals, conservatives, and especially state leaders embarrassed by the large numbers of their schools labeled failures under NCLB have attacked the law for usurping state and local control of education and demanded that federal policy makers decrease Washington’s demands on local public schools.
But the problem with NCLB isn’t that it requires states and local school systems to set standards. The problem is that NCLB unintentionally encourages states and districts to set low and, thus, not very meaningful standards. As Education Sector’s policy director Kevin Carey chronicles in a report titled “The Pangloss Index: How States Game the No Child Left Behind Act,” states have adopted easier tests, lowered passing scores, shrunk the number of students schools must test, and used several statistical sleights-of-hand to artificially inflate school performance. As Carey writes, “A law that has been widely denounced as unduly harsh [has been] transformed into a law that is often comically lenient.”
NCLB’s hopeful but naïve demands that every student be proficient by 2014, and that states judge schools on whether enough students hit testing targets and not on student progress have caused many states to ignore the law’s calls for higher standards. NCLB puts schools with large numbers of impoverished, low-achieving students at a huge disadvantage. Even when such schools improve student performance significantly, NCLB labels them failures.
If the law measured student progress, states could maintain high standards because schools would get credit for moving students up the academic ladder, regardless of the rung they started on. The advocates of the law’s pass-fail method of judging schools have argued that under a progress-based rating system students might never reach meaningful achievement levels. But a decade of experience shows that NCLB’s pass-fail rating system itself has produced that result.
At the same time, the law’s tight timelines for reporting student results encourage states to use primarily multi-ple-choice tests of low-level skills, which also have undermined rather than advanced NCLB’s efforts to raise standards. Because teachers tend to teach what’s tested, such tests have lowered the expectations of students in many classrooms.
By encouraging schools to focus on reading and math, NCLB has led to less instruction in science, history, art, and other important subjects. The U.S Department of Education acknowledged on its web site recently that the law has led to “an unintended narrowing of the curriculum and an emphasis on the basic skills measured by standardized tests.”
Astonishingly, given the “comically lenient” expectations of students in many states, nearly half the nation’s public schools were failing under the law by the end of the 2010-11 school year — a sobering commentary on the state of the nation’s schools.
Other flaws have compounded the law’s problems. It sought to improve teaching primarily by requiring that schools employ only “highly qualified” instructors, but defined “qualified” as “certified,” despite research that reveals little relationship between teachers’ credentials and their performance. And while NCLB sought to use choice as a reform lever, permitting students in failing schools to move to higher-achieving public schools, only a small percentage of eligible students have been able to use the remedy because of transportation and other logistical challenges.
NCLB’s effect on student achievement is mixed, at best. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a rigorous snapshot of student performance nationally, reports that the number of 4th graders scoring proficient or advanced in math increased 11% during the NCLB era (from 2003 to 2011), which is good news. But that compares to an increase of 23% in the pre-NCLB era (1990 to 2003). The same is true for 8th graders in math: Those scoring proficient or above increased 9% in the NCLB era, compared to 17% in the pre-NCLB period.
More troubling, achievement gaps between white and black and Latino students, a high priority for NCLB’s sponsors, in many cases increased under NCLB, at least by the measure of students achieving proficiency on NAEP assessments. In 1990, 17% more white 4th graders than African-Americans scored proficient or above on NAEP’s math tests (18% versus 1%). By 2003, the gap had increased to 38% (48% versus 10%). And by 2011, the gap had reached 43% (61% versus 18%).
The proficiency gap between whites and Latinos on NAEP math at that grade level is slightly smaller, but also growing. And the proficiency gaps in math between white 8th graders and their African-American and Latino counterparts are also substantial and growing, according to NAEP. In reading, there have been only small increases in the proportion of 4th and 8th graders performing proficiently since 2003, and the proficiency gaps among the races today are dramatic and larger than in 1992, NAEP reports.
The new and more demanding Common Core State Standards and the development of new, voluntary national tests may help push the public education system towards the higher standards that the nation has sought for three decades. NCLB’s strategies for holding schools accountable for student performance may have been flawed, but both Republican and Democratic proposals for reauthorizing the law would rely heavily on merely publicizing test scores to pressure educators to improve.
Would that be sufficient — even in combination with new voluntary national standards and tests and a new method for measuring and crediting schools for improving student performance— to lift the performance of the public education system and close the startling achievement gaps among the races and socioeconomic groups?
One thing is certain: The task won’t get any easier in coming years. The meltdown of the mortgage industry during the Bush Administration will drain property tax-dependent local school coffers for years. The push from the left and the right for a return to “local control” in public education puts the common core standards and tests at risk. More students are living in poverty. Public education is serving growing populations of Latino and African-American students. And the level of education required for jobs that pay middle-class wages is rising.