Originally published on the National Journal Education Experts Blog.
There’s no doubt that NCLB’s effort to establish an academic floor for underperforming and economically disadvantaged students led to lower standards in many states. The law’s drafters couldn’t avoid that consequence because when NCLB was on the drawing board a decade ago we didn’t have the technical capacity to measure on a large scale schools’ impact on individual students’ achievement levels from year to year, a so-called value-added strategy that would have given schools credit for educating students regardless of where the students started the school year academically. By decreeing that schools had to set a single standard and have every student reach it, NCLB practically guaranteed that the standards would be set low, large numbers of schools would nonetheless underperform, and that there would be a political backlash against the law.
The Obama administration’s expectations of states that received NCLB waivers are useful levers of improvement, at least in theory: new, higher student achievement standards; tests that mov…
There’s no doubt that NCLB’s effort to establish an academic floor for underperforming and economically disadvantaged students led to lower standards in many states. The law’s drafters couldn’t avoid that consequence because when NCLB was on the drawing board a decade ago we didn’t have the technical capacity to measure on a large scale schools’ impact on individual students’ achievement levels from year to year, a so-called value-added strategy that would have given schools credit for educating students regardless of where the students started the school year academically. By decreeing that schools had to set a single standard and have every student reach it, NCLB practically guaranteed that the standards would be set low, large numbers of schools would nonetheless underperform, and that there would be a political backlash against the law.
The Obama administration’s expectations of states that received NCLB waivers are useful levers of improvement, at least in theory: new, higher student achievement standards; tests that move beyond basic skills; more-rigorous evaluations of teachers and principals; steps to turnaround the lowest performing schools. It’s also encouraging that the waivers require states to reward high-performing schools, something that didn’t happen under NCLB.
But it’s not clear that the accountability strategy built into the administration’s waivers is going to work any better than NCLB’s. The new model, which also undergirds most of the ESEA reauthorization proposals currently languishing in the Congress, relies heavily on transparency: schools must test students as they did under NCLB and report the results publicly. But only the very worst schools are going to face real sanctions. So the only thing that’s going to push most schools to improve is the power of negative publicity. Time will tell whether that’s a strong-enough incentive.
Nor is it clear whether states are actually going to implement high standards and more rigorous tests. One step is key: removing the incentive to lower standards by shifting to accountability system that gauges schools growth regardless of where their students start on achievement spectrum. Value-added measures of teacher performance are spreading rapidly. We should be evaluating schools the same way.