A Dream Deferred

Abstract

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. 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 toward 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. 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 deadend 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. problem is that NCLB un-intentionally 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 naive 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. 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 multiple-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. …